hospitality exchange

Amsterdam - Hamburg - Stockholm

We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so. It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien's front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck.

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bewelcome

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Cinemstardam I - L'attaque des MacSaber Paranos

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First week in Amsterdam

In the beginning of November Robin asked me if I'd somehow be interested in renting a place in Amsterdam. I had been thinking of moving to Amsterdam after Trento, but I considered his question a bit preposterous. Fortunately he rented the place himself and now we're room mates! During my years abroad I sometimes considered Amsterdam the only place left to live in the Netherlands. Going around here on foot and by bike I learn to appreciate my own country again. The bikes are amazing, transport is so efficient (if you don't go by car).

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Working for Hyves in Amsterdam

Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I've been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member.

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Citizen Logistics

Together, Joe Edelman and I were the dynamic duo of the CouchSurfing Collective in New Zealand. Joe came with fantastic ideas, that were unfortunately not realized in Nelson. Fortunately he also improved the infrastructure of CS in such a profound way that his work there is probably the main reason that the website is still up.

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The Wiki Party - closer to reality

Last year I did a BoF at Wikimania 2006 about The Wiki Party, the idea to start a political party. Today Anu sent me a link to a Facebook group with this same title. I jokingly told people "when I'm 40 years old I will start this party if no one else did before then". Fortunately I won't have to, anymore. Of course, it's happenning in Finland. Olli Sirén was considering to run a campaign to the Helsinki City Council.

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It's good to have local friends!

Thanks to Fabrizia, who put an ad in a local weekly, I have a new place. She and Davide have been very helpful.Unfortunately amylin hasn't come back from New York yet, but that gives me the opportunity to make our place look good. There's a garden, roses, a garden table, a bath tub and a lot of beds! I think the 72 year old landlady used to rent it to 4 students.

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Civil engagement on social networks

Looking for some candidate blogs to add to Planet Hospitality I stumbled upon Spurring civic engagement on Facebook, Myspace and SixDegrees.org.

For the moment, while Facebook’s Causes and Myspace’s Impact seem a welcome change in allowing some use of these networks for more civic purposes, it seems as though they’ve hobbled their tools enough and created a weak-enough attachment that we’re skeptical that a

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Planet Hospitality

A Planet is a website that aggregates a lot of other blogs. Tonight I set up Planet Hospitality. This specific planet should obviously mostly be about hospitality exchange. Posts can be philosophical, personal, political, scientific, or just funny. Check the Crash at Mine Wiki if you want your blog to be aggregated on Planet as well.

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Montreal, Boston, NYC, Dublin, Treviso, Verona, Trento

We left Morgan a bit later than planned. I really didn't sleep well with the prospect of waking up at 5AM. We started of taking a bus out of Montreal, at 9:16. Hitching in Quebec is easy. We had a couple of short rides, and then a ride down to Burlington, a college town in Vermont (in the US, the State of Cheese). Like most college towns, it was easy to hitch out of there. But then we were in a shitty spot.

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