Why CouchSurfing is enabling QuantCast to measure visitors is an interesting question. No doubt this will spark lots of “theories”.

Personally, I think it’s interesting to note that the weekly reach of couchsurfing.com is circa 300k people, nothing like the 1m “members” that CS Inc claims (at best their are 1m profiles).

• * Caseysurfing.com – Easygoing consumerfriendly network run by a bunchfull of burning men buddies with no strategy for the future at all. As they eat up an amazing amount of donations and the market for virtual social networks collapses with the international cashflow a simple sellout isn’t an option anymore. When the fun is over, I won’t share the hangover.
• * Veitclub.org – The google-ad homebase of a single men gathering people who don’t mind censorship in communication. If the communication system is working at all. Estimated 2 years behind reality. Hard to signup for newbies and without technical improvements a living dead.
• * Senil.org – Surviving from the stoneage of postwar hospitality exchange still not yet at home in the digital age but muddling through anyway.
• * BeBehind.org – Some core volunteers still suffer from restrictive mindsets (courtesy of Veitclub.org), so progress in really opening up the network is small. Restrictions are still restrictions even if the code is GPL. The open source rebuilt of a common hospex-software is probably to slow to really suffer in the decline of big hospexnetworks, but may offer some software for other experiments (still a shitload of work).

Short but nevertheless also cynical theses for the future of hospex:

The hospitality exchange scene is and always was diverse. This won’t change, no, in the future the number of networks will probably rise and the importance of each one for the whole scene will shrink. I see two main future options / possibilities:

• * Hospex as a gadget/plugin in other (commercial) networks like f**kbook, MyShit, soon T-Couch, iHospex, MacSleep, Sleepbucks and others – nothing I’d really care for, but something that would definetly keep some idiots out of things I like. There’s nothing wrong with it, but please leave me alone.
• * Hospexnetworks with very specialized communities like gay boyscouts, polite gamblers, frustrated florists … A disadvantage of this kind of networks is the absence of bigger diffences within them, as there is always a common interest / category. So somehow it’s a bit limiting and cultural exchange simply fails with out differences. A solution could be megasearches between open parts of these networks, profile transfers and easy access. Besides smelling like violating privacy all over the place, it’s all theory right now.

And why this ranting?

I’ve spent and still spend some of my free time to volunteer for hospex networks, but from time to time it’s good to reconsider engagement. Right now it feels like being stucked between something halfdead, that is still working from an user-only point of view, and a luck of ideas/projects to improve/develop things.

So maybe it’s time to look for something useful to do in other areas?

http://www.bewelcome.info

The real background about this “democratic, transparent, legal” (sic) network.

The blog is on its way.
This is my second day at the Collective and
I have to admit that I dropped the ball on getting the blog set up before my arrival.

MANDIE M posts again on May 28th, 2008 – 1:52 am but makes no mention of the blog.

Walter Heck 28th, 2008 – 3:11 pm The blog is here: blog.couchsurfing.com

Taking a look at the blog shows the thread
Welcome to the Collective! May 25th, 2008

Now was this a intentional or was Mandie concealing the blog till she got an ‘official’ response from her boss ?

Mandie reminds me of Dana Perino the current White House Press Secretary for President George W. Bush [1]

Also reminds me of the White House Press policy

“No one charged with keeping the press and the public informed about the workings of the government should have to play such frustrating games,” McClellan writes.

But “it was clear,” he writes, that the president’s definition of necessary would “keep the press secretary on a pretty short leash.” This included being barred from key internal decision-making discussions,

“The more filtered information is, the less accurate it’s likely to be,” said Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution.

“The more typical press secretary spends a good deal of his or her time trying to find out what’s going on,” he said. “They’re up against a lot of people who are busy and who don’t really trust the press. … You’ve got to be pretty insistent.”

So you’re interested? Great! Initiative has taken place to start facilitating this process and to pull the first things together. A small group of active participants within the networks are securing a location in Amsterdam on behalf of SHE as we write and they invite you to help organising this event, scheduled for a weekend in June. Your input is essential and you are invited to constructively help facilitating it.

