Wikipedia

Draft:BeWelcome

  • Comment: This article is promotional in tone - seen in things like the list of membership numbers throughtout the years to show growth, and sentences like "BeWelcome is committed to data protection and members' privacy". The external links in the list of founders also needs to be removed and replaced with their full names. -- NotCharizard 🗨 09:50, 29 April 2024 (UTC)


BeWelcome
Type of businessNon-profit
Available inArabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek [1], English, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Persian, Finnish, French, Galician, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Latvian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romansh, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Sundanese, Swahili, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese [2]
Area servedGlobal
Founder(s)Marco Presti, Matthias Heß, Pierre-Charles Marais], et al. [3]
ProductsHomestay
ServicesSocial networking service
URLhttps://www.bewelcome.org/
Users207,160[4]
LaunchedFebruary 2007; 17 years ago (2007-02) [3]
Part of a series on
Homestays
Hospitality exchange services
Hospitality for work
Hospitality for money
Home exchange and others

BeWelcome is a non-profit[5][6] and open-source[7] online hospitality exchange service by which users can request free short-term homestays or interact with other members who are interested in travel. Hosts are not allowed to charge for lodging[8] and the use of the platform is free of charge. The platform focuses on direct interpersonal exchange in real life as well as online.

Core values are being free to use both for guests and hosts, being entirely run by volunteers, its code is open source and with a strict privacy policy.[9][10] Full transparency extends to financial aspects, budgets and expenses are publicly accessible. The platform is run purely on donations.

In 2008 a verification process amongst members was started which was omitted in the meantime for creating a false sense of safety.

History edit

In 2005, a disagreement between some volunteers of the defunct Hospitality Club[11] and its founder led to the foundation of BeWelcome.[12][13][14]

Inspired by the legal structure behind Wikipedia, the platform BeWelcome is operated by the non-profit organization[15] BeVolunteer which is registered in Rennes, Brittany, France. Its members decide on legal issues like its statutes and the Terms of Use of BeWelcome.[16]

The BeVolunteer statutes can be modified only by an extraordinary General Assembly.[17]

The platform BeWelcome.org went online in 2006. The number of members currently is 207,160 as of December 2023[18]

The growth in membership was propelled by events in the biggest hospitality exchange network Couchsurfing.[19]

Since 2012 BeWelcome is considered the most important alternative to Couchsurfing.[20][21][22]

Organization edit

Any member of BeWelcome can start volunteering at any time. There is no obligation of joining BeVolunteer.[23]

The yearly General Assembly is composed by the members of BeVolunteer. The participants elect the Board of Directors and approve the financial statement and the budget.

The Board of Directors is the main organ of BeWelcome. Every active volunteer for BeWelcome can become a member of BeVolunteer and is then entitled both to vote or being elected in a Board position.[24]

The Board of Directors of BeVolunteer is elected on a yearly base. So far Board members have come from countries such as Argentina, Belgium, China, Croatia, France, Germany, New Zealand and Poland.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeWelcome
  2. ^ "BeWelcome". Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  3. ^ a b "History". BeVolunteer.org. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
  4. ^ "BeWelcome statistics". BeWelcome.org. Retrieved 2023-12-25.
  5. ^ "About BeWelcome". BeWelcome. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  6. ^ Bosnic, Tyra (January 14, 2022). "Meet the Women Who Created a Facebook Group That's Helping Thousands of People Survive the Pandemic". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  7. ^ BeWelcome. "rox/LICENSE". GitHub. Retrieved March 31, 2023.
  8. ^ Schöpf, Simon (2015-01-25). "The Commodification of the Couch: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Platforms". Triple-c. 13: 32. doi:10.31269/triplec.v13i1.480.
  9. ^ Ossewaarde, Marinus; Reijers, Wessel (21 August 2017). "The illusion of the digital commons: 'False consciousness' in online alternative economies". Organization. 24 (5): 609–628. doi:10.1177/1350508417713217. ISSN 1350-5084. S2CID 149344352.
  10. ^ Tagiew, Rustam; Ignatov, Dmitry. I; Delhibabu, Radhakrishnan (2015). "Hospitality Exchange Services as a Source of Spatial and Social Data?". 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop (ICDMW). pp. 1125–1130. doi:10.1109/ICDMW.2015.239. ISBN 978-1-4673-8493-3. S2CID 8196598.
  11. ^ "receipt for creation of "Hospitality Club Volunteers" in January 2007" (PDF). Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  12. ^ Baker, Vicky (26 August 2011). "Budget Travel: Not-for-profit Couchsurfing becomes a company (with a conscience)". The Guardian.
  13. ^ "Tips for Travel Savings in 2014". The New York Times. 7 January 2014.
  14. ^ https://www.unsere-zeitung.at/2022/08/24/hospitality-club-ein-nachruf-2/ | date=26 October 2023
  15. ^ "Rules of BeVolunteer" (PDF). BeVolunteer.
  16. ^ Kühner, Anja (2010). (Fast) Gratis Reisen. Ein Guide durch die Gastfreundschafts-Netzwerke (in German). Heidelberg: abc Verlag. p. 163.
  17. ^ Schöpf, Simon (2015-01-25). "The Commodification of the Couch: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Platforms". Triple-c. 13: 32. doi:10.31269/triplec.v13i1.480.
  18. ^ "BeWelcome.org suspends members who haven't logged in for 5 years to keep database up-to-date & active". www.reddit.com. Retrieved December 30, 2023.
  19. ^ Tagiew, Rustam (December 30, 2014). "Bewelcome.org – a non-profit democratic hospex service set up for growth". ResearchGate. arXiv:1412.8700.
  20. ^ "Der Hospitality Club – ein Nachruf". 24 August 2022. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
  21. ^ TAN JUN-E, WEE KIM (2012). BUILDING TRUST IN ELECTRONIC-TO-FACE SOCIAL NETWORK SITES: CASE STUDY OF COUCHSURFING.ORG (PhD thesis). WEE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION Nanyang Technological University in Communication. p. 166. Retrieved December 20, 2023.
  22. ^ "Best Free Hospitality Exchange Websites: 16 Couchsurfing Alternatives in 2023". 25 January 2018. Retrieved 31 December 2023.
  23. ^ "BeWelcome Volunteers". BeWelcome volunteers. Retrieved 31 December 2023.
  24. ^ Zvolska, Lucie (2015). "page 46, 3.2.1 Free platforms BeWelcome". Sustainability Potentials of the Sharing Economy The case of accommodation sharing platforms (MSc thesis). Environmental Management and Policy Lund, Sweden. Retrieved 2023-12-30.

External links edit

 

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Category:Non-profit organizations based in Europe Category:Non-profit organizations based in France Category:Organizations established in 2007

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