In this Fairbnb.coop Monthly Digest #4 we are very excited to share with you all the reports of our teams and a preview of the new look of our online interface: the main website, the community minisite and the Local Node pages, with all the information about the social projects that we support.

May was a month full of improvements for our new platform and the whole coop ecosystem. Read the reports of our areas to find out what happened both at a Local Nodes and at a European level, and continue to follow us so as not to miss the upcoming events, such as the next Fair Talk on community-based cooperatives.

We are also undergoing some changes from the organizational point of view, that will help us to be ready for future challenges. Among these, the need to ensure data protection and the desire to develop an open-source new platform: the European Ledger project we won goes precisely in this direction.

In Europe, thanks to the growing diffusion of vaccines, tourism could resume as early as summer 2021, in conditions of safety for both travelers and local residents. The travel certificate could be the key to re-open Europe: in this month’s articles, we explain what it is and how to get it. Taking all up-to-date data into consideration, we have chosen the safest destinations in Portugal, Spain and Italy, with an insight into the Italian Riviera and its beauties. Find out more by reading our Content Digest.

Enjoy your read, let us know your thoughts and thank you for your support.

The Fairbnb.coop Team

Every month we publish the latest news from our organizational areas. Let us remind you that all our managers are available for questions, so if you need some details or if you want to discuss some opportunities with them please don’t hold back: mail to info@fairbnb.coop.

Product: the new platform – Lead : Emanuele Dal Carlo / Jan De Bock

Last time we promised you to deliver the new booking engine in May. We are a few days later, but it is coming very close to go-live, with a substantial amount of new features for hosts and guests alike, as already explained in our previous Digest #3.

In the meantime, we are very excited to share with you the new platform user interface and pages created – in collaboration with the team of our tech partners of Studio ITC – on our main website and the minisite dedicated to the activities of our community.

As you can see is a massive revamping of all our visual identity and a lot more content that gives a new look for our online presence: have fun browsing and giving your much-appreciated feedback.

• Main website: https://fairbnb.coop
• Community: https://community.fairbnb.coop

Both websites are only available in English for now, we are going to add more and more languages in the next few days as soon as our laborious Local Ambassadors and collaborators will produce the translations.

As this new platform is an important milestone for Fairbnb.coop, we will spend a lot of attention on communication. If you are an active host, a host waiting to become active, an interested host, or a guest who subscribed already once to our platform: you will all receive a personalized mail with information on the new platform and some hints and tips.

Latest news from Community – Lead: Domenico Di Siena

New Community and local node pages

The new page dedicated to our Community is a significant step to give more visibility to one of the differentiating features of our platform, namely our Community Powered Tourism. With the new platform, we have a map where our Local Nodes are visible, with their communities, ambassadors, and funded projects. These Nodes, regardless of whether they are already active, have their own specific web page as soon as they have an ambassador who handles their activation.

At the moment we already have Local Nodes, and so the websites, of: Porto, Serra de São Mamede, Malaga, Granada, Valencia, Barcelona, Girona-Empordà, Marseille, Lyon, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Geneva, Bologna, Venice, Rome, Pisa, Cuneo, Genoa, Western Italian Riviera and Eastern Italian Riviera.

Digital Meetups

In May we re-activated our Digital Meetup program, the first one has been organized thanks to the enthusiasm of Sabrina Scacchetti, our Local Ambassador in the province of Pisa. The Pisa Digital Meetup was a great opportunity to bring together the different local actors around our project. We got to know the local projects that will be financed, and they are very impactful. The idea is to continue with new Digital Meetups in other cities throughout the summer.

Fairbnb.coop selected for Tourism accelerator in Paris

We are very excited to finally announce that Fairbnb.coop has been selected as one of the projects that will participate in the acceleration program of the City of Paris, the Welcome City Lab, especially focused on companies in the tourism sector.

Our ambassadors in Paris from the Volumes agency, together with the Oiseaux de Passage cooperative, will take advantage of this program to work on the creation of a national entity that can speed up the development of Fairbnb.coop in France. This selection also demonstrates the sensitivity of the City of Paris to move forward sustainable tourism, with actions very much in line with our approaches.

