Talk:Hospitality service

Original Research?

This strikes me as original research. - FrancisTyers 18:41, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Potential Modification as a charitable service

The concept

At present, the hospitality exchange phenomena is very much enclosed within the purview of highly advantaged populations in the global North. However, it would seem that the kind of people who are at present most interested in using this system: young, educated, idealistic, trusting, liberal, and international in nature, would be very much inclined to convert at least some of their tourist time to volunteering overseas in a worthy cause.

Let's just say group of Americans students from Austin, Texas wanted to drive across the U.S.-Mexico border, travel for a couple of months on their summer break in Central America, and do some good works along the way. If they went to the Internet to try and find some locations conducive for volunteers in their position, they would be summarily disappointed. There are options available for volunteers, but they remain highly formalized. In fact, most programs require that you pay a fairly large nonrefundable fee (often exceeding $300) up front and stay for an extended period (at least ten days or so). Furthermore, they require extensive documentation and institutional references. These restrictions would likely deter these students from pursuing volunteer efforts at all and they would likely fall back onto the hosteling/tourist circuit exclusively. There are many worthy causes to be found (educational, environmental, organizational, structural), especially in poor nations, but they aren't well publicized outside of the local community in which they take place.

A potential issue could be that the training required for many volunteer opportunities is extensive, but there are certainly jobs that require far less. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may be reluctant to involve short term, non-paying volunteers because they have more structured continuous programs requiring many extraneous adminstrators who must receive a salary. However, there are many needs in poor countries that cannot be filled by NGOs and their programs. This is especially true with short term projects. Many of these services are organized by local churches, which may attract some faith-based volunteers from abroad, but may also put off potential non-religious volunteers. Accommodation sharing could connect truly grassroots community development projects with potential volunteers from the developed world. During their stay, they could lend skilled and unskilled labor and reap the benefits of a truly rewarding relationship with local peoples in need.

What needs to be done

An action research approach will be used to test the feasibility of integrating accommodation sharing with community-based development projects. The first step would be to choose and screen different potential programs with different environments, requirements, and themes. It would be necessary to sample a diverse array of settings in order to determine how differences would affect the overall experience of hosts, volunteers, and the projects themselves. This demostration project would be undertaken with the support of one accommodation sharing site which would create a special link on their home page with an explanation of the project and links to the profiles of different host organizers. Volunteers would be screened through the same accommodation sharing format as the general user population. The organizers would have full discretion on who to invite, but the process they use to select invitees would be recorded. Perhaps it would be possible to line up a potential "volunteer circuit" through multiple programs in the region.

The variables in programs would include: wealth of nation and locale, rural vs. urban settings, nature of work performed, its purpose and ideological justification, size of project, skills and funding of organizers, skills and demographic background of volunteers, linguistic conditions, living conditions for volunteers, and the duration of their stay. The data collection would be decentralized, having no lead researcher in charge at specific sites. Participant observation and personal journaling would comprise the primary methods for gathering information about ongoing activities. The local organizers and volunteers would both be required to keep these kinds of detailed records of their experiences, which they would duly record each evening on an individual basis. In addition, all participants and organizers would be asked to write an autoethnography about themselves and their expectations before participating in the program and the conclusions they came to about their experiences after they had left. These materials would then be sent to a team of qualitative data analysts who would code the information for specific themes and call participants to discuss/clarify their experiences in a debriefing session. When emerging themes reached a near saturation point, their analysis would inform an in-progress research report that would be shared with organizers at the specific sites. Furthermore, this information would then lead into face to face interviews with organizers/participants and on site focus groups including both groups.

When all programs had reached completion, the data would be compiled into a comprehensive report assessing their benefits and shortcomings of the programs along with concrete policy proposals for the future. This information would be first distributed to the organizers, who would be given the opportunity to review and comment. These suggestions would be taken into account in the final version which would then be made fully public and translated on the Internet.

comm

i'd just like to say, i think this wiki is great. it's extremely informative and encyclopedic. i think some commentators may say the formalization of "for example, you may [... ...]" to describe things isn't very encyclopedic, but i think the whole thing here is great. bye.

