CouchSurfing Alaska Collective Blog

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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Collective Week(s) in Review

It is the beginning of my fourth week, and a lot has happened since I arrived. We rolled out a tech release package, launched group RSS feeds,  witnessed several great presentations, started several of our large projects, and welcomed several new members to the house.

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How to use RSS with CouchSurfing groups

RSS feeds have made their way to CouchSurfing! Your group posts can now be viewed by RSS subscription. The RSS links are at the bottom of every public group page, and are also available in your Communication Settings page.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to use the feeds for easy management of group posts. There are two video tutorials at the bottom of this post if your Internet connection is fast enough.

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What are we trying to achieve?

To help give our members an insight into what it is we are working towards achieving, not only as Collective participants, but as an organization, check out the priorities page of this blog.

Click here for the CouchSurfing Project Priorities

International CouchSurfing Day

Happy International CouchSurfing day everyone! Get out and connect with your local CouchSurfing community!

Today we are going to be heading to Turnagain Pass to throw some snowballs at each other. What are you doing?

To see what is going on in your area, check out local events or the wiki.

Tech Team Alaska Collective First Release

As part of this Collective, we have changed the way we release tech updates to the site. For the first time ever, we are rolling updates into release packages. This makes it easy for everyone to see what has been updated, and it allows us to notify everyone before the rollout occurs.

Click here for the Tech Team Alaska Collective First Release

Some of the updates are visible to the public, some are useful to volunteers and Ambassadors, and others are behind the scenes. It is worth to note that some only make sense if you are fluent in tech speak!

One of the most visible updates is the addition of RSS feeds for groups. RSS means Really Simple Syndication, and it is a useful tool for the automatic dissemination of information. See the little RSS icon in the top of the sidebar to the right on this blog? We now have the same deal for CouchSurfing groups. We expect this is going to make it much easier for members to keep updated on posts in their groups, by giving them access to group posts without flooding their email inbox.

I will be posting a training video on some ways to use RSS to enhance the CouchSurfing experience. I will be able to do this once it is live on the system. We will also be posting a general news item to let all members know about this new functionality for groups tomorrow.

Thanks to the tech team, who worked around the clock (literally) to get these things accomplished!

Kelly’s Two Pesos (Notes from the Fundraising Guru)

(NOTE: Yes, Kelly is writing in the third person. But don’t get used to it!)

This past Monday, June 9, 2008, Kelly of the Pattersons (aka, “KellyKarma” on CS) held an intensive fundraising workshop/exercise for all ACS Collective team members. Collective volunteers were strategically divided into four teams:

• Leadership Team
• Two separate Tech Team groups
• PR/Communications/Events/Identity

The overall objectives of this event: to assist all teams in long-term planning, identify prospective team needs (resources) over the next 3 years, as well as to assess general team knowledge of fundraising tactics, while simultaneously serving as a research tool to measure CS team members’ fundraising perceptions. This event also served to demonstrate how fundraising plays a role in all the CS departments and must ALWAYS be aligned with CS’s core values and mission. Read the rest of this entry »

Playing the numbers game

I admit it – as much as I love spontaneity in my personal life, I absolutely love a good plan when it comes to anything I am pursuing at work. So you can imagine my relief of finally getting my hands on the priority list for this Collective. It is comprehensive, and I can now see why it took the key members of the Leadership Team so much time to nut out the details.

Things have been separated into priority A and B. I love this method – priority A projects are highlighted so all teams know what projects are the most important.

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Down Time, Groups, and New Members

You may have noticed that CouchSurfing was having some problems over the past few days. If you got the "Site Temporarily Down" message every other time you tried to visit the site, you weren’t alone.

The start of the Northern Hemisphere Summer (traditionally a high travel time) combined with the new member load (we are at 8000-9000 new members a week!) put some sudden unexpected stress on the system. To fix the problem, we shut down group postings for a while, taking a large load off of our main database system while we handled some issues. Casey stayed up until 4:30 am making sure that everything went smoothly, and he was replaced by Walter who took on the rest of the night.

Things are running smoothly now, and we are still working steadily on more ways to speed up the site.

Below is a graph of weekly signups for the past four years… We are growing at an exponential rate! Keep passing on the word and enjoy the Surfing Season!

More detailed statistics and cool information can be found at:
http://www.couchsurfing.com/statistics.html

Collective Work Shifts Into High Gear

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!