How to organize a camp

Organizing a meeting or camp for hospitality exchange people is not too difficult, but some things should be taken care of.

Types
There are different types of camps/meetings. Depending on the time you have and the amount of people.


 * Regular Meeting / One day
 * The best ones are the spontaneous ones when you have a guest over, just SMS to several people in your town if they would like to meet up the same evening..
 * Camp / Several days
 * Camp -Style Several (organized) activities
 * Look for a big place to where people can camp & be


 * 'Home'-Style
 * People from your town take several guests
 * Central meeting place
 * Several (organized) activities

Structure
There are different Types of meetings. Interesting is to split those ones up and think about different structure they could have.
 * 'Party'-Style
 * 'Workshop'-Style
 * 'Lectures'
 * 'Open Space Technology'

Preparation
Before you announce, pick a good date. Make sure people will be able to come, e.g. choose a date during holidays. Once the date is chosen some travellers might have planned to change their itinerary, or even booked flights, so it's definitely not a good idea to change the date later on.

Also find some people close to you to work on the camp together.

Activities
When you organize meetings/camps over several days with a large number of participants is it excellent when you organize different activities where people can participate in. The normally big party crowd gets split up. Throughout different activities and interaction in smaller groups people will to get to know each other easier.


 * Workshops
 * Citytours
 * Games

Jigsaw Set Ups are especially recommendable and to aspire.

Announcements

 * announce your meeting on many sites
 * the Hospitality Club forum
 * the CouchSurfing meet functionality
 * to make your life easier you can have your message sent to all members of a specific group
 * you can use the space on this wiki
 * contact some, or all, active members in the region where you organize your meeting
 * try to contact some active members in other regions, such as other people who are organizing large meetings, this way people who attend that meeting can be informed about your meeting

Budget

 * try to make sure it won´t be too expensive
 * many people will come on a very low budget

Camping

 * when there is outside camping involved
 * try to arrange some spare tents or a place inside where people can sleep, not everyone brings his or her own tent

For a big camp you can set up a seperate website, where people (independent from the networks), can register.