Welcome to the Couchers.org core team! Thank you for offering your time and skills to this project and our shared cause. We're very excited to start working with you!

We want to make sure that you get the most out of your involvement and are able to push Couchers.org forward. We’re sure you’ll meet passionate and skilled people, develop your professional skills, and make this worldwide community even better.

Couchers.org is built by a global team of skilled volunteers — like you — in their spare time. The purpose of this guide is to outline the processes and policies we have in place to make sure we can all do this efficiently and effectively. We want to make sure everything is done at a high standard, while making sure your time spent on it is rewarding and fun.

Onboarding tasks

To get started, do the following tasks:

1. Get set up on your new Google @couchers.org account
   • make sure you can sign in and view the shared Google drive folders
   • click this link to add yourself to the all-team calendar.
   • (optional) forward your emails to your regular email account. This way you can get all emails and event invitations sent to your regular email address.
2. Get set up on Slack
   • download the app on your desktop and/or phone
   • upload a photo to your account
   • add your role description to your profile (View profile > Edit profile > "What I do")
3. Say hi to the team
   • go to the #introduce-yourself channel and write a description about yourself, your history with the couch surfing community, and what you're going to be doing as a volunteer
4. Make sure you have a first task to be working on. If you’re not sure who to ask, send Dea or Itsi a message.

The Couchers.org Vision

Please have a read through our Mission and Values. They are very important to what we do. We think that both couch surfing and belonging to couch surfing communities improve people’s lives, and grow society to be more open, empathetic and tolerant.

The project was initially started by Aapeli and Itsi. In early 2020, they laid out a vision by identifying issues with the current couch surfing landscape and suggesting a set of solutions. These form the basic "founding documents" and are the groundwork for the vision and plan on what we are building. Everyone who joins the team must agree on this unified vision in order for us to be on the same page on what we're working on. This also ensures that you know that any work you contribute now will not go towards any different vision in the future.

In short: our goal is to replicate the good elements of existing platforms while making some fundamental improvements to fix systematic issues with them. Once we have reached this point, we will continue to further iterate and improve the platform.

Our belief is that through good design and curation of the community, we can make couch surfing a far safer, accessible and easier experience for all members, and grow the couch surfing community to more and more people in the world. Over the long term we have an expansive and inclusive outset. We believe that couch surfing is a wonderful experience for individuals, and has a broader benefit to society in making people more generous, open-minded and trusting. We want to introduce as many people in the world as possible to couch surfing in a sustainable way that preserves the integrity of the overall community.

How we work

We work in countless time zones, spread all around the world. In order to be productive, it’s best that we follow asynchronous work practices. Try to avoid organizing meetings when things can be communicated by email or slack. The purpose of having a meeting should be for team and relationship building, and live brainstorming when necessary. Your team leader will outline the way your specific team works asynchronously.

Always refer to our Code of Conduct to make sure everyone is being treated fairly and with respect.

For an understanding of our governance and decision making structure, please refer to our Governance and Leadership Structure.

Our culture

We attract people who love couch surfing, and love working on projects. We strive to make sure that everyone has fun while contributing, and feels rewarded watching Couchers.org grow.

Most people contribute a few hours a week, and everyone is entirely remote. What we’ve found to work is a mixture of structure and encouraging initiative. We keep things well structured here to keep things moving, but want to make sure you don’t get bogged down in approval processes and meetings in order to get things done. As long as you see something that’s within your scope, we want you to push ahead with it. If you feel blocked or unsure what you should be doing, say something!

Allowing everyone to push things forward means people will make mistakes, and that’s a great thing. We expect everyone on the team to make mistakes, including the leadership. It’s not hard to fix mistakes as long as everyone is open and honest, and willing to take on feedback. Allowing mistakes means the project keeps moving, and people develop professionally.

