Hey guys, I’m Ben Hanna, the new Web Content Coordinator for CouchSurfing.com. I will be helping Mandie out with member communications, organizing what you see online, and working on various other content oriented projects, like this blog.
The collective house is now almost full of full time volunteers, those of us who will be here until the end of the summer, and we will begin welcoming the short time participants in the near future.
Yesterday marked the official start to the collective, and we began with house meetings and team assignments. Laura, the house manager, organized a great session of “get to know each other” games and activities. Since we will be 24 large by the middle of the summer in a relativity small space, it helps to break the ice quickly so that personal issues don’t develop into problems.
Weston helped jump start the work process with a tech presentation outlining the technical challenges, projects and goals for the summer, as well as the basic process for submitting projects to the team. The tech department is essential to much of what we do here (go figure, we are an online organization) so budgeting their time and prioritizing projects is a necessity. Almost half of the collective participants are tech team members, but they still have only ten people here and the same amount working remotely to do the work of many more.
The evening wound up with a presentation from general manager Mattthew Brauer (aka TTT) outlining the basic form and function of the collective, followed with a list of prioritized projects that each team has to work on over the summer. (Our priorities will be coming out online soon, we just need to put them in order first!)
We have two separate areas where people can work, one is inside the main house, and is a common area with couches and tables, and the other is a separate office with tables, routers, a printer, whiteboards and other office equipment. We split our time between the two, and it seems to be working.
9000 people joined CouchSurfing last week!
Our largest single week ever!
Tags: General