We are designing a protocol to connect different hospitality exchange platforms to unify the community while enabling greater diversity and long term sustainability of all together.
Hospitality exchange platforms help to connect travellers with those who want to host them. They help to meet like-minded people and build lifelong friendships, crossing many boundaries. We want them to help to build resilient communities everlasting boards of directors and finally, those exchange platforms.
We’d like to take community-first approach, followed by technology. Though it’s also very infrastructure heavy piece, so technically, we’re trying to federate different already existing hospitality exchange platforms to make it easy for new ones to emerge and evolve to keep serving their communities' needs - not the other way around. We'd like new communities to freely form, grow and re-form and for that we need new generation of software, flexible enough to be able to follow them.
We envision a variety of platforms exist, built around specific communities' characteristics: for the bicycle touring community and for slow-travellers, in English and non-English languages, for women and lgbtq people only, gathering together families or even vegan families only, if they chose to enclose themselves in a community of their own. Some organized around democratic values and others with a strong leadership model. While all the platforms are independent and individual, they share common goal to connect travelers and hosts, and communicate with each other to better serve their communities.
Come, help us!
Hospitality is a universal human phenomenon, practiced long before any software infrastructure existed. We can't imagine an endeavor like this to fulfill its goals if it was not built on trust and transparency, to reflect values which drive people to open doors to their homes and welcome strangers traveling the world. Open and transparent for everyone and forever. For us, this means i.a. open governance, open source software and open finances.
- Other resources for more background
- Domain modeling for some documentation
- We aim to solve the issue of centralized boards ending up with too much power and locking their own communities in a platform the members cannot influence or move away from without:
- excluding themselves from the community - right now, although a single user can relatively easily move from one platform to another, they can not do it [travelers] without losing access to the hosts on that platform and [hosts] while remaining discoverable for travelers who haven't moved (yet) - so the community, as a whole, is trapped,
- loosing history - 1. trust, often relying on reputation built over many experiances of interactions with a person, is crucial for participation in reciprocal hospitality exchange. 2. connections and memories are invaluable!
- We hope to grow network of (active!) hosts reachable from any platform…
- … and flexibility to choose who, when and where we’d like to host
- We hope to increase diversity of platforms so that everyone can choose what fits them best
- We hope to increase security and be more inclusive, and welcome new members from under-represented groups
- We hope to take off from existing platforms a burden of trying to fulfill needs of all without having a clear identity
- We hope to reduce the burden on developers maintaining the platforms to keep up-to-date in ever-changing technology landscape
Learn more what exactly would change
In the project are involved contributors to the platforms:
- WarmShowers.org: Former contributors to the community-built Android app. For years (since 2012), it was an official WS app, and the community has grown with it. The new board (first formed in 2015) closed the backend code (circa 2017), released a new paid app (2020), and cut off access for the old app. This change effectively excluded members who accessed the platform exclusively from mobile devices and those for whom the fee for the new app was unaffordable (including long-distance bike tourers and hosts from countries with less developed infrastructure). Other members and the developers who objected to the change were censored or had their accounts deleted.
- sleepy.bike: A new decentralised app for bicycle touring travellers and those who want to host them, created as part of the OHN project.
- Trustroots.org present and former volunteers
- BeWelcome.org
- CouchSurfing.org community builders and members, before their community was locked behind paywall
- DirtyRoad.org
Potentially also:
We are a group of developers, frontend and backend software engineers, so if you'd like to help with social media for example, you are more than welcome! Please join our chat room to say hi! and ask how you could help.
If you are a developer, join our chat room or just pick up an issue and start working on it. This project uses C4 (Collective Code Construction Contract) process for contributions.
Right now, we are creating a new space for bicycle touring community at sleepy.bike. Please register to re-build this community in the new place! From there, we'll work to extract a protocol/library that can be reused by other hospitality exchange communities to connect in the greater Open Hospitality Network.
Give us feedback, vote for features or ask questions on the board, it's very helpful too!