Please add reference or remove this phrase

Amarent, why do you once more add "very subjective evaluation by -- who seems to be fighting some sort of personal battle with Hospitality Club founder Veit Kuehne" without adding a reference? Guaka 02:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Interesting article to refer to: Emotional Tourism

An interpretive study of online hospitality exchange systems as a new form of tourism, by Paula Bialski. Guaka 02:44, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Possibly unencyclopedic phrase

I've removed the following phrase as possibly unencyclopedic "website about some hospitality networks with a very subjective evaluation by - - who seems to be fighting some sort of personal battle with Hospitality Club founder Veit Kuehne". The comments about "very subjective" and "fighting some sort of personal battle" would appear to be editorializing as defined by WP:WTA.Addhoc 13:24, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

number of users

can we do a quick calculation here? please edit figures & total if out of date and add the source:

   Data retrieved on November 30, 2007 (unless specified otherwise)
   
   * CouchSurfing --       373,058 [1]
   * Hospitality Club --   324,256 [2] 
   * GlobalFreeLoaders --   53,619 [3]
   * Servas Intl --       > 13,000 [4]
   * TravelHoo --            6,954 (March 29)  ...shut down? [5]
   * BeWelcome --            2,500 [6]
   * Pasporta Servo --       1,350 [7]
   * Warm Showers List --    5,036 [8]
   * WWOOF --                  800 (March 29)
   * LGHEI --                  500 (March 29)
   * Homeshare Intl --
     -----------------------------
   * TOTAL:                781,073

Keep in mind that while members may overlap, many of these services' entries are also actually couples using a single account.

If someone knows how to make this into some kind of spreadsheet (autocalculating) table, that'd be great. My apologies is this qualifies as original research, i couldn't find this from a single source.

the wikitravel article, it is also very informative.Brallan 01:00, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

AFS?

AFS could be regarded as the a hospitality service. What do people think, does it fit? If so, the history is prior to Servas. Brallan 00:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Links to hospitality services

Hi people, I have a problem with the few links to other hospitality services of which no wikipedia page exists. I consider them as link spam. Why don't they have their own wikipedia page? Maybe, because they are not relevant enough? If so, why do we need to link to them? Let's take BeWelcome for example. Until recently they were in Beta mode. And until now they don't publish any numbers of members. --Splette :) ^{How's my driving?} 00:07, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

I think it would be fair to also mention smaller hospitality services. There aren't that many anyway. I see your point though, that it might be better to list only those that have their own article. Cheers, --spitzl (talk) 17:23, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

"Let's take BeWelcome for example. Until recently they were in Beta mode. And until now they don't publish any numbers of members." http://www.bewelcome.org/whoisonline.php -> 1948 members, this is publish since I know the page. BeWelcome has more members then "Pasporta Servo" for example and is worth mentioning it because it s a result of very motivated volunteers who have worked in both big Hospitality Exchange Networks (HC,CS) and get the good experince from this work into the new project. Fabzgy (talk) 02:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I also think it is worth mentioning BeWelcome, and maybe-maybe other networks like Place2Stay and Stay4Free, in the article. After all, they are mentioned on http://www.hospitalityguide.net/hg/site/?sid0=networks as significant hospitality exchange networks. I also wonder why there is no Wikipedia article yet on BeWelcome since it seems like it is a strong and potentially very significant community which has attracted many active volunteers both from CouchSurfing and Hospitality Club.--Sigurdas (talk) 13:40, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

there are far more "very motivated" volunteers existing in CS/HC. Having some volunteers does not a good example website make. New sites should establish themselves before using themselves as example networks. Otherwise, it's just too much of the old "using wikipedia for selfpromotion and advertising". I also note that both fabzgy and sigurdas are volunteers for BW, whch they both neglected to mention in their views above. And hospitalityguilde.net is not a reputable source of information according to wikipedia's rules ( note also that the owner of that domain is a bw member themselves, and frequently post anti HC/CS stuff around the internet ). Passporta Servo is a specialist network, just for esparanto speakers, so of course their membership will be small. It is however a great example of a niche network.

