Trustroots Ideas

Save the Date: Trustroots Picnic in Berlin – August 2nd, 2026

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:41:34 +0200

We are writing this at the end of our 12th Hackathon in Portugal with the Trustroots team, with an invite to a summery potluck picnic in Berlin for the Trustroots community! Let’s hang out, connect over some shared food, BBQ, hear about ideas people are working on, amongst like minded people. We are also very excited to finally celebrate the next step of our community together: the launch of our new Nostroots app.

How we keep Trustroots free forever and ever and ever

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:10:55 +0100

As we announced last year, we’re evolving Trustroots into a new version of itself — one that’s more open, resilient, and user-empowered. This will be enabled by leveraging “nostr”, a decentralized network technology. For now, we call this version of Trustroots, “Nostroots”.

Wait… what? What’s all this talk about decentralized networks 🤔? I just want to keep meeting awesome people through Trustroots! Is that really necessary?

We get it. Many in our community are wondering what this means and why it matters. So let’s put the tech aside for a moment and focus on what’s truly important for our community.

nostroots: first apk and progress report

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 11:11:30 +0200

tl;dr:

apk at github

We set up a

Nostroots home page

, with the most important information for normal users. For devs there’s https://github.com/trustroots/nostroots

And here’s (most of) the progress report that we wrote for November 2024 till April 2025.

Project updates

At November’s hackathon week we decided to go for expo.dev with react native. This has worked out well now. The alpha version of our Android app is ready for testing. If you’re feeling adventurous, grab the APK and see what we’ve built so far. You can post notes on a map, and also see geographic notes from other sources.

Nostr updates

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 10:58:17 +0200

We recently held a weekend hackathon to make notes.trustroots.org even better!

A lot of our work focused on making sure that the notes we display on our map are trustworthy. We want to avoid showing any spam or invalid content, so we’ve set up a system to verify that notes come from real Trustroots users. Our solution involves running a server that checks the source of each note and reposts it with extra information. When you add a note to the map, it creates an event, but only notes from verified users will be shown.

Moving Trustroots onto nostr

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:56:17 +0200

tl;dr we want to make sure that Trustroots exists two decades from now and unlock sharing beyond hospitality: rides, bicycles, meals, parties, etc.

Trustroots has already had a brush with death. The project lead stepped away without a word. Only one other person had access to most of the servers. We’ve seen similar issues with other hospitality sites. CouchSurfing(tm) took venture capital investment which slowly rotted out the site. Warmshowers had some management clashes. Hospitality Club has had long periods of downtime as there’s only one person running it.

Restored from backup

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 14:10:46 +0100

We lost access to the latest version of this blog. I restored from the most recent backup that I had. Some posts have been lost. It’s not clear if we will be able to restore them.

Some parts of the blog might not work properly. Hopefully in time these will be fixed.

Trustroots Summer Newsletter

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 17:04:32 +0200

Contents

Greetings
How to Reach out and Root
Hitchhiking During The Pandemic: A Field Report
How to Reach Out and Root
Want to Join the Trustroots Team?
Share your moments
Relevant links

Greetings Rooters! Happy Summer!

We are all slowly, carefully opening our hearts to travel and making connections as the globe tentatively wakes up after the pandemic. In times like these, it is more and more important for us all to put down roots as we reach across the world and build relationships. There is still so much conflict and uncertainty in the world, but with Trustroots, we can open our hearts and homes and minds to making friendships and living life fully. We have now grown to over 80,000 Trustroots members- your personal network of global friends is growing. Come meet everyone.

Trustroots Hackathon This Weekend!

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 21:41:17 +0100

This coming weekend there is another Hackathon happening! For three days and nights our team will be devoting as much time as possible working on projects like our react migration, iOS application and i18N translations.

We’re are also looking for additional volunteers who would like to support with our communications and social media presence. Besides our long term tech volunteers, there will be volunteers from our support, communications and community building teams and our friends from the Open Hospitality Network and HerAdventures will also be joining. In short, it’s going to be a hoot!