SHE wants to be a tool of knowledge about sustainable hospitality exchange mechanisms and networks. SHE also claims that “though this is not a party-event, we do aim to walk all naked in the park, to exchange local practices and to increase trust.” All sorts of help is needed to bring the conference about as a dynamic flow of excellence and experience. Be warned though as SHE “will be potentially the most pretentious social networking event of 2008!”

You know what? SHE already exists in wiki-space. Check her out and be creative!

Let’s start with what it is:

• It is a label, a title, a word, a term
• It is a web site, a blog, a mailing list, a wiki
• It is a loosely (dis)organised campaign
• It is related to CouchSurfing and hospitality networks
• It is a movement, a meme, an idea of loosely shared values

Now what it is not:

• It is not an organisation, it has no offices, no officers, no constitution
• It has no members, there is no list of “OpenCSers”
• It is not “official”, nobody can speak on behalf of it, nobody can say they represent it

OpenCouchSurfing cannot agree or disagree with statements. It’s simply a means to communicate. As one can’t say “I am not E=MC²“, so one cannot really say “I am or am not OpenCS”. OpenCS is an idea, a campaign, at the very most, a petition.

Of course, all of this is simply my own opinion, because OpenCS cannot express an opinion or describe itself. So I speak on my own behalf, not in any official capacity on behalf of OpenCS.

OpenCS became a lost cause and as a result the campaigners themselves failt to fullfill their own requirements. It was never meant as a clear frontline against someone, but more or less the “discussions” end up in the “us vs. them” logic. The Leadership Circle strategy of keeping more or less quiet and as a result lacking a place for a discussion makes it worse: users at brainstorm began to feel annoyed about the same issues again and again in nearly every thread. In the meantime, forced by deeply personal disappointments, injuries and feeling betrayed, the reference war started. But leaving each other negative references not only symbolized the edge between “us” and “them” very well, it was also bad PR for OpenCS at all, even if the Leadership Circle answered in the same way (and Casey himself started to remove friendlinks).

Then things began to change again: Kasper – listening to the advice of others – made the brave step to remove the bad references (something I could not appreciate enough). This – supported by some apologies – changed the situation at brainstorm a bit. Additionally some new people at brainstorm have begun to ask questions. With the same result as ever: not much answers, even if this is from time to time hidden behind a lot of words. But the tone is different this time:
no more “us vs. them”, what means at least a form of dispute, no, now some people are adressed as “those few who hate CS”.

Who is that? A small group planning to destroy CS out of pure hate against CS as such? More conspiracy theories, please! Do I hate CS? Don’t expect me to answer this question, but maybe I should create a group “those who _really_ hate CS” (no worries: I won’t do it really. Like the “Goovy is an arsehole and we know it”-group). Seems all in all more a reason to laugh out loud than to worry. But the problem is: The Leadership is rewriting history here. If there are no answers or alternatives, the ideas of OpenCS will disappear more or less completely. The “usual supects” will end up as couchterrorists, who tried to destroy the happyhappy couchsurfing family, but failed thanks to the good and visionary leaders.

I claim the right of my own history. Remember, this is the digital age: history written on paper rolls by winners only is history itself.

PS: Didn’t I mention “The little leninist’s cookbook” before? One very important task is to define the own opinion as a majority and every critics as a small minority. Don’t worry about real numbers, it’s just important to say so. A perfect historical example about this can be found with the keywords Menshevik (from russian the Russian word for minority) and Bolshevik (from russian the Russian word for majority).
PPS: Nonviolent communication is not a good concept for people who don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) that non-communication is probably one of the most violent forms of communication at all.

Hi, (in reply to [0], www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=321705#pos… for “proper threading”)

guess what, I was one of those people only wanting to discuss ideas for a long time [1]. At some point of a full year of volunteering as a coder[2] and trying to make sure the very ideas from this group actually got somewhere [3], it became evident that in order to get those constructive ideas heard and implemented, improvements would need to be made. So I and others whose input you’re so willing to discard tried our best, sadly many of our suggestions and constructive efforts often went ignored by the LT [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Also, the “critical” tone is all too easy to obtain when valid questions and due criticism [8] repeatedly go unanswered.