BeWelcome is the first and, as far as I know the only open source hospitality network, thus working in the very same spirit as wikipedia. Isn't that worth a mention? regards, --spitzl (talk) 21:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

No. ( google: Results 1 - 10 of about 193,000,000 for "open source" )

--Jyhegron (talk) 10:45, 2 February 2008 (UTC) Wikipedia is not a place for advertising, they are plenty of social networks which appears and disappears : Ok, but I think that if one exist for at least one year, has a growing amount of members, and has real activity it must be considered in the hospitality service page.

It is important to remind that HospitalityClub has a policy of censoring (just check the news in this independent place to have an idea). Hospitality Club was the biggest network until it was replaced by CouchSurfing for this position. The HospitalityClub policy was very clear : doing everything possible not to allow HospitalityClub members to speak or inform other members about other networks. To figure it, just look how COuchSurfing allow to speak about HospitalityClub while HospitalityClub forbid to speak about other networks saying it is blatant promotion.

I am not sure it is important to speak about these polemics in the foreground (and I will not start it since I have a partisan opinion) but definitively wikipedia must reflects this reality they are many networks (if these networks are real ones and are working).

Some references of people protesting about HC censorship :

• independant hospitalityguide : [9]
• Couchsurfing members : [10]
• a sample of hospitality club member opinion : [11]

it is not one nor ten, but hundreds of people who say so

-- you are a founder so of course you think that way. i looked in HC and see lots of mentions of CS and cross HC-CS meetings, so your claims of censoring seem unfounded. I searched around the internet and most claims of cencorship come from the forums some years ago. Interestingly, two founders of BW were the forum modertors back then. So, the censorship team seems to have moved to this infant network. edit: wow, actually it seems 3 of the people from "those times of censorship" are trying to create this new site. How interesting these claims are...

I see 0 people logged in there, it's hardly an active network.

This isn't a page to list all the networks out there. There are tons, and most of them are much older than your personal project which has only been some months out of beta, and has a fraction of 1% of the membership base of the established networks. This is a page about hospitality service, and it is absolutely not necessary to provide an extensive list of networks; that's advertising, not providing examples of well established networks.

Wikipedia is very strict against advertising. Please stop trying to overrepresent your project here.

Here are some guidelines for you, since this is really just following rules:

Not a mirror of links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_mirror_or_a_repository_of_links.2C_images.2C_or_media_files Not a directory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_directory SockPuppet#MEtapuppets rule ( since most comments on this point come from high-level volunteers of your organisation, you are effectively trying to create concensus from a single biased view. Metapuppets are recruiting "friends" who share your view. Multiple organisational people for the project clearly fall into this. ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry#Meatpuppets

And finally, that project has attempted to have it's own page created in wikipedia and had it removed since it didnt meet the guidelines for new pages.

If we want to list only networks that have at least 50,000 members (why that number?), we must remove "Servas". (13,ooo members [12]) I hope you see where this ideological fight is leading. I hope also we can cool this a little. It's really not that of a big deal, whether one or more networks are listed or not. Besides, please sign your posts. --spitzl (talk) 14:28, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Is it worth including BeWelcome in this page ?

• BeWelcome has now more than 2600 members (this information is public an easy to find as stated before)
• It is a very active [13], they are news about it every month in many places
• It is the only project open source for hospitality exchange by now [14]
• It was started in 2006, but it is now translated in 14 languages (watch the website), so it is more than a "going to disappear project"
• they are clear evidences ([15]) of Censorship against BeWelcome and its people by the rulers of HC, mainly because most of the BW Volunteers are the ex main HC Volunteers who left HC for its bad censorship habits + complete lack of transparency (see History of BeVolunteer/BeWelcome).
• last point : quoting with 10 words the existence of BeWelcome in the "Hospitality Exchange page" is not an abusive promotion but useful information for Wikipedia readers, of it is a problem for someone, it only means he has personal reason
• I of course restore the cancelled information, they are two kind of sorting for listing the general active networks, Alphabetical or By Size, I used alphabetical since size is subject to change.

I think that the people behind IP address 203.31.232.2 or 59.167.65.47 are in fact the same person, Babso, new HC Forum coordinator who hates BeWelcome and believe he has right to act in Wikipedia just like he does in HC. nota : I can't give any proof of this, its only my intuition based of the style of his "contributions" here.