CouchSurfing Alaska Collective Blog

CS Tech Release 5 - Eagle

The CS Tech team has put out the final release of the Alaska Collective.  Included in this release:

Features & Fixes

General

• Menu options on each page are now centered.
• Removed some old links from the footer of the website.
• Front page picture has changed.
• Gaps in the index page have been removed.
• Removed the character counter input field from references and show the characters left just as plain html text.

Changes in groups

• Added subscription settings button on navigation menu.
• Subscription page is under group tab.
• There are now different colors for different type of groups: normal groups are beige, cs organization groups are now green, teams are blue and communication channels are yellow.
• Tabs and submenu don’t disappear anymore when you go into a group.
• An organization group doesn’t highlight the info-tab anymore and stays under the group tab.
• Redundant buttons in groups have been removed and the group tab with navigation menu stays open (almost) everywhere.
• Added PAGING to the groups!
• Fix group digests not being sent out bug.
• Leave group button on group page.
• Fix bug in where square brackets couldn’t be used in group posts without causing problems with the text.

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CS Tech Release 4 - Denali

For the fourth release, these are the changes that have gone live on the site today!

New features:
A new chat system has been created! Check it out at www.couchsurfing.com/chat.html

Volunteer team tools:

Verification team can see links to all regions of outgoing letters at the top of the screen instead of clicking to another page.

CUQs now have direct links to contribution/verification logs on member questions instead of having to click through so many links

The verification team can see a list of all members needing letters and edit their addresses from one page rather than by doing it from the sending page. This also marks an address as being edited and removes it from the list. Doing it this way helps divide up the growing tasks by the verification team between those who edit the addresses to ensure that they are correct and those who just send them out.

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The CouchSurfing News Channels - Coming Soon!

A lot of effort is occurring in the background by volunteers working remotely and at the Alaska Collective to establish our very first centralized news page on the site.

Members on the Communications Team are creating guidelines and preparing for the launch of this news page, including developing all the technical specifications for our Tech Team to build this new functionality and making the moves to recruit more volunteers to help manage these channels. Members will be able to subscribe to the channels of their interest by email alert or RSS.

So what can you expect to see on this news page? Click the link below to check these channels out!

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Let the Swatting Begin

Bug week has begun. The CS Tech Team is working hard this week to eliminate as many bugs as possible from the system. They started yesterday, and have fixed an impressive number of bugs already.

List of bugs fixes as of this post after the jump.

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Caribou Tech Release

The CouchSurfing tech team has just released their third update of the Alaska Collective. Dubbed “Caribou” after the animal and the Alaskan town, this release adds functionality across the site.

Some of the most noticeable changes have been made to the reference system.

Here are the changes you’ll see:

• Simply Positive, Neutral or Negative!

We know, we know… that time you surfed with those kids in the Philippines during Chinese New Year and ate tarantulas with the village grandmother or when you met your best friend three years ago when you hosted her last minute in Portland qualify as EXTREMELY positive experiences. However, it seems to be the trend that less members distinguish between truly “extreme” and “positive” experiences. Now members will just choose to rate the experience as "positive", "neutral" or "negative". You can pay homage to the extremity of your experience in the body of your reference. All current references will be automatically changed, so "extremely positive" and "extremely negative" references will be changed to "positive" or "negative", respectively.

• Bringing them together

To help you get a clear picture of both sides of the CouchSurfing experience, you will be able to see the references that two members have left one another, grouped together. Yes, that’s right - you won’t need to scroll through the entire reference list to see the corresponding references a member has left! References you have left others, that don’t correspond to a reference left for you, will still appear at the bottom of your reference list.

• Stationary updates

Updated references will stay put. They won’t move to the top of the reference list, but the member will receive an email with the reference changes. Now you can keep track of all the changes in your references, but others won’t be able abuse the system by constantly updating references in order to keep them at the top.

• Identifiable icons

To make it clear under what situations members have met each other, each reference will include icons that show whether a member hosted, surfed or traveled with the other member.