I feel it’s important to let others here know what exactly they are dealing with. I feel it’s a bit silly being all positive and hoping ideas somehow will get heard, when there are still no decent mechanisms to make that happen and no apparent willingness (historically) to actually listen to people who provide ideas to deal with the situation EVEN when they are the ones actively working on the improvements.

Besides, I feel the not-so-gentle wish of yours of all of “us” to take a hike with all the criticism based on EXPERIENCE (the case for me, Kasper, and the ones who already moved on) of dealing with the CS organization is just another form of censorship, albeit softer than simple deletion all of the “negative” posts. If asking questions and telling the truth is deemed as unconstructive and evil, I sincerely think CS is headed the wrong way.

FYI: the leadership team is far more willing to bring in “fresh” people than to keep around the old ones (who were actually doing a sizeable chunk of the actual work [9, 10, see especially contributions by Kasper and Matrixpoint] instead of just talking, and were respected by their volunteer-peers if not by the admins/leaders), once they start getting “difficult” – so beware, a year from now the situation for many of the new enthusiasts could well best be described as “told you so”. An actual quote from some leaders: “The coders are just whiners, so let’s just get new ones” – culture of appreciation [11], anyone?

Actually, there’s nothing new under the sun, has anyone ever wondered what happened to COSMIC GIRL, DANI! (former admins), CAIRONA (European Collective 2006 co-organizer) or Aparna (Former CS Country Ambassador for India)?

FYI 2: Blast from the past [12], many issues were questioned more than a year ago, yet we STILL don’t have all the answers. Make your own conclusions?

Anu

[0] www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=321705
[1] www.opencouchsurfing.org/User:Anu (list of my public, CS-related group posts)
[2] www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/17/making-it-official-anu-l…
[3] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Feature_development_process
[4] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Technical_Goals_of_the_New_Zealand_…
[5] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Talk:Paris_Collective
[6] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Idea_to_feature:_lessons_learned
[7] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Central_transparency
[8] wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Community_feedback_from_Mumbai
[9] www.opencouchsurfing.org/CS_commit_statistics
[10] www.opencouchsurfing.org/CS_bug_statistics
[11] www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=1589&post=283060

[12] Money and Such:
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=1668&post=28033

how many %why?:
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=28750

2,450 (!) words about: MONEY, MONEY, MONEY…
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=31537

Financial transparency
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=33130

Where is CS going?
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=33327

In any case, I would like to thank everyone I have had the pleasure to work with – regardless of the CS leadership team propaganda I do believe everyone writing and reading this blog are doing it because they care about CS, enough to be interested in the organizational issues as well. (consider this as my implementation of the culture of appreciation )

The author quotes the still not changed CS-Mission “Creating a better world” and starts with the following questions:

• Is CS a globalization from the bottom, realising a cometogether of people solidly united from all over the world far beyond the leadership of profits?
• Or is this all leading to a point where 270.000 people under the Couchsurfing logo will wake up with a hangover and have to realize that the party is over and they’re trained to be clients of another World Commerce Corporation?

After a general description of couchsurfing with some examples the author raises concerns, that a network like this is not spreading the idea of hospitality at all. On the one hand side the sophisticated criterias for searching and detailled profiles will bring only similar people to meet with eachother, excluding different people as a potential risk or at least too different. On the other hand side the networks could kill traditional hospitality, by replacing it with a technical solution or even worse simply with business models.

The author calls the CS Terms of Use a loud ticking bomb for everyone who is not deafening hisself because of enthusiasm about the idea. He recommend reading it and says he hasn’t read very often texts repeating in every thinkable detail the same thing: “We (the company) are allowed to do everything, you (the users) are not allowed to anything.”

