@Diederik: Can you explain why you disagree?

Err, I guess that my English isn’t that good . I mean that I fully agree with both of you. Iets met ik kan het niet meer met jullie eens zijn

@Doogy: Forget you/we, us/them. Instead, let’s phrase it like this:

The public can see how much money is spent on specific book keeping numbers. Recently the public has been getting a little bit more insight in what CouchSurfing is working on. The public is probably with this increased transparency, but on other parts there is still quite a lack of information: what is the status of the members of the Board (who are not eligible to receive a salary according to NH non-profit law) and what is the progress with relation to the 501c3 status?

You know exactly what we spend and what we are working on. What more do you want? You want to know how much time I spend in the shower today? What food we got yesterday? How much time I lost with reading the ocs website?

The database problems are old old old. It has always been under strain, because of bad algorithm and table design, bad migration choices and complete inexperience with DB redundancy. It could have been addressed properly years (no, really, years) ago, if only Casey wasn’t too proud to let real professionals correct “his design”.

CS *is* essentially the site and “CS management” simply fails to take good enough care of it to keep it running consistently.

Of course it makes sense to pay your buddies and give them titles like “volunteer coordinator” or “general manager” just to keep the CouchSurfing community from self-organizing.

$4,000 per month per sysadmin
Wonder where they pay this dough

SYSADMINS DON’T GET PAYED… And regarding the downtimes, AFAIK the database can’t handle the concurrent connections, but since I am no longer involved in the sysadmin-team, I don’t know all the gory details…

Where no one needs to ask stupid questions when all the answers could just be communicated to everyone easily.

What is the big secret to hide all the info? something or nothing.

If there is nothing more to hide then why do people have to work really hard to find answers ?

$4,000 per month per sysadmin
Wonder where they pay this dough

What is your ultimate goal? If you are really smart, you would have checked where the servers are now.

Yes, there is a server-park, and while my opinion is that the servers are quite expensive, they do work. You can get them more cheaply, but currently CS-Techteam might not implement such big changes.

And no, the sysadmins aren’t payed. I’ve been offered a job as sysadmin, but refused because of the salary (that isn’t $4000 but $1000, not enough to pay the bills).

I would estimate this to be handled by a bare minimum of 5 people in shifts and rotations. If you set an average salary of $4,000 per month per sysadmin, you could be looking at $20,000 a month, or $240,000 per year.

If you stack on top of this the cost of redundant fiber optic connections to internet backbones, AC cooling, security, rent, and the purchasing of the servers themselves; it becomes easier to see why hosting with a 3rd party is a much more affordable solution for CS.

walter heck adds

In addition to this, I can tell you that CS is not a website that runs on two or three servers. At the moment we have around 25 servers running our whole server park. 5600/25 is not that much for colocated hosting

server park humm. Maybe we need to map all the server again. Find out where they are located and how much each of the service providers charge. So 5 has gone up to 25 wow .

What are they doing?
Planning a BIG PARTY for what exactly?
The website anniversary? Couchsurfing day
What about a good Friday for the day of the crash?
Day of sadness for the day couchsurfing was no more and the shunyatra letter.

OCS asks more questions than ALL the 1000+ Ambassadors
Doesn’t that say something?
Doesn’t that show how they were selected?

I mean if the UN managers are not really helping the world . Would the ambassadors of different countries speak up?

constructive criticism about the Thailand report
Humm how many people had to hassle Mandie to really get all the slacker to say what they had done?
What did the report show?

Maybe if people stopped cooking the books OR if they are not cooking the books maybe really explain how the server cost is so high.

It would set the bar higher than petty questions and more constructive criticism.

examples

NO COMMUNICATION IN THE LAST 7 DAYS by MANDIE M
What were you guys doing?

When was the LAST TIME casey posted on the site?

When was the LAST TIME mattthew the GENERAL MANAGER updated his blog?

What do you expect walter?

There is never any communication.

You are the FIRST COLLECTIVE MEMBER TO REALLY COMMUNICATE ON OCS.

Maybe there would be constructive criticism if we find you really can get things done .

let me do the math for you: 10.000 / 30 (days) / 3,5 (months) / 20 (people)

Let us see the other math

how many people have to contribute to the cs cause to gain FREE food for 20 SLACKERS.

10,000/25$ = 400 members had to contribute 25 $ to get free food to 20 Slackers !! Who were selected by casey to USE up all the money (NOT TO MAKE CS BETTER)

@pickard: omg 10,000 $ dollars in thailand on food!!
let me do the math for you: 10.000 / 30 (days) / 3,5 (months) / 20 (people) = 4.8 dollars per person per day. Thats seems verrrry cheap.
one day includes breakfast lunch dinner
Now that I see the numbers I’m actually not surprised I was complaining about the food :p

I hope you are ok with the fact we get some good food and something to drink for volunteering 10h a day / 6 days a week.

If you dont have it then you are just talking for the sake of talking.

What counts is figures.
10,000 $ dollars in thailand on food!!

8330 • Meals/ Groceries expenses (990 line 40)
This is the cost of all expenses spent on food while at a collective or staff meeting
8330 • Meals/ Groceries 10,895.37

How much of this was alcohol and other 420 friendly goodies?

2008
Moved to Emergency Fund (see notes)
10,000.00
2007
Moved to Emergency Fund (see notes)
50,000.00

Notice the decrease in the surplus.

Can some one make a wiki page of the finances never know when they ma y decided to hide it .
There are SO MANY slackers and moochers at the collective shnorrer ,freeloaders like the DJ cam .I don’t blame them Free tickets ,Free Food,Free ALCOHOL Bucket what more do you need?