• How close are they?
  

When looking at references, there will be a dot to show you how close the members are to each other. Just as in the "How do I know?" section on profiles, you can easily see by the darkness of the dot, the strength of the friendship link. The darker the dot, the closer the friendship.

• KISS: Keep it short and simple!

We don’t want you to have to read an essay to understand the message a member is trying to get across in a reference. There will be a capped limit to how much you can write in each reference, but don’t worry - it’s capped at 1000 characters so you will still have plenty of typing space!

• Keeping things private for members

On publicly viewable profiles, references left for others will not be displayed unless you’re logged in. This is to respect the privacy of members whose profiles are not publicly viewable.

Some of the other visible changes include the addition of a safety page under the home tab and the addition of city and country of origin for every meeting member.

For full details, check out the release notes.

Alaska CSC Talent Show [Video]

In case it is not clear by now, there is not much “nightlife” out here in Homer, Alaska, save for really bad costume karaoke, playing pool at a scrubby but charming pub, bonfires with Chubby Bunny contests, Scrabble, “Netflix Night”, and the hot tub. Therefore, we at the Collective have to be very creative about our leisure activities. So inspired by the show “American Idol”, we hosted our own in-house, home-made Alaska CSC Talent Show last Thursday, July 10. It was a surprising success!

Despite being poorly organized by Mandie and myself, and in typical CS-fashion (meaning everyone does everything at the last possible minute!), we managed to come up with eight outstanding acts! In addition, we asked three colleagues to play the roles of the American Idol judges: Weston played “Randy”, Rachel played “Paula”, and then Cam played “Simon” (with incredible accuracy.)

Act One: Joel (our visiting French Chef) taught us all how to make Les Bananos Flambees in the kitchen…which involves rum-soaked, flaming bananas (with a side of fire extinguisher.)

Then we moved into the Dining Room for…

Act Two: “Times 11 and a Beer” was a nail-biting, audience-participating, high-math contest between Cyril, the Human Calculator, and Patricia, operating a regular calculator. Cyril not only beat Patricia on the calculator, but finished his beer!

Then we moved to the Living Room for…

Act Three: “Bear Belle’s Bellydance”, which was performed by a visiting Dutch CSer named Eline. Eline dressed up in her super-sexy belly-dance gear (bells and all!), with hunting-spear in hand, and simply hypnotized the crowd.

Act Four: “Slam!” Charish, our gleeful, enthusiastic PR Team Coordinator, surprised our audience with some DEEP poetry she composed, then twisted us around completely with an interactive, giggle-inspiring poetry slam.

Act Five: Named “Masala”, Shonali and Dougie whipped out the Banghra beats and did a flawless spoof on the Classic Bollywood Couple Dance Scenes…and if you know anything about Bollywood, you would know what a perfect job they did! (None of us knew Dougie could dance!)

Act Six: Laura and Andrew, known as “Flannel Flapjacks”, did a poignant guitar-duet. Laura shocked us all by exposing a beautiful unique, singing voice, and Andrew did such a good job on the guitar that we barely noticed Laura was just doing air-guitar!

Then we all moved to the Piano Room for…

Act Seven: “The Soul Man Show”, which featured Nick “The Blick”, our tee-totaling cook on piano, dressed like Elton John in the 70’s (fur coat and glasses, holding two bottles of booze), and Me, playing the role of the sexy sassy back-up singer, performing our own lyrics to “The Midnight Hour” (“I cannot wait until the Collective’s Over, and no one is around….”) which basically poked fun at everybody at the Collective.

The final act of the show, took us all outside to watch…

Act Eight: Weston showing off his soccer (or football) tricks, while Ben did some kind of juggling with fancy sticks….

However, the Talent Show Judges are the ones who really stole the show with their improv skills! Weston, without even seeing the show “American Idol” before and with a little direction from Trip and I, played “Randy” possibly better than Randy himself! Yo dog! And Rachel captured a highly sentimental, overly enthusiastic, alcoholic Paul Abdul, which naturally inspired Cam to channel a caustic, highly critical Simon. In my humble opinion, one of the best nights at the Collective thus far…we had no idea how much talent was lurking among us!

