Open Hospitality Network
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.
Table of Contents
Check also:
- Other resources for more background
- Domain modeling for some documentation
Why are we doing this?
- 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,
- losing history - 1. trust, often built on reputation is very important for 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
Who's involved?
In the project are involved contributors to the platforms:
- Trustroots.org present and former volunteers
- Open Alternative to WarmShowers.org - contributors to the community-built WarmShowers Android app, first released in 2012, before any WS board existed (2015), with which the community has grown, and whose access was cut off after WS board closed backend code (ca. 2017) and released a new paid app (2020), effectively excluding from the community members who access the platform from mobile devices only and for whom the fee for the new app is unaffordable (i.a. long-distance bike tourers and hosts from countries with less developed infrastructure). The devs and other community members made previously many attempts to inform the board about the situation.
- BeWelcome.org
- CouchSurfing.org community builders and members, before their community was locked behind paywall
Potentially also:
Help wanted!
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.
We will likely spin up, rebrand and adapt an instance of Trustroots for bicycle touring community. If you'd like to help re-build this community in the new place, it's best if you could join Trustroots team as for now and self-organize from there.
Give us feedback, vote for features or ask questions on the board, it's very helpful too!