Is it a good idea to have a place at couchers.org to promote your own country?
There may be travellers who are looking for new experiences and could get some ideas.
Others may be flexible enough to journey to somewhere they wouldn’t have gone unless they read about it here.
For example, the Canary Islands is somewhere I know nothing about it and have never met anyone who’s been there.
Apart from having ‘the best climate in the world’, the Canary Islands have some amazing hikes and places to visit and if it wasn’t for Nolo I would never have known.
1 Like
Yeah, I can totally see that as a great idea! Personally, I’d even find it more intriguing than more “objective” pages and information about places. Members could write a personal account or presentation and that could be shared in various ways. Linked from your profile, presented on a map, in a general forum category, or even shared in a blog/newsletter.
I generally think it’s a great idea to offer a variety of opportunities for members that don’t want to work as volunteers or be especially active in a local community - or in addition to that - to just share or collaborate with others in an easy way. Be it a presentation like that or a travel story or simply a self-made Couchers postcard, we can have a space for sharing and collaborating on the forum and be open about how to integrate it with the app. I already shared my thoughts on setting up part of the forum for this in What are our goals with the forum?
So I guess we could lay this out with a new category and then flesh it out more as we go?
1 Like
I’ll be honest, most of the travel information I go to is WikiTravel or TripAdvisor and since that’s already a pretty well-established and collaborative place that is basically open to all, investment into something similar seems redundant. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, however I do see a great benefit of sharing experiences.
Having said that, if it’s not something integrated specifically with trips (post trip), the only type of thing that I can think of is a blog or simple entry of recommendations like they had other sites. I only focused on where I live, and wasn’t very motivated to go back to all the other places I’ve been. For me, writing a blog is enough of my commitment.
4 Likes
so this was a rather old post but i found the idea very nice 
Maybe this is something the local communities could offer? Like a sort of extra page where people can exchange some experiences and recommendations like hikes or restaurants, etc. or maybe even useful links?
Of course we dont have to “reinvent the wheel” - but it would make things easier for travellers and maybe even help to build communities?
3 Likes
Yes this is something really important going forward. How can we get people to share useful information and make it accessible? And how can we get that to genuinely add to community building?
There’s been a few discussions about what this can look like:
The way we’re planning it is that users will be able to make their own pages that they can post to a community (or more than one if relevant). There’s going to be three types of pages which will show up for a local community:
- the community’s “main” page, that’s what you see when you go to the info tab e.g. the page for Istanbul. These are maintained by the local moderators
- Places: these are points of interest that will show up on the map. Any user can submit a Place page. Maybe you want to write about a specific landmark or restaurant that would be interesting to surfers
- Guides: these are any other sort of page that a user wants to make: e.g. “Itsi’s guide to the best hikes around Sydney” or favourite places to eat etc.
To add to the community building aspect, each one of these pages is going to have a discussion thread attached to it that anyone can comment on if they think other people should add information or anything else.
This is probably a little while out, we’re still focusing on the core mechanics of the platform, but this will be one of the highest priorities after we get things out like events and moderation/safety features.
4 Likes