Trustroots Stories and News End of 2021 Edition

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 07:09:21 +0100

Table of Contents:

~ New Circles ~ Lets Meet in the Middle ~ The Traveling Psychology Advisor on Tour ~ #Trustroots Photos Around the World ~ Want to Join the Trustroots Team? ~ Relevant Links

Places are open, places are closed, again, Winter is here, Summer is here, migrations are happening all over, new love is blossoming, old patterns and lifestyles shifting and recalibrating.

Travel is happening, yet on a minimal level not seen in years or even decades. Some things are slowing down and going back to how it may have been. Maybe that’s a good thing. Travelers are looking for hosts in countries that are currently open, some borders have opened slowly, some have not, and some are looking for a warm place to land their feet in the Winter. And as some move around to other spots, there are hosts and homes to stay at, local dishes to taste, social gatherings to connect to and share whatever it is all of us are going through at this very moment.

Trustroots Travel Stories and News September Edition

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 18:58:50 +0200

Summer in the Northern Hemisphere has come to a close with the seasons changing and the leaves beginning to Fall. There has been traveling and hosting happening and in this edition of this Newsletter we highlight some of those hosting experiences. We also share some stories of hitchhiking, building off-grid, how to host a meetup on Trustroots, and crazy villa parties that come as a result of being hosted.

Trustroots Stories and News July Edition

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 22:43:50 +0200

Contents: Meet the Member: Steph Ryan You can never save enough carrots *byTa*nja Caron Glimpses of Prague Food Makes Me Happy My Trustroots Experience HospEx Recordings Available Open Hospitality Network Created Trustroots volunteer opportunities Share your moments Relevant Links

Greetings Trustroots Members and Newsletter Subscribers from Around the World!

Travel is beginning again in many parts of the world, yet some parts remain closed off and working to recover. We hope you are well wherever you are and that if you are traveling again, share with us some of your stories and feelings. Write to us at Share@trustroots.org and we can highlight your stories here on our Newsletter or social.

You Can Now Share Your Experiences With Members

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 05:01:00 +0200

From today on, you can share and write about your experiences with other Trustroots members!

Trustroots has been growing at a steady pace since 2014, and Trustroots members can tend to share a common mindset. A vast majority of the community are helpful, kind, responsible and respectful to others and when there are disputes, our large support team is there to help.

That said, sometimes members would like to understand before requesting a place to stay with a member, what experiences did this Trustrooter have so far? What kind of experiences have others had with them? Will our expectations from meeting fellow members likely be met with this person?

Trustroots Stories and News April Edition

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 16:55:11 +0200

Photo © Paul Grillet

Contents: *Experiences is Launched! *HospEx Summit May 8th *Meet the Member *Say Hello to Warmshowers Refugees *On the Road as a Hobo for 14 Years *Bea’s Journey into the Multiverse *A Photo Says More Than A Thousand Words *How to Write a Hosting Request! *Relevant Links

Now you can Share an Experience about anyone on Trustroots

Experiences is launched! What is experiences? It is basically a way to leave references for those you interact with on Trustroots. We call it experiences though, because we want to encourage everyone to share their personal experience, rather than share a judgement of the persons character, which can be hard to determine in a short amount of time.

Trustroots Can Now Be Translated

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:32:16 +0100

Hallo, Hola, Hello, Salut, Ciao,

There’s a lot going on behind the screens, and we have volunteers working on different fields to improve our platform. One of those fields is translating Trustroots to multiple languages, and we’re happy to say we’re releasing translated Trustroots in five of those languages!

From this day forward, you can select one of these languages, and instead of English, most wording will change in your selected language. Of course, our goal is to offer more languages, but for that: We need your help! If you’re interested, please join our volunteer team. We’ll help you get started.

Trustroots Travel Stories and News February 2021

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 08:32:05 +0100

![](/images/hosted/331d90808c4a-dce77-trtree-1.jpg)

Greetings Trustrooters and readers!

Hoping you and anyone you are with are well in this unique time in human history. As the pandemic continues to encourage governments to close borders, impose lockdowns, curfews, and other restrictions, it is good to remember that it will be over soon enough. Vaccines will be more readily available, borders will open, travel will happen more freely, and doors will be open for those to stay over and share life together.

