Updated on October 24, 2018
What’s brewing at the Collective?
Hey folks!
Near one of the longest virgin beaches of Spain, the mixture of work, sun and sea brought this great energy into the community of Trustroots: lots of new people ready to team up and work online! Growing the roots!
Summer days, summer nights are goneSummer days and the summer nights are gone
I know a place where there’s still somethin’ going on
Tech boost
Online activity on Slack and GitHub has increased massively. A large part of this flurry of activity is thanks to Hacktoberfest where we show up on the main page at times.
What’s next
Guaka picked up Akronix on the way, which led to some pair programming. Akronix has already left but will present Trustroots at the Hackmeeting in Malaga from 1st to 4th November.
Tech wise, the top priority this year is to add reference-type functionality to contacts between profiles. You can follow some of that on GitHub.
Spreading the word
Together with Lisanna we have been working on the interface and user experience. We also revived our instagram, joining other travellers on the globe. We want to get merchandise to travellers with blogs and social media following, through our shop.
Goals
These are the goals we set ourselves:
Reach out to (new) members
We gotta do more outreach. Got a travel blog, write about Trustroots! We also welcome guest posts on our own blog, if you like writing about anything related to Trustroots, travel, trust if you want to tell the world about your experience with Trustroots.
Wakey wakey support team
Helena started taking care of support queries. Let us know if you want to help with this.
Safety team
Wherever your journey brings you to, remain trustworthy yet aware. We’re so many on the go, to keep Trustroots safe and trusty we’re adding safety features. We are here for you, building a community. Wanna help?
Three’s a crowd (of coders)
There’s a lot of tech activity, definitely more than 3 active coders. Guess we can increase the goal to 10 active coders to work on these triple T features:
- Trust features: this is progressing nicely with work on references
- Tribe communication feature (but no forum pleaz!!!1!!!!!!1111)
- Tea-Geolocation: for peace of mind, free tea for everyone, always
Ca$h
Trustroots is a moneyless foundation. At this point. The collective is self-funded. To make this easier in the future we want to try and get your money, OK? Coz life’s a beach.
Patreon is the way! (or so we think) If you have experience with raising money on such platforms, welcome on board to help with text, video, all that jazz.
More seriously
On a serious note: we are very aware of some issues around hospitality exchange networks in the past and there’s a lot of that we don’t want:
- turn into a for profit corporation
- raise 20M$ VC money (and waste it all)
- a board or an executive team that’s detached from the community
- dictators and censorship (really, this happened)
- endless discussions
And this is what we do want:
- free software forever
- transparency around finance
- move forward together, with board, volunteers, hackers, community
- lots of awesome people on our network
- actions (speak louder than words)
Wanna join?
The Collective is promising and we wish to be expanding and developing more in the following months. The best is yet to come – and we need some yoga partners! Stay tuned, stay trusty!
Check this form if you want to join us.
Yogis and yoginis of the world, unite!
Updated on October 14, 2018
Iberian Collective
tl;dr We’re organizing a Trustroots Collective this Autumn somewhere in the South of Portugal or in Andalusia.
What
A Collective is a time and space bound group of people choosing to work non profit on the same cause they believe in, like hospitality (exchange) or contributing in helping for any other reason.
In short, we will rent a space for volunteer work on Trustroots.
Why
Trustroots has been around for a while now, and the Community is growing nicely with amazing people. This is the reason Trustroots needs some more love and help energy to keep moving on. Now it’s time to accelerate things a bit.
Trustroots is reaching out for YOU.
When
We are aiming to start in October, and keep it going till at least December 2018. In other words, TR Autumn ’18 Collective.
Where
We’re aiming for the South of Portugal, Algarve, or the West Andalusia region of Spain, near the frontier.
Our first choices are either the beach of La Antilla or the beach or El Portil, in South West of Spain., but open for ideas if feasible.
This a particular interesting area for few reasons, like its mild Autumn weather (some people would call it Summer), kilometers of beach to walk, and tons of places to trip to in the near by area. This zone holds the largest protected area in Spain, including a National Park, is also close to spectacular rocky beaches in Algarve, beautiful and big Sevilla is 90 minutes away and it has all the peace of the ocean right on the corner.
If you are coming from or going to Africa around those dates, this can also be a good place to make a stop and give the TR Community a hand (please read below) as part of your adventures.
We’d like to have a place where we can volunteer on something we love, TR Community, and also have a place to share an international helping spirit.
How
We have some awesome people in the network now. We want to reach out and get some of these creative minds together in one space.
We will be all sharing the place, work, ideas, and how we would like to contribute or how TR should grow. However,sometimes work and fun go hand & hand and we want this to be one of those.
Food (Veg), shared accomodation and optional activities will be organized for volunteers willing to run the extra mile to help TR be accesible to more people.
Goals
- reach out to members
- more/better feedback to members who communicate
- activate 10+ volunteers
- active 3+ active programmers
- some features:
- add tribe communication feature
- more geolocation
- better trust features
Wanna help? We knew you did!
Most Welcome:
- Coding: geeks, hackers, especially if you’re well versed in JavaScript (both frontend and Node.js)
- Designers, artists
- Writers, authors
- Community Reachers and Connectors
- Babysitters, yes, if you like kids, you are in :)
- Cook, cooks asistants
- anything else, let us know
- We have not decided for any place yet, so if you can help us find a place in the South West of the Iberian Peninsula, get in contact pronto!
Wanna come join? Fill in this form
For other stuff, contact Guaka through Trustroots or by email.
Updated on August 21, 2017
Meeting people now on Trustroots
You can now meet people on Trustroots even if you don’t need hosting or cannot host. This is probably the biggest change in Trustroots since our launch two years ago!
As our community is already 27,000 members strong, we wanted to make Trustroots useful not only for those who can host or who are travelling. Our mission is to connect likeminded people together and while hosting is one of the best ways to do so, simply getting people to meet is very much part of our mission, too.
Meets are visible on the map just like hosting offers and removed automatically after some time — currently one month after any updates to it. Members can have multiple meet offers on the map at the same time.
are visible on the map just like hosting offers 
and removed automatically after some time — currently one month after any updates to it. Members can have multiple meet offers on the map at the same time.
We didn’t want to guide too strongly what “meet” exactly means: it might be you’re travelling in that location, it might mean you’re organising a dinner party at home or it might mean a bigger Hitchgathering type event. We will follow how people start using the feature and do adjustments while we learn more about possibilities. Do send us all the feedback and ideas as well! We’re all ears.
New Tribes!
Thank you so much for sending us so many new tribe suggestions! We’re amazed by so many different communities, hobbies and skill practitioners on Trustroots.
We just published some of the most requested tribes and will probably follow up with a few more in near future. Keep sending us ideas! Know that in future everyone will be able to create tribes, but until that we don’t want to spread the community too thin as finding likeminded folks would become more difficult.
Go Join new Tribes and happy rest of the summer!