- you will always have mediocre workers and leaders attempt to make themselves irreplaceable. it is rather proven though that anyone can be replaced, there is no indespensible worker. i have no doubt that casey as ceo could be replaced and someone with an average ability in management and development would already outperform casey within a month.

casey not even has to go, he must go. it is pivotal in a social networking project to have a sound and accepted leadership. heck, if you take facebook, their ceo, mind you he made it to billionaire in under 3 years and apparently knows business, still goes on and blogs and communicates with the clusterfuck of facebook community whenever there is an issue, showing humility and engaging in debate about controversial issues.
if a commercial project can do it, why cant cs, claiming to be all about the community and happyness? the answer is simple: leaders unfit for command can not engage in critical discourse with the memberbase, since their lack of arguments combined with lack of self esteem and self confidence gives them a rather humble position to start with, so they avoid it.

What i do not like about casey
He keeps hiding behind his circle of cronies/attack dogs. Donia,rachel,jim stone,ttt(mattthew).And the second rung cronies mikky mouth,promi.
He never answers post’s he started (kinda like a newbie).This is very insulting .
He lets his PR team lie . (fixing the server in candle light).
He is too american in his attitude (not the global free spirit) ( scared of thai locals)(cannot related to other locals from other countries)(burning man orgies)

Although I admire your generous spirit, and your openness to reconciliation with Casey, I feel differently about the points you raised.

1. CS is indeed highly dependent on Casey, but I believe that is by Casey’s own design, deliberately trying making himself indispensable to ensure his dominance. The fact that as a consequence CS is highly vulnerable to his potential departure (as was demonstrated by the crash of 2006) is of secondary importance to him.

Nevertheless, I feel that there are so many highly skilled and generous members who could and would step in and take over the technical management of CS, if Casey did not take the code with him (as he did before), that after a transition period the site would become stable and less vulnerable than under Casey’s dominance.

2. It is true that Casey has avoided appointing anyone who could replace him technically from being on the LT or BOD. Really the same point as #1.

3. However one may feel about Casey as a person, in my book he’s not a straight shooter. That’s nothing unusual in the corporate world,
but I can’t support him as a “visionary leader” of an organization devoted to inter-cultural understanding. Personally, after my experiences with Casey and his appointed elite, I no longer trusted them with my private data, and so left his website.

Having made these points, I don’t necessarily disagree with the title of your post, nor do I oppose anyone who either makes use of the CS website or supports its success.

I recently read about a guy who started a dating website. He developed and runs the operation entirely by himself, and pulls in more than $1,000 per day in revenues. A great success story, and the guy who did it deserves all the credit and reward. Casey could easily have accomplished something similar with CS, and few would have begrudged him his success, certainly not me. But for whatever reasons, he tried to do two inconsistent things: promote CS as a community-centered charitable project, and also a vehicle for his own personal ambitions.

If CS had always been “The Casey Fenton Show” up-front, people could have chosen to be involved or not on that basis. Now that there’s no doubt that CS is “The Casey Fenton Show”, then of course, “Casey needs to stay”.