Cooperating with BeWelcome
From General
BeWelcome was started in way similar to Wikivoyage. BeWelcome is a hospitality exchange website. BeVolunteer is the official organization.
Guaka has posted about Wikivoyage in the internal forum of BV and there is definitely some interest in cooperation from the side of BeVolunteer.
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[edit] About BeWelcome
BeWelcome is a network of people traveling around the globe in search of intercultural exchange. They sleep in homes of other members or meet up with them for city tour or for dinner.
This way of travelling isn't as exotic as it seems. The big networks (Hospitality Club and CouchSurfing) have around 300,000 members. Generally the members connect a lot with the community. As BeWelcome is a democratic organised network backed up by an official organisation we will make sure that the network will always belong to the community.
BeWelcome has a (still) small, but very international members database and their website has already been translated in 7 languages with more then 90% completed and 17 more to come.
So probably there are members who would like to participate in translating articles in their language.
[edit] About BeVolunteer
Briefly: BeVolunteer is the French organisation which runs BeWelcome as main project.
If you check the History of BeVolunteer you might see some parallels with the history of Wikivoyage, and you can find even more at OpenCouchSurfing.
[edit] Possible forms of cooperation
[edit] Integrating the Wikivoyage travel guide within BeWelcome
Many of our members are travellers and/or welcoming hosts so they need information about their destination. That for other big hospitality exchange networks established a travelguide, [1] (started by Guaka). As we are a new Network with around 1300 members (August 2007) we don't see any point in creating all this information again and again. Unfortunatelly the other networks don't use a free license and they don't seem very open for cooperation.
Our project just started and is still in a beta phase. Beginning of October 2007 we will launch a promotion campaign which should multiply our quantity of members soon. That would bring lots of new editors for the "travelguide/wikivoyage" wiki.
The problem is that our members will need additional information on top of the information provided by Wikivoyage. I don't know if it's technically possible to load a wiki page in frames. One part of the article comes from wikivoyage and one part comes from our database. This way our users could edit all information on the same article but if they edit something in the Wikivoyage part it will be edited in your database so everyone wins. We have an up-to-date travel guide with exactly the information we need and you have a bunch more editors.
[edit] Attracting BW members to WV
Probably there are possibilities to announce the cooperation within our networks and later on keep references in the travel guide to wikivoyage.org. So far our members are travellers concerned about transparency and democratic structures. In the future the relation between this members and "normal" travellers probably changes but still - if they provide good information for the wiki. Perfect.