Our traditions

👋 Onboarding

We like to welcome our new volunteers with open arms and excitement. Here are some ways we make that happen:

• your Team Lead will send an introductory message on Slack welcoming you on our #announcement channel;
• we will ask you to take some time to introduce yourself on the #introduce-yourself channel;
• we will ask you to share a picture so we can introduce you on our social media channels.

🍰 Birthdays

They only come around once a year, so why not make them special? We try to let everyone know it's your birthday to let you know you're appreciated and to feel the love from the team!

• we will wish you a happy birthday on our #chit-chat channel
• if budget allows us, we will send you some gift merch, such as t-shirt or mug
• we will add your birthday to an organization-wide calendar, so you can know when to wish everyone else as well!

🎈 Virtual Fun

We have volunteers spread across 10+ countries and 30+ different cities. Since we don't pass each another in the halls, we do our best to find creative ways to connect and build relationships.

• We pair our volunteers up every other week for a #VirtualCoffee. A chit-chat for 15-30 mins to connect and talk about their lives. We use the donut app to pair our volunteers together and match them in our #virtual-coffee channel;
• Answer a fun question every Wednesday on the #chit-chat channel. Each question is designed to prompt fun, creative answers that will in turn create an engaging, energetic comment section through which our people can laugh together and enjoy each other's answers;
• Share our weekend adventures every Monday morning in the #chit-chat channel. This is a fun time to learn more about our volunteers and what they are up to while surfing, hosting, enjoying, and exploring life outside their work/volunteer duties.

Our attitude towards Couchsurfing™

Most people on the team are here because they previously used Couchsurfing™. It is part of our history, and for many of us part of our identity. It is the common experience that brings us all together. There is a lot we have learned from that experience, things we wish to take and things we wish to leave. Above all we believe this is something that we must replicate and improve upon in a way that meets our shared values. It is a rich source of analysis for us to building something great.

We do not have time to dwell on negativity. If you have come upset at their actions, we ask you to leave that at the door. Any energy spent on tearing them down would be much better spent building us up. We are here because we love couch surfing, and want to spread it further for our own sake, and for the next generation of couch surfers.

Workflow

Please always use UTC time when communicating with the team. We want to avoid using times like CET, EST, AET, etc. You can convert UTC times to your own local time with a tool like mytime.io. If you organize a meeting, please use WhenIsGood with (time zones enabled) to find a time that works for everyone.

Slack etiquette

The purpose of these guidelines is to be respectful of other team members' time: a lot of people have limited resources they can contribute, and we want to make sure we foster an environment where they can get their work done efficiently. Endless irrelevant notifications on Slack causes people to turn their notifications off which hinders work.

1. Try to find the appropriate channel or person to post your message in: post in the smallest channel that contains the people who need to hear your message, or write to them privately
2. Please write all your thoughts about one topic in one message, and draft through it to make sure you're articulating your thoughts concisely
3. Use threads when replying to a topic, this keeps channels cleaner and helps find content in the history
4. Please do not post on #updates, but you may respond in a thread
5. Be very mindful of posting in #general, it's for project-wide notifications only

Overall, keep in mind that what takes you a few minutes to write can take a combined hour for a whole channel to read and digest. Try to write in a way that minimizes read time at the expense of a bit more write time.

A general meeting can attract up to 20 people and take over 2 hours, which is a valuable 40 hours of volunteer time. We want to be conservative when calling meetings.

Legal stuff

The Couchers.org project is supported by Couchers, Inc., a non-profit organization formed specifically to oversee the Couchers.org project, guard its assets, and give team members protection from legal issues. Read more about the non-profit structure.

We ask you to sign a Contributor Assignment Agreement (CAA) to assign your work to Couchers, Inc. if you're contributing something that's for the sole use of Couchers.org. That's most things apart from source code. The purpose is to protect Couchers, Inc. and you from legal issues.

The source code for the project is licensed under the MIT license and all contributions are made under that license. In a nutshell, you retain copyright for your work but allow Couchers, Inc. (and anybody else) the right to use and redistribute the code under this license.