[peterburkimsher]

BeWelcome.org is trying hard to get that "critical mass". I won't explain the whole history of CouchSurfing demanding membership fees and locking people out of accounts, because I don't want to complain. The focus within the community is about volunteering and building a new future together. It's primarily about letting people stay in each others' houses for free, yet there's more to the community that just hosting and being a guest.

It's a very international group, with real-life weekly meetups in several cities. The management structure is like Wikipedia/Wikimedia. The website itself needs a lot of work though.

If BeWelcome gets the network effect it needs, I'm very hopeful that BeVolunteer could start more projects. (BeBook? BeMail? BeChat?)

[sixhobbits]

It says its open source, but the only link to this in the faq says you should "get access" to the source via some developers circle(?) which goes to an apache "it works" page

[peterburkimsher]

Sorry that the link is wrong! This is the Github project:

https://github.com/BeWelcome/rox

There's no closed "developer's circle", it's an open group that anyone can join - I just made an account about a month ago.