Latest Update from the Thailand Collective

Find out what the team has been doing this month!

A Moment with our Manager

As Collective Manager, my role is to ensure results. That includes discussing objectives and accomplishments with each expert team supervisor on an ongoing basis. So perhaps more than anyone here, I understand why CouchSurfing members who are reading this newsletter want to know exactly what we have accomplished here. Also, as CouchSurfing's General Manager, I identify most with those members who love our service and community as it is now, but who also see its giant potential to do more!

So it may seem strange when I say this to readers: by the end of this Collective, most of what we have done here will be invisible to most members. Our mission for the end of this Collective is to build several global teams of volunteers and to provide them with tools they will need to create the future of CouchSurfing. These future team members will implement the many ingenious new ideas that members send us every week. They will provide the people-power to fulfill the dream of CouchSurfing's tomorrow. 

In this update, you will read about what I see each day: diligent and passionate participants steadily building the foundation for their teams-to-be, brick-by-brick. They are setting priorities, creating policies, conferencing with remote volunteers, and simply orienting themselves with CouchSurfing's diverse community and systems. These aren't the sort of reports that make for captivating news! Yet as each step proceeds according to our long-term plans, these are just the sort of reports that bring a smile to this Collective Manager's face each day. 

- Mattthew Brauer

Home Sweet Home in Pai

After two weeks of scouting to find the perfect location for the remainder of the Collective, we are happy to report the team has now made their new home in Pai, a small town in the far north region of Thailand. This area is perfect for us with Pai offering the unique balance of all the amenities of a modern town but with the strong flavor of local Thai customs. We were all keen to get the experience of traditional Thai culture, and being away from the tourist beach areas of the country gives us a greater opportunity for getting to know our new Thai neighbors.

Huge thanks goes to Susy and Casey who took time out of their roles, packed their bags and set off searching for us – we would have been homeless if it wasn’t for your efforts! Also thanks to the members who traveled with all the Collective things from Kata Beach to Pai!  

We have certainly learned a lot from this experience and the disruption that changing locations caused to the team, so for future collectives a larger lead time will be given to finding the right place well in advance of the Collective. This will ensure at the start of the Collective the team will be able to do what they do best without needing to assist with the location set-up. 

Change in Member Services Leadership

As a member, our Member Services area is important to you and to us! It's the hub of activity that helps members get the answers to their questions, processes verifications and gives those enthusiastic welcomes to new members. 

Dodie Butler was one of the first members to arrive at the Collective to take on the role of Member Services Team Supervisor. Unfortunately after some time in the role, Dodie made the difficult decision to leave us and pursue other opportunities that she thought would be better suited for her. We were sad to see her go but want to thank Dodie for the commitment she made in coming to the Collective and appreciate that she made the best decision for herself.

Thankfully in Member Services we already have three wonderful supervisors of the groups within this area who will continue their super human efforts in managing the services provided by their teams. Member Services is one of the more developed areas of the site, with systems and processes in place to ensure these valuable services continue, made possible by an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, including many of our awesome ambassadors. 

We will now be looking into the options we have for this area long-term, while trying to provide as much support to the existing supervisors of the groups as we possibly can during the Collective.

Recent New Arrivals

We are thrilled to have the Collective group grow at a rapid rate this past week with more passionate members arriving at our door step! We said hello to Mandie, the new Member Communications supervisor, along with Cameron and Diamond taking charge of Events and Outreach and Jim for Volunteer Coordination.  

This just leaves Seb, Design and User Interface, to arrive on 19 January and an invasion of the remaining members of the Collective on 1 February - Charish, PR & Marketing, Rachel, Member Safety and Disputes, Laura, Events and Outreach and Naz, Tech Team.

We can’t wait to see you all – travel safely!

CouchSurfing Image

If CouchSurfing was a person what would he/she look like? What would they say? How would they talk?

