---- Forwarded Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 1, 2013 8:40 PM
Subject: Warmshowers.org: Happy New Year 2013
Subject: Warmshowers.org: Happy New Year 2013
Happy New Year and greetings to all Warmshowers members!
Once again, thanks to all of your for your kind generosity to touring cyclists this year. And all of us who have stayed with you thank you as well.
- The first-ever full redesign of the site happened this year. We hired a designer, Josh Miller, who ended up putting in untold volunteer hours, and Josh, Chris Russo, and I spent untold hours building the new site. We like it! (If you still need to explore it, see this video.)
- Mark Martin and I did the day to day work of corresponding when members have questions, removing spam and spam accounts, and generally keeping the site running.
- Cyril Wendl translated the site to German and is now organizing other translations, including to Italian (thanks to Diana Grasso!). The rest of the translation team, Eduardo Green (Portuguese), David Peluso (Spanish), and Olivier Fourdrinoy (French) dealt with the major challenge of the redesign and the many things that had to be updated.
- Johannes Staffans created the Warmshowers Android App and Chris Meyer continues to enhance the iPhone/iPad app. (more info)
- Alex Rosenblatt and Russell Workman have begun to handle the very few knotty issues we have when there is a problem with a member or a conflict between members.
- I (Randy) was the webmaster and dealt with technical problems and helped with supporting our users.
- Thanks to the leadership council, we are making progress with improving the long-term governance and sustainability of the organization.
- But most of all, to all of you who so generously hosted members, THANK YOU.
As always it's time to remind you to please log in and check your registration information even though you know it hasn't changed. That tells the system you're still there, and gives you a chance to update everything.
As I write this our membership is around 28,000 (up 8,000 from last year this time), but each year we delete about 10% of our members who have not logged in for a year. Please don't let that be you! On January 5 we will delete about 4,000 members who haven't logged in.
We remind you in these annual notes that your financial support is always welcome. All of the registration and technical work and the work of keeping the site going is done by volunteers. Our hosting fees and related expenses run between US$100 and US$200/month, so that means we're spending about $1200 to $1800/year for hosting alone, and there are related expenses for monitoring and such. We received about US$3000 in donations this year and spent about US$2900. THANK YOU! If you would care to donate, please visit the donate page.
For those of you who would be interested in volunteering to help build the site through creating or maintaining translations, doing Drupal development, sitebuilding, we're always hoping for committed volunteers who can take on these roles, so let us know. We especially need a Spanish-speaking member to maintain the Spanish version of the site right now, as it has fallen behind. Current volunteer opportunities are listed on the Volunteers page.
Final notes... We've set up the Warmshowers Foundation, a US nonprofit corporation, to be the entity responsible for the site. We're trying to make sure that we are meeting our responsibilities as the site has grown so large. Nothing has changed about our noncommercial status - we're completely noncommercial and dependent on donations to operate. Also, we now have formal Terms of Use, which stress that members alone are responsible for their interactions with other members.
Again, thanks to all of you for your generosity to touring cyclists. If you have any questions at all, just reply to this email and we'll try to resolve them.
Thanks,
-Randy Fay and Mark MartinWarmshowers.org Administrators
-Randy Fay and Mark MartinWarmshowers.org Administrators
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