Trustroots Changelog — December/January

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 16:43:24 +0100

Let’s see if this becomes a habit, but the idea is to highlight all the small improvements and continuous efforts that go on Trustroots, thanks to all our volunteers! 👏

The search got a bigger upgrade under the hood — it’s now smoother and faster, especially on mobile. Visuals got refreshed a bit, but primarily this change will also unlock any future improvements to Search. Stay tuned!

Already visited dots are now a bit transparent, and currently selected offer is black.

Trustroots Travel Stories and Latest News

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 16:45:49 +0100

Greetings Trustrooters! Happy Winter if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere or Summer if you’re in the Southern.

The world continues to change and shift everyday, and we sincerely wish you are doing well in the midst of everything, and that you are able to experience some joy and love in the midst of it all.

Some have been able to travel again and are using Trustroots to facilitate safe hosting. Travel itself probably won’t come back the way it was until the middle of next year it seems..

The challenges of diversity

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 22:24:35 +0200

Online platforms bring together a great lot of people. Like-minded in some ways, but often very different. In a world of bubbles and echo chambers, this is often a breath of fresh air. But it leads to the occasional mortally embarrassing misunderstanding.

About half of the energy of the Support Team goes into handling those moments. Some individualities are very synergetic, others stay away from each other, and some are quite contradictory.

Decolonising Into Circles

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 11:02:44 +0200

You might be wondering why Trustroots is changing the name of Tribes. In this collaborative article we will try to explain what’s behind the change and why this matters. It has mainly been written by Mariyano, a Brazilian backpacker currently under lockdown in Buenos Aires due to the pandemic, and Martin A. who spent a few years travelling before finding relative stability by the European Alps. But as you will see below there has also been plenty of discussion among the Trustroots volunteers, so all in all it’s a rather communal project.

Journeys Through the Night

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 11:00:21 +0200

Community Stories, Vol. II

Welcome to the second part of our community letter to ourselves! In case you missed the first one with Covid-19 lockdown experiences, you can find it here. This time around we are travelling through the night - sleeping at police stations in Pristina, trainhopping to escape from where nobody stops for hitchhikers, and overcoming suspicion in Kończyce-Kolonia.

We hope you enjoy the read and that the stories either bring back memories of your own adventures or inspire you to future ones. A couple of months from now we will publish the next collection of stories where we want to hear about notable Trustroots experiences you’ve had, so send an email to share@trustroots.org if you feel like it!

New Tribes*

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 12:52:44 +0200

In the past couple of days we have been adding new tribes* to Trustroots. In total there are 15 additions, based on the most frequent requests we’ve gotten from yourselves. At the moment the images and descriptions are work in progress, so if you got an epic photo that would make a great Tribe* cover, send it to support@trustroots.org, or join the conversation in our Volunteer Chat. Sometime in the coming months there will be further updates regarding tribes* and what they can become in the future, so stay tuned for that!

How is Trustroots different from Couchsurfing?

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 17:25:19 +0200

The elephant in the room

Couchsurfing, the largest hospitality exchange network has announced on the 14th of May, that they will be requiring many of their users to pay a monthly subscription. Since Trustroots is also enabling hospitality exchange, this is very relevant to us.

While Couchsurfing hasn’t claimed to be a charity or a non-profit since 2011, this move has angered many members of the community. When Couchsurfing turned into a for-profit, there were claims that it would also remain free. So the questions that are being asked about Couchsurfing are also relevant to other networks.

Covered in covids

Sun, 17 May 2020 15:51:46 +0200

Dear friend,

you are looking at the first letter from the Trustroots community to itself. I hope it finds you in good health during this time of plague and forced sedentariness.

This letter, and the ones that will hopefully follow every two or three months, is about stories. I want to tell you of some pretty incredible adventures that some of us in the family have gone through, and you know we’re an adventurous bunch. Hey, maybe your story needs to be told too. And it will if you allow it.