Who Are We?

One of our goals at this collective is to enhance the user experience of a CouchSurfer. A general goal, but an important one none the less. When we began discussing different ways to accomplish this goal, we realized that we only had a vague impression of who CouchSurfers were. Sure, from profile polling we could tell that the average age is 26, most of us speak English, we all like to try new things, and we like to meet new people. What we were having difficulty figuring out was where people were having trouble with the site. We knew where we were having trouble and what processes are complicated, but finding what was complicated to users of different experience levels was a challenge.

Enter the User Research Team! Created during the Thailand Collective, this team is made of of people around the world who specialize in user research! They have come up with some incredible solutions for us to find out how and why surfers use the site in the way they do. The team has just started an audience research project that will help us define our group of users. We can see who is just joining the site, and how they manage to find what they are looking for compared to the site use of surfers who have been active since the birth of CouchSurfing – and everyone in between.

Knowing who we are helps in every aspect of CouchSurfing. The goal is to simplify everything, and allow people to find what they are looking for without having to think about searching for it. We will be able to identify groups of users, and present them with tailored navigation options that offer no more and no less than what they want.

Recently we posted a news item with a survey for focus groups, and the response has been incredible. The strength of the CouchSurfing community is evident in the number of people who are willing to donate their time towards the improvement of the experience.

Tech Team Alaska Collective – Release #2

The Tech Team has released their second tech brief of the collective. This is a culmination of the work of many people, both here at the collective and in remote teams around the world.

View Tech Release #2

Thanks much to everyone involved for making this possible!

Ready, Aim, Blitz

I arrived in Homer late Sunday, and am excited to again be a part of the Collective atmosphere: the productivity, the camaraderie, and the inspiration of volunteering alongside so many driven professionals who are devoting their time to this project. The setting here is absolutely stunning–who wouldn’t want to look out over snow-capped mountains when pondering an e-mail? That said, I’ve had little time to explore beyond our backyard (although see the picture below - its nothing to complain about!).

Since my arrival, I have been busily working on several exciting projects. Firstly, it’s an exciting week on the news front! As many of you are aware, CouchSurfing recently surpassed 1 million positive user experiences worldwide. For the Public Relations and Media Team, that means a media blitz: sending out our first worldwide news release this week. It’s an enormous task, but a thrilling one! The distribution of this news release will help us examine our process and identify areas for improvement. I’ve been absolutely amazed at the professionalism and dedication of the many volunteers who comprise this team; what a gift it is to volunteer with them and learn from them. Logistically, a distribution plan like this one is difficult–the press release must be translated into many languages, then each core team member must research media outlets to which this should be sent, which can be a time consuming process. Developing an international media list requires ongoing dedication, but I have no doubt this team is ready for the task!

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Glaciers, Trails, and Seldovia | The First Two Excursions

In rural areas of Alaska like Homer, cabin fever has been known to drive even the most peaceful of souls to hysteria. So with the sanity of our volunteers dear at heart, we’ve been focusing on excursions that get us out of the house and into the Alaskan wilderness.

Just over a week ago, Casey and Andrew led half of the Collective on our first trip across Kachemak Bay. This was a momentous occasion, as the hefty cost of a water taxi ($75/person!) had kept us snug on our side of the Bay for the first part of the month. Luckily Casey and Andrew managed to tap into a deal with the National Park Service, allowing us to do park cleanup in exchange for a discounted ride across the way. So we woke up at the ungodly (yet sunny) hour of 6 AM, piled into our respective water taxis and cleared a ragged trail for the first four hours of the day. As terrible as all that might sound, the view from the deck of our water taxi as it charged towards the opposite shore justified everything. Wind and adrenaline in the morning put coffee to shame.
Cutting Trails

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