These are the types of questions being asked by Shonali, the marketing expert of the two part team of Public Relations and Marketing. With thousands of people joining each week, how do we make sure we grow in quality not just quantity? It's about presenting the right message to help us all realize our dream of creating a better world through the extraordinary connections each and every one of us is making with other CouchSurfers around the world.

Shonali has been doing detailed research into other social networking websites and the different strategies of those sites and non-profit organizations. For the first time we have a professional strategist focused on promoting this amazing community.   

For more information on the objectives the team will be focusing on during this Collective please visit the Public Relations and Marketing group.

The Tech Team Supporting You 

The recent problems with the CouchSurfing website prove how beneficial these Collectives are when you have a group of experts in the one place! If critical issues occur on the site, usually the tech team has to overcome the obstacles of remote communication, different time zones and volunteers’ normal work schedules to resolve the issues. Having a lot of the team together when the website encountered problems after the power outage at our hosting site made coordinating so much easier among themselves and with other volunteers elsewhere in the world.

Weston, Technology Team Coordinator, said it was energizing having so many of the team together in Thailand as they could also push ahead on some ideas to make data recovery much easier and quicker in the future. "It served as a great reminder about the need for us to keep moving forward in creating a concrete design for the website."

We are still experiencing "after shocks" from the original power outage with issues in different sections of the site, and this has meant continued efforts by the tech team, both in Thailand and remotely, to get the site back to full health.
 

Looking forward, the tech team will be focused on upgrading the infrastructure of the CS website. This will involve designing a system that can reliably deliver the current level of services to our growing community, even when they reach 1 million people! The team will also be supporting the new team supervisors in developing the tools they need for their teams.

Your Photos!

We know one of the things members love about the CouchSurfing site is they are able to express themselves freely in their profile. Currently there is no limit to the number of photos you can upload, and we want to keep this creativity flowing! However, with over 5 million separate images on the site, we needed a reliable and cost effective way to continue to provide this valuable aspect of our site.

This past month the tech team has created a new strategy to manage these images. We will now use a third party provider to store and back-up these images. Once all images have successfully been transferred, photos will load quickly from two sites in North America and Europe. So keep on uploading your amazing photos - there is no limit!

Team Updates

As we gather the group together and the supervisors take charge of the development of their teams, we know some people have a keen interest in what is being undertaken. The team is committed to getting a flow of regular information coming from the Collective and these supervisors will be using their respective groups to communicate the various things they have been doing as the Collective progresses.

So if you want to know what has been happening in any of the teams, then visit the groups by clicking on the links below:

•           Member Communications

•           Public Relations and Marketing

•           Events and Outreach

•           Technology

•           Member Disputes and Safety

•           Volunteer Coordination

•           Design and User Interface 

Please be aware though, if the supervisor has just recently arrived or is yet to come, it is likely there will be no information related to the Collective.

Improving Communications

Now that our resident communications expert has arrived we are looking forward to improving the quality and amount of messages you receive – we want members to be informed!  

Already we saw the benefit of having the team being together with the recent problems with the website. Arriving the day after the original power outage, despite having traveled for 36 hours to get to us, Mandie got involved immediately to understand the issues so we could let you know what had gone on. 

"Being at the Collective meant I could sit down with the tech experts and get the answers directly from them - being relatively new to CouchSurfing I had a lot of questions on how things operate! Having this chance to build relationships with the people in the different areas of CouchSurfing and learn from them is invaluable. It will help me in ensuring we continue to get the right messages out to members long after the Collective is over." Mandie 

Already you may have noticed an improvement in the messages you received when being unable to access various pages and functions within the site, along with the latest news bulletin explaining the issues we had encountered.

 
Signing off for now!

As you can see, it's been an eventful month already for the team here in Thailand and we look forward to dynamic month ahead with the amazing group of participants collecting here! 

You will hear from us again next when we publish another Collective News update in February and in the meantime, check out the expert team groups for more information from our Collective participants.

Happy Surfing! 

- From the team at the 5th CouchSurfing Collective, Thailand