Spring Hackweek

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 16:26:19 +0200

With a pandemic rolling over Europe and borders being closed, it might not be the time for traveling right now. But we think it’s a good time for working on a traveler’s network and pushing it to the next level.

So, we didn’t cancel our hackweek that we were looking forward to. Instead, we’re doing it online. While a lot of people are currently struggling with the challenges of remote collaboration, we’re already used to it.

Trustroots in 2020

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 09:23:34 +0100

We are starting the new year with a lot of ideas and full of motivation to better the service that we can provide to you. We are a few volunteers that work on Trustroots and we are working hard.

We are not and will never ask you for payment or in any way capitalize on the data that you provide. You can although help us with a special contribution: A few moments of your time! We would like to help us with a short contribution so that we can continue to provide a useful and pleasant service. Also, we want to open the gap between the users and the volunteers on Trustroots for more inclusion of user opinions and knowledge.

Barcelona Hacking Collective

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:42:02 +0100

Last year winter we organized an Iberian Collective in the south of Spain to activate volunteers and boost the development of Trustroots. We realized that meeting physically and saving some dates is the best way for us (the volunteers behind the social network) to focus and dedicate time to the Trustroots project.

For this reason, we are calling for another collective, a physical meetup of Trustroots volunteers, developers, supporters and anyone with the will to help. The purposes are similar as last year: work on the codebase passionately, think on new features, meet and get together in person, welcome new volunteers and make strategic decisions. And, of course, we will organize some fun activities too!

Meta Wiki Developers

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 10:33:24 +0100

mrkvon and banan arrived here a while ago and have been excellent at getting me deeper into the code base. This led to some cosmetic changes on the site, including edit buttons on some static pages such as the guide.

Related to that, we now have a wiki: wiki.trustroots.org - it’s actually not new, we simply hijacked Couchwiki, which is a wiki I was running since 2009 (when couchsurfing decided to take down the CouchSurfing Wiki - it took a couple more years to pull the final trigger).

What's brewing at the Collective?

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 12:51:59 +0200

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!

Tech boost

It’s really nice to see this much geekery from 10 different people in just one week

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.

Iberian Collective

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 10:58:56 +0200

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.

Meeting people now on Trustroots

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 22:41:06 +0200

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.

Introducing the Trustroots shop

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 12:51:01 +0200

We have just launched a shop for Trustroots t-shirts and apparel — something our members have been asking for a while now.

We want a world that encourages trust, adventure and intercultural connections. This is another way to show you are part of Trustroots family and promote that the willingness to help each other is universal, where ever we go.

About designs

Currently there are just some basic designs available. We will be adding more little by little. If you have a great design or sketch, feel free to send us your designs so we could increase the variety!

Trustroots goes invitation only

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 17:56:42 +0100

From today, new members can only join Trustroots by invitation.

Why?

Trustroots is growing, we’ve just passed 25'000 members. We recently issued our first member ban. Until now Trustroots has been focused around the hitchhiking community. As we grow, we want to manage the transition to a wider audience carefully.

Right now we simply don’t have the features to support a diverse audience of people with differing values. We want to build on the tribes* feature, and add a whole lot more to help with this. But, for now, we feel that it’s better to keep our growth more focused.

Applying Trustroots values

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 19:02:30 +0100

This is the Trustroots vision statement:

“A world that encourages trust and adventure.”

These are a couple of the

rules on trustroots.org

Be friendly and know when to stop messaging someone.
Be yourself, helpful, kind, responsible and respectful of others.

Behaviour that is not respectful, is rude, aggressive, or discriminatory, does not belong on Trustroots.

First member ban

To that end, Trustroots banned a member today for the first time. The decision wasn’t taken lightly, but it was taken quickly. We received a report, discussed with both members involved, and ultimately felt that one member was clearly behaving outwith the Trustroots spirit.

Hitchwiki + Trustroots Install Party

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 17:42:34 +0200

Geeks!

We’re in Berlin hacking on both

Hitchwiki.org

and Trustroots.org codebases.

If you’d like to see how to get these projects running locally on your computer and volunteer working on them, come over and we’ll show you exactly how!