Fairbnb.coop Ecosystem – Lead : Jonathan Reyes

Fair Talks – From Feminist Imaginings to Community-based Cooperatives

Last month we had the pleasure to be with Chenai Chair at our Fair Talk, discussing how to build a more inclusive digital future by including the Feminist Approach in the design of our platforms. We really invite you to watch this Fair Talk and don’t miss the next one!

The upcoming Fair Talk will have Isabella Ippolito as the main speaker: starting from the experience of the community-based cooperatives in Liguria, Italy, Isabella explores how this model can be a useful mutual aid tool for local sustainable development and circular economy. Save the date and find out what opportunities this model offers, in small towns as well as in big cities. 

Futurecoop – Shaping together a better future for more inclusive digital platforms

At Fairbnb.coop we are reflecting on how to evolve our workers’ cooperative and how to adapt to the challenges of the digital era. This means building a multinational new platform cooperative where hosts, travelers, local projects, and partners co-own the platform and have a voice in its internal democracy.

Not an easy goal… we hope you will take this journey with us! Join our FutureCoop social group to contribute.

Over the next weeks, Fairbnb.coop’s first Future Coop BETA engagement campaign will develop around six topics that we identified as crucial. We are looking to collect ideas, comments, references, and whatever feedback and contributions you would like to share with us. You can see the title of each topic and the dates in the image below.

Our voice at European Social Economy Summit Mannheim 2021

We have been invited to the session “Platform cooperatives and their fundamental role in the context of recovery” where we had the pleasure to discuss with La Coop des Communs, Mobicoop, Urbikeand Open Food Newtork, and many other people about the role of our coop platforms to ensure good working conditions for platform workers, as well as solutions to ensure that platforms are a tool to ensure local resilience and circular economy.

This discussion happened in the framework of the Manifesto “Towards a people and planet-oriented digital transition in Europe” we signed with Co-communs and many other platforms to stand for different values and practices for a fairer digital future.

PLUS – Working on a Chart of Digital Workers Rights

At the beginning of May, we had a Co-creation session to discuss with our workers and Local Partners how to create tools for the construction and experimentation of adequate protections for platform workers. This happened inside the framework of the European PLUS project where, as you may recall, Fairbnb.coop is participating as a pilot case.

The goal of the session was to work together on the co-design of new policies, tools, and solutions to keep improving the implementation of digital workers’ rights. We are working on a report to share the results of both the workshop and the previous research process we did.

Marketing – Lead : Emanuele Dal Carlo / Isabel Duregger

Venice Marathon
With Fairbnb.coop you can get a discount for the registrations for the BMW Jesolo Moonlight Halfmarathon & 10k, which celebrates this June 26th its 10th anniversary: Fairbnb.coop is the official partner of the Venice Marathon events. To get the discounts, you just have to enter these promotional codes during the registration process:

For the Moonlight Halfmarathon (10€ of discount):
code FAIRBNBMHM21K
For the Moonlight10K (5€ of discount):
code FAIRBNBMHM10K

Celebrate this important partnership with us by choosing the distance you prefer – 21K or 10K – and running in the moonlight, between the pine forest and the Jesolo sea, after a relaxing day of sun and sea! The fast and smooth racecourse is perfect for your personal best!

ETC – #OpenUpToEurope

We have signed the contract to be a strategic partner of the European Travel Commission #OpenUpToEurope campaign starting in June and lasting until the end of September. Besides targeting potential travelers for our new platform, this partnership puts us in contact as co-partners with some of the biggest travel companies such as the World Travel Tourism Council, Eurail, DB, Öbb, and several DMOs such as Tourism de Portugal, Visit Luxembourg, Polish Tourism, Slovenia, Kommunität Valencia and many more.

We are also the official sponsor of the online travel community Traxplorio during the month of June. It is a platform for authentic consumer-generated travel content that will help us to spread our awareness. Coincidentally, Traxplorio had the great opportunity to be on German television which boosted the traffic of their website – so it seems like Fairbnb.coop was there just at the right time!

Organize your holidays on Fairbnb.coop and share your Travel Experiences with the Traxplorio Community to earn some extra bucks for your next trip.

