BeWelcome News

I'm proud to announce that I just made some changes to the BeWelcome site by our phantastic software development team available to the public. Here is what changed with today's release:

• Removed checkboxes for "Accept spam policy" and "Attach profile picture" from message sending dialogue
• Added link to group at the top of group forum post
• Fixed extra empty lines appearing when editing forum posts
• Fixed developer links at bottom right of page: revision links to gitorious, better bug report…

Hello to all and a warm "BeWelcome" to our new members!

I'm Matthias, a long time member of hospitality exchange networks and right now the treasurer of BeVolunteer, the french organisation legally running BeWelcome. I'm preparing the financial report for the general assembly of BV in early November and drafting the budget for 2012. You'll find details on BeWelcome as soon as it's approved by the GA and available.

But before I like to give you an overview on how we're doing financially…

Couchsurfing has been going through a lot of changes lately. So we thought it's a good idea to explain the idea behind BeWelcome better. Thomas Goorden, volunteer for BeWelcome and current chairman of BeVolunteer (the legal entity behind BeWelcome), tries to do just that in a short video:

http://vimeo.com/bewelcome/thomas-goorden-why-bewelcome-is-different

Thomas' statement hopefully gives you an idea of how BeWelcome is different. We believe you as a member should shape its future. In the end…

Recently we experience an unsual number of new members, that's great! So first of all: BeWelcome, I'm happy to have you here. As a lot of questions naturally come up to a newbies mind, someone had the idea to explain some of the important things in the community news, so here we go: I'm no lawyer, but I'll try to explain the basic legal setup of BeWelcome.

BeWelcome isn't owned by anyone and I think that's a good thing. The software and content (except private data off course) is open source…

For the past few weeks we have had some problems with the server that hosts the feedback messages and forwards them to our ticket-managing system. We have now solved this problem by temporarily forwarding the feedback to a 'normal' e-mail address, but unfortunately we can't get hold of older feedback there.

So please send us your feedback once more and we will try and handle it this time :)

Sorry for this inconvenience!!!

Since the BeWelcome / Open CouchSurfing workshop during Project 888 in Paris 2008, I haven't couchsurfed on any of my subsequent travels. And every time I looked for a place to crash on BeWelcome, I have met an amazing person.

I mostly travel by hitchhiking and for the magic of the things that happen when you let go. So just two hours before hitching out from Amsterdam to Istanbul, I got a text message from a Berlin friend offering a free train ticket for Vienna-Budapest. And she even was in…

Monday there was a meeting between the Servas-to-BeWelcome project members. It involved two members of the BW board of directors (including me), one BW coder and three Servas coordinators (including the president of Servas International).

The topic was the general roadmap for the project. A draft had been submitted a few days earlier by one Servas coordinator and we were going to discuss it and take it to a complete state. Most of the items of the roadmap were pretty trivial and were quickly…

It's been stated a couple of times on the forum and possibly written about in some forum posts: BeWelcome is relocating it's test server to one of it's members (Tobixen - many thanks!). In connection with this, you might experience some problems if you try to reach the old BV wiki or the trac pages (if you're trying to put in a bug report). Things should be up and running within a day or two again, though - so please, don't worry too much if you see some pages broken, they should be fixed again…

Share your travel experiences through your personal blog at BeWelcome! Link your blog posts to trips. How? Have a look!

Has the BeWelcome community rewarded you with unique travel experiences, open doors and hearts last year? Then please consider a small donation to the project so that even more people can share inspiring moments in 2010!