Useful knowledge for Hitchwiki:

PHP
Javascript
MediaWiki

Useful knowledge for Trustroots:

Javascript
NodeJS
AngularJS
MongoDB
ExpressJS
ElasticSearch

You could also be interested in starting to write a native mobile app either for Trustroots or Hitchwiki.

Introducing Trustroots Tribes*

Mon, 09 May 2016 18:06:36 +0200

Today we’re introducing Trustroots Tribes*. A Tribe* is a group of people on Trustroots with similar interests.

How do you build a trust network that can scale up when it grows bigger? This question has occupied ourminds for a long time. This started long before we actually founded Trustroots, when working on and using similar networks. In the initial phase we focused on getting especially hitchhikers on board and making the site ideal for that. It was a straightforward way of getting initial traction. Today Trustroots is over 16 000 members strong. We chose this approach because we know a lot of hitchhikers and 2 of us have been heavily involved in building up Hitchwiki.

Message thread feedback

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 16:39:14 +0100

New feature! You can now give private feedback about messages you receive.

We’re going towards “references type” features this spring. We will be collecting the data, do testing and figure out how to guide people towards better messages and full profiles. Things are likely to change along the way while we figure this out as more data comes in.

Now,

go give feedback

Trustroots is now 10 000 members strong!

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:47:23 +0200

Dear Worldwide Trustroots Community,

We made it to

10.000

members in eight months! Congratulations to all of you wonderful people!

Trustroots is an open, transparent, friendly and international Community. In this short time TR has welcomed members from many walks of life. Some were already users of hospitality networks, while others are completely new to this world.

Without your hospitality, your travels, your feedback, your patience with limited features and your willingness to help one another and spread

Trustroots Picnic Berlin

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 21:56:05 +0200

As we

wrote before

, we’re all team here in

Berlin

now working on Trustroots. Let’s have a cozy day together with the community at the lake this Tuesday (11.8.2015)!

Picnic around north-eastern end of Krumme Lanke (

map

Time: ~3pm onwards.

If you’re interested in

volunteering;

coding, translations, support etc we can have sessions about it later this week. We’ll be around for a while.

Event on Facebook

First Trustroots collective: Berlin 2015

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 12:33:17 +0200

From the 7th of August and onwards the Trustroots team is gathering in

Berlin

for the

first Trustroots collective

. We launched the website last December and we are very happy with the current situation. We now have an official non profit Trustroots Foundation

registered

in the UK. Almost

9000 members

strong, with a lot of activity all over the world. Mainly in Europe and mainly in Berlin, exactly as we had expected. Now it’s time for the next phase. And it’s time the 5

The Invisible Key (& 2)

Tue, 05 May 2015 09:42:36 +0200

Is that a river?

I asked out loud while contemplating the beautiful shore of an small river, but big enough to swim. And no easy to find if you didn’t know the area. Picture perfect.

Yeah, we are so lucky that runs along side this part of the property

Rachel, our good hearted host said while smiling -

It’s perfect for the summer!

And it was summer, early July, and although the running water at the house was not working properly (luckily!), we had the best bath ever.

Trustroots community is now 5000 members strong

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 08:08:17 +0200

Thank you! Thanks for the photo goes to Wesley Stanford. Check his photos, they’re great!

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article (in German)

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 11:48:44 +0200

A couple of weeks ago Mikael, Callum and I were interviewed by Marlene Göring. She was writing an article about hospitality exchange for a renowned German newspaper.

Here’s the article, it’s in German:

Sofa So Good - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

(posted here by author’s request). And a big chunk of it is about Trustroots! It mostly looks pretty great. I just want to comment about this part:

We're now testing with Browserstack

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 12:05:29 +0200

Test driven development

is great. Before you create new features or fix a bug you first write a test case that covers the specific issue. In the long run this means that you’re avoiding unforeseen side effects and that the entire code base is a lot more stable.

