Unconference report

Some unofficial reporting of people who attended the 1st (un)conference.

You can also look at the Unconference conclusion page.

Contents 1 Saturday before noon 1.1 Personal impressions 1.2 Software workshop 1.3 CommunityCouch workshop 1.3.1 Advantages 1.3.2 Disadvantages 1.3.3 Ideas 1.3.4 Criteria 1.3.5 Promotion 1.3.6 Management 1.4 Group feature brainstorm 2 Saturday afternoon 2.1 Personal impressions 2.2 Privacy & safety workshop 2.2.1 summary / introduction (midsch) 2.2.1.1 What's privacy? 2.2.1.2 Privacy Statements 2.2.1.3 Privacy Policy 2.2.2 Discussion 2.2.2.1 Some Concrete Issues 2.2.2.2 Deletion of data 2.2.2.3 General Rules 2.2.2.4 Access 2.2.2.5 Auditing 2.3 Development roadmap (what's next?) 2.4 Trust network workshop 3 Sunday 3.1 Personal impressions 3.2 Brunch 3.3 New features workshop 3.4 Volunteer management & motivation workshop 3.4.1 Introduction: status of volunteers 3.4.2 Problems of volunteer management 3.4.3 Demotivating aspects 3.4.4 Ideas for motivating 3.4.4.1 Support team / workflow ideas 3.4.5 ideas for recruiting new volunteers 3.4.6 ideas for activating old but inactive volunteers 4 Remaining stuff / future happenings

Saturday before noon

Personal impressions

• While more and more people drop in, saying "hello" to eachother, i really feel "welcome". A lot of smiling from people who know each other on a virtual basis for months and now shake hands and exchange words in reality. midsch^BW 12:03, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Software workshop

• We started with a 20" demonstration by Jean-Yves of administration functionalities. Felix gives some feedback on the use of filtering, improvements are suggested. Some of the discussion ends up being about privacy issues, we delayed this to the afternoon.

• Felix and Micha team up to present the PT platform and the transition from the older BW code. It seems there are a lot of questions and things to investigate. Different testscenarios and testing areas are discussed, but no agreement about the "right way" so far.

• Testing?
  • Crawler
  • Make a test suite with user scenario's
  • A test suite for methods with a build plan?

• New Features / Developement is postponed until tomorrow.

CommunityCouch workshop

Advantages

• easier for people without regular computer access (villages in Africa join with a community profile)
• giving more people access / a voice
• school, cultural exchanges
• innovative feature that takes BW to the next level (we are not only helping global north to travel, we actually care for creating more inclusive civil society)

Disadvantages

• we don’t know every single person using the cprof  abuse?
• tourist offices might use it for promotions
• what about political parties, religious groups/sects?

Ideas

• limited access:
  • only public profiles + community couches (no)
  • or all profiles but no messages to individual profiles, only to other community couches (individual profiles CAN send messages to cp but not the other way round)
  • extanded and personal application process (including a volunteer that go with the representative of a community through all the steps, rules and guidelines)
  • one representative for every entity who is liable and responsible for everything done in the name of this entity and one substitute
  • one person for registration, one person for contact (can be identical, both have to be individual members)
  • every representative NEEDs to have an individual profile linked to the community
  • have a vote about religious groups / political (no)
  • if community profile is not desired any more, it can be deleted

Criteria

• terms of use have to be followed
• physical vicinity of the members of a community profile

Promotion

• news item
• newsletter
• information page
• contact people with interesting profiles / links to communities

Management

• Signup

Group feature brainstorm

The main group page isn't manageable with more groups.

• Group the groups to make it more readable

Saturday afternoon

Personal impressions

• After lunch people slowly reorganize for the next workshops ... still people try to connect and are eager to do so. midsch^BW 13:29, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
• ...

Privacy & safety workshop

summary / introduction (midsch)

What's privacy?

• individual ownership about individual data
• privacy is an individual matter and a personal choice, as we learned from the discussions at the forum nearly everything could be related to privacy
  • very different ideas about:
  • full name
  • login times
• no "snooping tools" for volunteers
• protection against stalkers(former partners molest former partners)
• protection against automatic datamining by google, advertisement company
• protection against data theft (hackers)
• suggestion: let the individual decide what is stored

Privacy Statements

"The privacy of our members is our main concern." -> a phrase like this sounds great but is worthless if not filled with some information, policy etc.

Privacy Policy

• Let the individual decide what date he/she wants to store at BW
• Explain/document well if and why there is mandatory data (even if it's obvious)
• Public and well documented privacy policy
• Guidance (Besides the fun of hospitality there are risks - usage of individual brainpower and common sense is recommended, but good to point it out anyway.)
• Document who, when and where is able to access private data (and afterwards if someone has done so).
• Fight arguments like "love it or leave it", even if we deal with minorities or even individuals it's worth thinking about it.
• Fight suspicion by transparency
• It's first about issues not about technology.

Discussion

Some Concrete Issues

• mandatory address
  • 'false security' because the address might be wrong
  • we need to connect the address to
    • establishing guest-host contact by giving up privacy and transmitting address (i.e. Check box at message system 'Include my address')
    • start verification process and clearly state that data which is not verified might not be trustworthy
• documentation of who has access to what data / tools
• logging of why data has been accessed (this would be published once a month/ year in an anonymised way together with some statistic / report)
  • problem: rumours and speculations might spread
• members can request clarification if and for what reasons his data has been accessed by a volunteer

Deletion of data

• if members are kicked out because of abuse, some data has to be kept in a 'negative list'
• forum
  • forum posts are kept, but 'anonymised': 'forum post by former member number 224'
• if members ask to be deleted, all the data will be deleted
• comments
  • problem: who owns the comments
    • a) the person receiving the comment -> comment would remain
    • b) the person who wrote it -> comment would be deleted
    • c) the community -> comment would remain
  • this topic should be dicussed more in the forum

General Rules

• Every piece of individual information should be protected by default. Every access to this data without the owner's agreement (and knowledge) must have valid reasons.
• Every common information should be public by default. Every concealment of these information must have reasons.
• The reasons for violations of the first two rules should be public as well.

