After months of intense work and heated discussions we have started to invite the first few selected friends and supporters to a pre-launch of betterplace.org - to check out the site, give us detailed feedback and leave their mark: post their own projects or enter their profiles as one of the first betterplace users. There is so much already there, but for us, who know what’s in the pipeline and what exciting features will appear on the site over the next few days and weeks before the official launch, it may well seem as if this is, as Moritz pointed out, a “soft-pre-launch”.
For me, a most enriching experience during the past weeks has been the close collaboration with those people who were the first to post their projects on betterplace. As we had to enter the descriptions manually ourselves (note: now they can be posted directly on the site), we got to know each one of them quite well. My initial reaction when I read through the emails with the project descriptions and looked at all the great photos is a dangerous one: I want to support them all! (Maybe I should be glad that the donate button isn’t there yet!) I hope this excitement will come through to everybody on the site. At the latest it will happen once you start engaging directly with a project and the people behind it.