Selenium

testing is great in that you’re testing your web project in an actual browser. It’s a pain to run 38 different browsers on 7 different platforms though. Fortunately there’s a service that can handle that for you:

Announcing the Trustroots Foundation

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:11:02 +0100

Exciting times! It’s time to give a little update about our legal status. From a legal point of view Trustroots has been a hobby project so far, but we obviously need a non-profit legal base for our project.

We now have the

Trustroots Foundation

We just set up a

Limited by Guarantee

(LBG) in the United Kingdom under section 60 exemption with by-laws that allow us to easily add the so called

It's not Trustroutes

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:33:34 +0100

This is a tiny post to help people who are trying to find us under other words.

It’s not

Trustroutes.

But if you’re googling this name we want you to find us nevertheless. Same for

trust routes

trustroute

and

trust route

. It’s quite a nice name as well, especially when it comes to hitchhiking. But we somehow chose Trustroots, probably because we don’t want the network to be exclusively for hitchhikers in the long run.

The Invisible Key (1)

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 21:51:30 +0100

I was very lucky in 2007, someone called me and offered a spacious flat in the center of the city. Two months after I moved in, I already had all the dinners I could have with my old time friends, but still felt it’d be cool to share it with more people, besides, I used to have lots of free time back then. A good friend talked to me about hospitality networks like CouchSurfing or Hospitality Club. Had my doubts, but gave it a try and decided to start hosting. Little I knew how that small internet move would change my life forever.

How we "use" Facebook

Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:04:10 +0100

Photo by

mkhmktg (Creative Commons).

It seems there is a misunderstanding about how we’re using Facebook. I’m getting some signals that some people don’t want to sign up “because of Facebook”. Let me clarify three things about what we do with Facebook.

There is no and there never will be any obligation to have a Facebook account to use Trustroots.
It’s not possible to sign up with Facebook, it’s merely possible to link your Trustroots account to Facebook. More than half of current users have done so.
If a user has linked their Facebook account with us we’ll use their profile picture if the user hasn’t set a Gravatar image. This is using the Facebook Social Graph and if you don’t want FB to receive any data from you you should set up e.g. Ghostery. Or help with this issue.

Then there are some ideas that we’ll work out at some point:

Life outside the Big Blue Box

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 11:27:33 +0100

Photo by mkhmktg (Creative Commons)

It’s not that everyone needs to stop using Facebook but those who actually communicate with friends, participate in communities and organise real life meetings really should start using something else as well. The rest could spend less time looking at stream of pictures and random blurbs, but for that Facebook is really ideal. Just like television.

As I’ve already written before:

Taking roots

Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:15:46 +0100

Montreal CS Collective logo by

amylin

. Couch turned gray later on.

I’m writing down my own opinions, ideas and experiences, these are not necessarily shared by other team members

The roots of this website have been growing for a long time. Back in 2005 I wrote an article about how hospitality exchange websites should be based on free software and free from censorship. In August 2006 I joined the Couchsurfing Collective in Montreal. For a couple of months I traveled to amazing places with fun people while feeling the excitement of potentially changing the world in a big time, reaching a 100.000 people ready to share their homes to strangers, while working with some amazingly smart people.

Introducing Trustroots

Tue, 23 Dec 2014 15:39:02 +0100

Yay! Trustroots.org is now out of the first testing/bugfixing round. It’s time to join us and spread the word!

This post was originally published at Mikael’s blog.

Me and other hospex activists are creating a new volunteer based gift/free-economy project. While hosting will be at the core of

Trustroots

, it’s not limited to it.

Hitchwiki Hosts

This project started from an idea to create “Hitchwiki Hosts”. We were frustrated with CouchSurfing and later with BeWelcome not really moving forward, and thus we decided to act.

It's genuinely nice to be nice

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 16:38:26 +0200

Way back when, in the dim and distant past, when smartphones were still only a dream…

CouchSurfing crashed, Casey wrote the famous “so long folks” letter. The community rose up and said we want this to continue. We value our gift economy, we want to keep this journey going. It started in Montreal, then continued in Nelson. There was a sense of possibility in the air. The sky was the limit. Here we were, a community of maybe 100k people dedicated to free exchange.