Access

• access to logging
  • admins
  • safety team
• problem: invisible profiles for testers

Auditing

this is a bit off-topic, but to be saved for further discussion in the forum

• could be done by PhD students

Development roadmap (what's next?)

Micha gives an overview on the past work in the development team. There are a lot of issues still open and we're looking at ways to organize the next things to do.

Suggestions:

• Being able to reply from personal email account?
• Better group functionality (eg.localized groups)?

• A place where it's easy to get involved?
• Merge the test team and new feature group?

• Profile import/connecting different profiles?

• Community profiles? (eg a village or photographers or ...)

• Invitation based hosting / planned trips?
• Visualization of networks?
• Alternative currencies?

• Good meeting functionality?
• OpenSocial?

• A better forum than phpBB?

• Connect functionality (integration)?
• Easy way to comment on everything (shoutboxes, blogs, country pages, etc)?

• Volunteer tools for the GEO database?
• More integration/feedback (development related) from the regular users?

• Local guides + map functionality for traveling info?
• Activity display above location/region?
• Tags/icons?
• Calendar?

• Associated nodes? (explicitly defined or autodetected)
• A better HTML editor and/or a different input syntax?
• Geography tagging?
• Datetime tagging?
• Queries on tags, etc? Better search in general (spotlight)?

• Template/translation engine?
• Framework moving?

• Improve admin tools? (Usability in general, especially sign-up)

• RSS feeds/syndication?
• Ajax where possible/desirable?

• 3rd party integration and synchronization/MASHUP!

• Test suite?
• WAP mini functionality?

• Phone system/asterix?

• Feedback functionality (who sends the messages)?

• Bufixing / system stability?
• Improve bug/problem reporting? What are the biggest bugs?

What's the metric for a stable system?

Trust network workshop

Sunday

Personal impressions

People are more laid back and relax today. There are less fervant discussions but we work more individually and in small groups instead.

Brunch

During brunch people talk about their motivation to volunteer for BW/BV and their main problems (probably there will be a filmed documentary available later). Unfortunately it got interrupted every few minutes by new people showing up and some serious breakfast issues. So there is still a lot to tell ...

New features workshop

• Priorities
• Group features

• Remote input from an unparticipant to the New feature workshop: I wrote a hello-world module yesterday (or better: i deleted all the stuff from another app and let only the essential code). I will document it within the next two weeks and advance it step by step. Highly skilled programmers maybe will find this trivial, but it can help people with little php/mysql knowledge. The idea behind this is not that someone without skill will write professional & stable BW-features, but someone with only few knowledge could get started easier and write creative applications (e.g. ideas from the List of New Features) to show them on a "BW-playground-server". And even if all of the code of such an example application has to be dropped, maybe some ideas could be improved and implemented on the real BW-website code. Best regards. Mahouni 15:37, 19 January 2008 (UTC) (This comment can be deleted or removed to a better place, I just wanted to give announcement to this workshop)

Volunteer management & motivation workshop

Introduction: status of volunteers

• There's still quite some confusion on the difference between BeWelcome, BeWelcome volunteers, BeVolunteer members and BoD.
  • BeWelcome volunteers are volunteers who joined a team and volunteer for BeWelcome
  • BeVolunteer members are Bewelcome volunteers who applied for BeVolunteer in order to be a member of this legal organization. Bevolunteer members can vote on the statutes of BeVolunteer and also on the BoD
  • the BoD is an elected board of BeVolunteer members that is involved
• team coordinators should inform team members about the possibility of joining BeVolunteer as soon as they are eligible ( http://www.bevolunteer.org/wiki/Rules_and_regulations#Conditions )
• More information about this distinction on http://www.bewelcome.org/about

Problems of volunteer management

• many volunteers are in the middle of their education, so whenever a new job or exam period comes up, they might stop volunteering

Demotivating aspects

• difficult to begin: lot to read, understand the tools
• feeling of isolation / lack of interaction between

Ideas for motivating

• answer everybody, give
• motivating aspect of the status metrics of the translation tool (90% of xx translation has been achieved)
• connect with other volunteers in real life (maybe a map/list/ etc. where all volunteers come from would be great)
• roadmapping withing individual teams (i.e. software development team: deadlines, small steps, which is already done by Philipp)
• writing comments on each other
• easy access
• online working sessions

Support team / workflow ideas

• Wiki Page of Top Ten bugs
• 'translation' of trac tickets into normal English
• cooperation between translation and support team --> active translators could be asked if they would like to help with support team (they already know the site quite a bit)

ideas for recruiting new volunteers

• browse profiles and ask people with intersting jobs or skill or interests
• talk about it at meetings
• Index Page: Help us Join the team:
  • add a link to a contact (feedback: volunteer?)
  • add a link 'More' to About Us page
  • About Us page: have a detailed list of tasks that needs to be done with possibility to put your name and with contact persons

ideas for activating old but inactive volunteers

• Hackathons
• Workshops

Remaining stuff / future happenings

• small hackathons whenever, whereever
• ...

• Developers
• Design team
• New features
• Geography
• Testing team
• Server admin
• Writers (prop.)

• Translation
• Media/PR
• Signup team
• Forum team
• Groups team
• Support team

• Abuse team
• Local vol
• Legal team
• Vol. mgt
• Communications
• Wiki team