BeWelcome News

This post is going to be in German - as it is about a wonderful hospitality exchange radio report made by a journalist in North Germany - which is also in German.

Auf NDR Info hat die Journalistin Christiane Zwick eine schöne Sendung gemacht: "Mein Sofa, Dein Bett - Couchsurfing in Norddeutschland" heißt ihre knapp 25minütige Reportage. Sie wurde gestern ausgestrahlt und ist in der Mediathek zu finden:

https://www.ndr.de/info/sendungen/forum_am_sonntag/Mein-Sofa-dein-Bett,sendung791246.html

Zwar…

Unfortunately the last code update aimed at enhancing the mobile editing experience broke editing of messages and forum posts instead. Thanks to everybody reporting this the situation is now resolved and this is most likely the first post in the community news ever written on a mobile device :)

The formating option are a bit limited in comparison to a desktop but you can still use bold, italic, underline and numbered lists. Of course you can add links as well.

Please note that you need to tap…

The preparations for the next General Assembly (GA) of BeVolunteer are under way.

Please save the date: November 17th/18th, 2018
This year we will leave the European continent for the first time - and go to England … just in time before the Brexit happens ;)

We have been offered a free room for our meeting by Space4 @ Outlandish - this cooperative web agency will sponsor our two days meeting in London! HOORAYYYY! 
(and many thanks to the cool and super friendly Outlandish team for making this…

Not longer than eight weeks BeWelcome ago asked its members for donations. Now the 2000 Euro goal has already been reached. This is the shortest donation campaign I can remember. A BIIIIG "Thank you" to everybody who donated money to enable us to pay for the costs like servers, obligatory insurances etc.
Please: Next time you will see the donation bar on the front page (which will be in the beginning of next year) please consider donating yourself ;)

And if you do not have any money to spare…

A BeWelcome member who wants to stay anonymous recently donated 1000 Euro - the highest donation so far!
We reached out to this member and this is what came back:

"I am a long-term supporter and user of BeWelcome, and it always fills me with joy to meet fellow hosts and guests through this wonderful platform. These days I am a little busy with work, so I chose to make a financial contribution to the - very modest - costs of the project.
I admire the ongoing commitment the volunteers give to the…

You might have noticed that the donation bar is now visible once you log in to BeWelcome. As every year the annual donation campaign has started.

BeWelcome needs about 2000 Euros to cover its expenses this year. This is not a lot of money for a community of more than 100.000 members. Do not even try to compare it with donation campaigns by other websites like Wikipedia who asked for almost 8 million Euros during the past weeks. BeWelcome works on the lowest monetary budget possible thanks to the…

Last Weekend (18.+19. November 2017) the annual General Assembly of BeVolunteer - the association behind BeWelcome - took place in Lille / Northern France. Eight Volunteers have met there in real life, several others took part online - and quite some important decisions have been taken.

One of the decisions: As every year the new Board of Directors has been elected. 

BeVolunteer now has a new secretary: A warm welcome to Frauenschuh!
He is also actively volunteering in the Support Team.

The new…

"Testing is like searching for truffles", a friend of mine once described it: You walk in a beautiful surrounding and then suddenly stumble upon something that is irritating.

We are all looking forward to our new website. The redesign is going on and advancing ... but nothing can be put online without proper testing beforehand. And the more people test it, the more bugs or inconsistencies will be noticed. 

If you have an hour or two to spare and want to play around with the future look of…

Do you want to be on top of scientific research about hospitality exchange and accomodation sharing?

Our member Luciez has included BeWelcome in her study on the sustainability potentials of the sharing economy, which you can find here: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/8055286

Now she continues her research and sent me An invitation to dinner and focus group on accommodation sharing in London:

BeWelcome is not a dating site. But sometimes it happens that likeminded members meet and find out that there is more between them than just sharing a lifestyle, common interests, and hobbies. Sometimes unplanned things happen – for example that two members fall in love. This is called life.

While still living in Munich artep https://www.bewelcome.org/members/artep liked to go hiking in the Alps. She posted several suggestions of hikes in the Munich group https://www.bewelcome.org/groups/288 and…