Goals of the New Zealand Collective

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New Zealand Collective
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Contents 1 Redefining the Collective 2 Collective documentation 3 Transparency 4 Financial sustainability 5 Global marketing 6 Organization structure 7 Why in New Zealand? 8 Technical goals 8.1 More specifically 9 Any other goals?

This is a list of 'goals of the New Zealand Collective; things that might be able to be accomplished. Please add, subtract, clarify, work on, develop objectives (ways for accomplishing goals) and prioritize these goals. The benefit is that when people volunteer to work at the collective, they will know what goals we are hoping to achieve and what they can be working on.

In no certain order:

Redefining the Collective

• Redefine the Collective - provide a clearer image of what the collective is so that people are less skeptical and more supportive. Part of this is developing all the goals for the collective.

Collective documentation

• Document collective achievements more efficiently. Everyone wonders what is going on at these collectives. One goal should be to ensure that the rest of the CouchSurfing Community knows what is happening. Any ideas for how to achieve this?
  • One possibility is to work on stuff directly on the wiki. People from everywhere can actively participate in this process. (Guaka^TalkCS is always happy to explain any wiki stuff)
  • Frequent reporting of what's going on: meeting minutes if available, especially important in involving volunteers who are not in NZ but are willing and able to participate in the working groups defined in the organizational structure
  • CS Chat could be used for some scheduled Q&A sessions between the in-house volunteers and anyone who wants to ask what's going on (note: this is kind of what happened during the Crash, chat being the only thing left to connect with other surfers & the collective, so why not make it more structured this time?)
  • Using Mutliple chat clients and Ambassadors for a global decentralized communcation network to dissiminate news from the CSC and allow queries and allow the larger user base to be able to participate in the CSC.Decentralize the dissemination of information and preventing bottlenecks in bandwidth at the collective by having ambassadors as the point of contact with the collective who would use multiple id on yahoo/msn/icq/skype to keep the global user base informed of the happenings at the collective by using msn live (which communicates with yahoo) so all hotmail/msn chat user could communicate also the yahoo users. Communication Ids like CSCNZ1-CSCNZXX could be set up .Also a time table would need to be set up to show when each id would be online. Also the information disseminated by each ambassador should be uniform and discrepancies should be avoided.
    • The reason of the above proposal is after considering the below facts.
    • All users do not use the same clients to chat and communicate.
    • All users do not user the wiki to communicate.
    • All users do not use the groups to communicate.
    • Members at the CSC usually have too many tasks to communicate efficiently
    • At present no email from the CSC have been answered.
    • The present skype option does not work and causes a bandwidth bottleneck at the csc.--Mentor
  • Webcam? Might not be very informative but the visuals did help to create community spirit during CSC Montreal.

Transparency

Developing a system for transparency. The above only a broad scale. We want the collective to be transparent. This can be done by simply keeping people informed of what we hope to achieve and what we are doing to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. Transparency in the organization as a whole is a bigger fish to fry. How do we begin this process? What steps need to be taken?

Financial sustainability

• Financial sustainability (thread). This goes for both the Collective and CouchSurfing as a whole. This is a very real situation. I don't know much, but I know servers are expensive. I know there are loads of costs that go into maintaining this website and that those needs are currently only met by member donations. Can we continue on donations? This is a problem we need to solve at this collective.
  • Non-profit tax exempt status. Are we eligible? Is it beneficial to maintain this status? How do we get there?
  • Transparency of finances: to find how we can get financial sustainability, financial stability or just plain money, it´s good to know how much and what kind of costs both the Collective and CouchSurfing cause. One idea is to have a FAQ where most questions about financial aspects of couchsurfing are answered.
    • Hosting a web site costs next to nothing; why do you need all that money?
    • Couchsurfing is cool! I'll give you some money. But what will it be used for?
    • Isn't Couchsurfing supported financially by its founder?
    • I'm told that Couchsurfing is supported by XYZ! or some other company. Why don't you solicit them?
    • Why does Couchsurfing not put up advertisements for income?
    • Does the government not provide any funding?
    • What forms of donations do you accept?
    • Where can I view detailed information about the progress of fundraising?
    • I have a problem or concern that isn't answered here. What should I do?
    • What´s all that talk about money? Why can´t you come up with some better ideas to keep Couchsurfing going?

...

(FAQ strongly inspired bythis one).

To work towards such a document could help the community to analyze the financial situation of couchsurfing. Once the status quo is transparent there could be more creative and constructive approaches about couchsurfing finances.

Global marketing

Global marketing, spreading CouchSurfing. How do we effectively spread CouchSurfing to get more "high quality" users?

Organization structure

• Strengthen the organization structure. This is something that has just started and is no where near developed. Should we focus on developing this org structure, finding the right volunteers during this collective? How do we implement huge volunteer coordination when volunteers are doing the coordinating and can't commit full time?
  • Distinguish between tasks that many people can do and tasks that need to be done straight away, like legal and financial issues.

Why in New Zealand?

• A question that arose during this goal development session was this: What can CouchSurfing accomplish in New Zealand that it can't do anywhere else?

Technical goals

• A usable website: making sure core features of the site are as trouble-free as possible and making the site as secure and reliable as possible
• Streamlining developer involvement

See also Tech priorities

More specifically

At the end of it all, what do we have to show?

• Solidifying programmer coordination
  • Find the right way of communicating internally and externally without overwhelming tech volunteers and under-informing site users: through Wiki, CS Groups, the BT, the mailinglist (in progress: Anu & John)
• Developing coordination with non-technical feature development parts of the CS organization (in progress: Anu)
• Getting more programmers trained and involved (in progress: Kasper, Anu, Casey)
  • See Tech Team
• Improving the site
  • Fixing the most annoying existing bugs (in progress: John for the most part)
  • Making the site as secure and reliable as possible (in progress: Casey & John)
  • Developing new features (everyone, but we're lacking a way to define & follow up on what should be developed)
• Starting long-term technical projects locally to be continued after the collective
  • examples?
  • Could be as simple as assigning responsibilites for specific parts of the site or sub-projects for people joining the collective based on their interest and ability, continuing accountability beyound the collective.
  • Examples worked on during the collective: ambassador system, ride share, blogging feature (in progress: Anu, Kasper et al)

• Post-collective development (as we're approaching the end of this collective)
  • Making sure that current developers can keep contributing remotely
  • Making sure getting new developers involved can continue after the collective

Note: John aka Matrixpoint is not located in NZ but has been doing amazing work remotely (google mapping the search, polls and fixing tons of bugs are all his doing)

Any other goals?

Any other goals we should set? What do you want the collective to be? Please edit this document!