Dear Yves,

when registering on BW they ask a valid a-mail, your name and surname, your birthdate, and your location (town). That's it. Which data you want to expose on your profile is your choice. No abuse. Just your free choice. Donations: Yes, BW needs donations to exist. As Wikipedia does, as other non-commercial structures do. But not millions without any info for what, only several thousands with clear transparency. You can read all this in this group, there were hysteric reactions "oh, the same shit as CS!" before - and answers. Just do some reading before posting.

Best wishes

Krischaan

For more information you can check the wiki https://www.bewelcome.org/wiki

If you want to contact the board members directly, you can write to bod(at)bevolunteer.org

where? on bewelcome.org for starters. sign up, write a forum post. :) meet the tech crew on irc.freenode.net #bewelcome

please note that bewelcome is a volunteer organisation inspired by open-organisation principles, with no full time staff, no office, no phone number and an annual budget of 3000 or so eur.

so things will naturally move slooower than elsewhere. this fact alone can be source of frustration, so be prepared for that. patience and group-think abilities will be of advantage.

we intentionally have no dominant leadership, so you will need to address a bigger crowd with your questions and see who replies. the board will only be active as such during meetings obligatory according to french law and when really big decisions are to be made. the rest is up to a sort of do-ocracy and consensus decision making, which is working sometimes well and sometimes leaves some people unhappy.

i estimate that roughly 10 techies and 10 other volunteers are currently making regular useful contributions. they are all doing this in their spare time and get nothing but an occasional "well done" from the community in return, so be easy on them.

local volunteers don't really exist, mainly because the technical infrastructure for this has not been built yet. that's definitively something we should get into, if you ask me.

meinhard.
technical volunteer at bewelcome and bw member #202. ;)