Great ideas

The statements and opinions on this page are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of CouchSurfing International.

Welcome to the CouchSurfing Great Ideas Wiki

This Wiki is designed to supplement the discussions that happen throughout the Group discussions that result in a Great Idea being raised.

Hopefully this Wiki will be able to document the Great Ideas before they fall off the ends of the group discussions to live in an archive.

With new members coming in to the Groups and not seeing the Great Ideas implemeted and NOT KNOWING the great idea has already been discussed this Wiki might help inform them of discussions and ideas gone by...

This Wiki might also be looked at by the CouchSurfing Leadership Team and who knows - they might even make comment of ideas they like and offer guidance to memebrs as to how to turn those ideas into reality.

Great Ideas

Please add your Great ideas below in like Topic order if possible with a description and a link to any discussion that might help track debate.

Rural Couchsurfing

Based on the concepts of wwoofing and helpx but with the focus being on culture exchange rather than labour for room and board

http://www.wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Rural_CouchSurfing

Most recent debate at: http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=24&post=668980

Gender section of profile

Change the gender section in "edit profile" to textbox (possibly one that just opens when selcting "other") rather than the current dropdown menu, to give people that don't feel that thze want to be categorized by the binary female/male distinction to express themselves and their concept of gender. It's just like the "ethnicity" field, where we have more choices than "black/white/other", just imagine that! great to have the opportunity to write something like "bird of prey" as well as your nationality (as some people do, which i find awkward, but hey, if someone sees an importance in it), as well as your skin color, or just "human".

Since i for myself am ok with categorizing my gender in a binary way, i can't really imagine the options here, but some people are obviously more creative and see the binary options as a limitation. I think leaving the freedom to define it yourself would promote and give room to the idea of tolerance and diversity. --tomvienna 13:15, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Volunteer flags:

"I tend to think people will do a great deal to help if there is some small show of appreciation and acknowledgement involved.

Local - supports area projects with Amb direction Regional - project support across several districts Global - may choose to participate in any region

For what is worth I'm trying to imagine how things are rapidly evolving for our community. We've got a virtual realm that still has a high need for field volunteers to facilitate activity." Keith

Ambassador Packages:

Hi folks: I can see that nothing is being done by this group to actually make the "package" a reality by looking at the posts made and their dates.I am a new city ambassador and know how badly this is needed.I'd like to take the point on this and start to put it all together as a group of links, definitions, and explanations, and contacts to assist in better understanding the duties of the task.... MACNAPIER [1]

Breaking news: some work is being done on this at: [2] and at [3]if you would like to have a look

Multiple Couches:

Some people live in two places and would like to offer them both. Since a couch is not a person, why not have the database system treat them both separately.....James Smith [4]

Regional Ambassadors:

I know its been mentioned before but I think it would be a good idea to have a regional ambassador as there are some areas that have too small a population to have a city amb but would benefit from having an amb position of similar 'level' to city amb but that would be able to encompass other smaller areas ......? DUBLINGUY[5]

CS Greetings:

- there might be a new member that has been greeted once, but I do not know if they have been greeted from someone in their own city/country or from someone around the world. sometimes I want to greet someone in my city that has already received one greeting and I am a bit hesitant to write about our city group etc in case they have already been greeted by one of the city members. I think it is important to know the type of greeting they have received...Konstantina[6]

- I thought about a tool that would be helpful when it comes to greetings. When I now look at who needs to be greeted in my country, it often says they've been greeted by one person before. I would love to see WHO has greeted them.... Ricard Salevik [7]

- when a new CSer comes into the World list they come in from the top and fall away from the bottom... this list is 100 members long...when they receive a greeting they disappear from the World List and arrive in the Country list and City list.A City (such as Sydney might) might have 3 City Ambassadors - In australai we would like to extend a local greeting to all our new CS members however we do not want to saturate them with greetings from 3 different Greeters from the same city offering the same advice regarding groups and meetings..Would it be possible to tempoarily show the Country of any greeters whilst the new profile remains in the Greeting Realm? ... Leimondo [8]

Verification without a credit card or donation

an ongoing discussion on improving Verification using other techniques:

[9] as well as [10]

Couch Search

- To enable new members to be at the top of the list when you go looking for a couch.[11]

for further info and discussion on this algorythm you might want to look here

There has been the idea to [sort the search results by degree of seperation], a more simple approach would be to just search for friends of friends.

Groups

- dividing locals and non locals in the list

"It would be helpful for me to see who is a local in the community so maybe I can personally nudge some people to come out to events. I know I can go through a list of a few hundred people, but it would be nice to have a box around the profile of locals, or maybe two sections or something... Cindy [12]

- How to create a worldwide free sms and email notification system for meetings in just 3 easy steps?