Summer Campaign

Thanks to the suggestions of Branka, Jim and Winnie during the workshops held in the Marketing Open Group (if you are interested in joining us please read the requirements and fill out this form) we are about to release a kick-ass summer campaign tailored mainly to Guests. In this way we will have a consistent brand promotion that will help us to promote our new platform throughout the summer.

To boost the summer campaign we are currently fine-tuning the Social Media promotion and brainstorming ideas. Stay tuned for the final result!

General Direction – Lead: Alessandro Rocchi

New members of Far Bnb Network cooperative and due diligence for investors

This month the financial team gave documents and replayed about the compliance for their Fairbnb investment. The due diligence requested by the investors is quite challenging: it is the procedure that is usually requested for the big companies where all the materials and the official documents of the company have to be discussed and checked.

A meeting with some workers has been held in order to explain how our cooperative works and which kind of memberships we have.

FairLab challenges: addressing coop Values, sustainability, and hosts criteria

During our weekly meeting, Adolfo presented us a general map based on the actual organization of Fairbnb.coop with the deepening on the development of a tool to assess our impact, as well as the translation of our values into concrete practices and operative guidelines of sustainability. The main goal now is to prepare a road map that is going to be part of the workshop for the all Fairbnb team meeting in July in Bologna, in order to promote our values and write a common manifesto of the cooperative.

Annex c and project application

During this month the legal team has been preparing two new documents. The first is the so-called “Annex C” which is the contract that every ambassador who has signed the partnership agreement should provide as an annex of the agreement. We prepared a template that can be useful to follow in order to find the most important aspects of the regulation about short/mid-term rentals in every local node. The second document is the project application to crowdfunding Fairbnb.coop. It is a simple agreement with the fundamental duties of the relationship between the cooperative and the social projects. Both documents have been presented to the community area and then to the Ambassadors’ call.

New platform and Local Nodes: Tuscany, Vienna, and Bologna

Step ahead in activating Tuscany with the ambassadors of Pisa and Florence who are working with us to reach an innovative agreement with the municipality of Florence based on our sustainability criteria. Final check and sign of the agreement. with our new partner in Vienna has raised interesting issues about hosts recruiting and new ways to face their sustainability. Meeting held with many no-profit entities of Bologna area to address the innovative project about helping homeless people. We have signed many agreements with potential new Local Ambassadors and Key-Partners throughout Europe.

Support for Ledger European Project and Data processing compliance
This month the team arranged documents and financial statements required for the Ledger, a European project that we won this month. FairLab is participating in the process to identify the implementation of blockchain for Fairbnb.coop. This is crucial also in addressing our challenge for open source.

We held meetings with our consultant and Studio ITC to address the privacy compliance of Fairbnb.coop in the light of the new platform. We paid attention to the cookies policy which will require an upgrade of our tools to fulfill the national authorities guidelines. With our future data protection officer, we prepared a new document with all the steps related to privacy that are going to be identified on the new platform.

Content Digest

As already announced in the Fairbnb.coop Digest #3, on our Social channels we are dedicating a series of contents to the new Fair destinations. After presenting in April the Cuneo province, in May we dedicated several blog posts to the natural beauties and to the projects we are supporting both in the Western and in the Eastern Italian Riviera. Find out how you can produce renewable energy by visiting Sarzana, or support accessible tourism by simply organizing a stay in the amazing Finale Ligure.

Italian Riviera: in Tellaro the hidden treasure of Liguria
The small village of Tellaro is an urban and architectural masterpiece suspended between the land of Lunigiana and the sea overlooking the Gulf of Poets, in the extreme Italian Riviera: it awaits you with its colorful houses shrouded in myths.

Covid-19 fit to travel certificate, key for holidays 2021
What is a travel certificate? When and where is it needed? How to get it? Which countries are in the “Green List”? Better to be informed about these issues, because soon we will be able to return to travel… Do you know enough?

Covid travel restrictions eased in the Europe: where will you go first?
Let’s pack our bags! After the long period of bans necessary to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, in many areas in Europe you can finally go back to the beach, to restaurants and to visit museums: choose where to organize your 2021 holidays!