What if you could arrive in a country and start receiving text messages on your phone for each upcoming meeting? And what about receiving an email with each meeting details instead of having to read hundreds of posts to get an idea of when and where there are going to be meetings in busy cities like London, Paris or Berlin?.... Ricardo [13]

- Option for new couchsurfers to sign up for their local group.

"whenever new user sign up on Couch Surfing, he/she should give an option to join a local group... Rahul[14]

- Theres no search function, sure you can search using google since the groups are publicWWW but still. the groups is weak.

everyone gets a CS email address. this is then integrated w google groups.

This CS email is what is used in the google groups. keeps peoples real email address private.

you can bring the googlegroup feed back into CS, and format it so it is still on the CS site.

-It also gives the poster privacy options for the post not to be archived (X-no-archive)

-This ties in with the REPLY email functionality above.

-Decent groups functionality,

-less load on CS servers (cs groups servers can be reallocated)

-more notification options not just the digest,instant..RSS Feeds etc ... Craig Thomas [15]

Profiles

- profiles for "Double Lives" ie double locations or double languages

"people might have legitimate reasons for wanting to create two profiles - eg they spend part of the time in one place and part of the time in another place, and might want to be able to host (and therefore come up in couchsearches) in both, or they're bilingual.... B [16]

- Elaborating the language proficency from three categories to five.

(Native Tongue (referred in CS as "Expert"), Highly Fluent, Conversational (CS terms as "intermediate"), Limited Use, Directions/Requests Only (what should actually be reflective of CS's term "beginner")...Kalaheo)

"Changing languages to 5 definitions instead of three. It is very difficult to fit yourself into a set of only three definitions of a language, I myself would not think of myself as only a mediocre spanish speaker, but could never say I am expert, so i would like more definitions to make it clearer how good my ability in a language is...Spyro [17]

Controlling bad apples

I have posted about this issue in the past and feel we should not delete problem people but freeze there profile and leave it there as a warning, but they should become inactive and not beable to post or log in anymore. I also feel this might make it harder for them to make a new profile and wouldn't be able to use the same card to verify etc... Mostly these problem people need to be there as warnings for others, NOT deleted.....Larry [18] also see ......badapples - brainstorm

- More Sign Language options needed for Languages section of profile

"I was just editing my profile and was disappointed to see there was only two sign languages... American and INTL which i am to assume means international... which does not even exist. Heh. Every country has their own sign language...Zoee [19]

- improvements to the Referencing System - new reference/connection system?[20]

- Elaborating on the Prefered Gender selection [21]

- Dealing with No Shows [22]

- Uploading Countries [23]

- Stricter controls in setting up Profiles - If there were to be a policy for sustainable growth, it might include:....Pickwick [24]

Formally Communicating Ideas to the LT

"something like Mantis could be the registry of these proposals where the item could be on display for all to read and show a a current status... If the LT require formal processes for communicating possible improvements then this process must be documented with the necessary tools provided... else you end up having a hotch potch of requests scattered from @#$!@ to breakfast time within a myriad of group postings where items raised in one group are only repeating items raised in another..."[25]

Organizing the vast amount of content on CS

post in the brainstorm ~ redefined group about sharing and retrieving information

Email Options

- "James, this restriction of the mail function exclusively to users with a certain amount of profile input is worth a discussion! It could be one non-bloody and comprehensive means of hands-on user education, too. Those of the users who can and do read instructions will do it anyway and won't even notice the fine fence. To others who tend to 'learning by breaking' the frustration on all parts could be channelized into a small red info line "oops... you can't post at the moment. That's because youre profile is too anonymous, and experience has shown that no one would want to host a phantom. You can change this by filling in some more info about yourself so people have an idea of who you are. We apologize for any inconvenience caused, but as Couchurfing is about real connections between real people, we believe it's not asking you too much to get real first before you message other members. Makes sense, yeah? Okay, fine, you're getting it. See you later in the post office - with a face." KAOXoni

- instead of having a noreply return address, create a unique return address for each message so we can reply straight from our email client. ... Craig Thomas [26]

- It would be nice to be able to email more than one person at a time. ... Cindy [27]

CS Requests replied to percentage

there has been the proposal to let requests "expire" after a certain time, so that people don't just reply months later with empty messages just to keep their percentage up. Read discussion about it.

Reference System

How to change the reference system in a way that people don't refrain from writing negative references because they are afraid of retaliatory references, and other interesting brainstorms about references - a thread of the brainstorm - redefined group

- go back to the old system where you choose the heading of the reference and that there is either a green, red or grey coloured dot beside the title. Also maybe at the top of the references section there should be just the 3 coloured dots with a number beside each representing how may positive references you have, neutral and negative. if you want to read the positive references then you click on it and then you can view all the positive... Taylor Booth [28]

Personal Home Page

a proposal for a new section of the homepage that shows, depending on your login ip: links to near by city's wiki pages, city groups, and ambassodors close by (from that or a nearby city, nomadic ambassadors in case they are close, contry ambs (maybe only the one's who are in the city) - post