A last quote (in bad translation):

“The thought, who obtrude the fan, the idea for this creepy conditions don’t suit the idea or the spirit of the community and are not invented from the founder of the CS-project, but from some mean consultants who talked him into it, should not calm down anyone: Very soon this kind of consultants will force him on selling to the highest bid. I for one haven’t found anything in the conditions, that would make such a buy-out difficult.”

My conclusion: Forget about CS corporation. Let’s save the idea. Which includes to think about the danger of creating networks connecting only similar people. Curiousity and openess has to be redefined and eked out everyday, that’s not a task for machines. At least if you want something else than clones of yourself.

Good night.

A brief history:

1. Sunday 6/May/2007: OpenCouchSurfing.org is launched after about 2 weeks of preparation. It was the result of months of uncertainty and dissatisfaction in the development group. First real reaction comes from Leo (who later turns out to not be a part of the “inner circle”. No “official” reaction.
2. Wednesday 9/May/2007: The CS site goes down for 18 hours to upgrade the database. No warning to the tech team. Casey finally proposes to talk over the phone with me; on Sunday.
3. Thursday 10/May/2007: Casey announces the Leadership Circle. Couchsurfing will be run by a self-appointed and closed group of (mostly) his personal friends.
4. Friday 11/May/2007: Casey suddenly and unannounced decides to move the SVN server with all of the CS code, quoting “upgrades”. It stays offline until today and now everyone has to reapply for commit rights.
5. Sunday 13/May/2007: I finally get to talk to Casey over the phone. He tells me he doesn’t want “politics” in Couchsurfing and clearly has no real-world knowledge or experience with code licensing. We agree to try and investigate two things together: a community code license of sorts and some form of elective experiment to determine a tech team “coordinator”. We agree to call again the next day. It gives me hope. (False hope as it turns out.)
6. Monday 14/May/2007: Casey postpones the phone call by a day. He’s too busy communicating with others.
7. Tuesday 15/May/2007: Everything seems to happen at once.
   • All day long, there is a flame-war (warning: long and ugly) between Naz (a completely new and unknown developer since 2 weeks) and Kasper on the developers mailing list. Naz is simply nasty and basically tells Kasper to take a hike. Chris Burley, our “tech team leader” does not step in at all.
   • I talk to Casey on the phone again. He basically states that he wants to split CS into a “staff” of sorts and “volunteers”. Ambassadors would be mere volunteers and developers would probably have to be split into people within and people outside of “the circle”. (I’ve now come to understand that they simply don’t want developers outside of the circle.)
   • Morgan Tocker resigns (see his Blog article).
   • Appearantly the long awaited NDA is now called “Volunteer Agreement” and is sent in secret to “core devs”, including John, Walter, Naz (who has been a developer for 2 weeks!) and Anu. Kasper, who has at least 1/3rd of the code commits to his name, is not included as a “core dev”. We learn all of this by accident. Chris Burley chats with both Kasper and me and tries to talk “off the record” with me, which I decline. We know it contains the following:
     - Automatic transfer of all intellectual property (=ideas) to CS.
     - A non-compete agreement, which basically states you can’t work on any travel or social network site simultaneously or 1 year after volunteering (working) for CS, profesionally or otherwise.
     - A complete gag order. You are not allowed to discuss anything “internal” with non-NDA people.
   • Kasper resigns.
   • Chris Burley offers me the Volunteer Agreement document, under the condition that I don’t talk about it. I decline. He tells me certain people might get “exceptions” to the NDA rules.
   • I quit.
   • After at least three people tell Chris that he should have stepped in with the Naztyness on the mailinglist, he finally does. The discussion is by that time already long over and done.

After that, there was a mixture of saying goodbye, total apathy and more nastiness (style: “Glad you guys are gone”). The Leadership Circle still doesn’t have the guts to publish the Volunteer Agreement.
So, what are we left with after 1,5 weeks of campaigning?

1. A completely closed CS organisation that is heading for a semi-commercial structure. Volunteering is considered second rate.
2. An NDA/Volunteer Agreement that is probably 3 times worse than the previous one. In all practicality, no IT professional could ever sign it, unless you never want to work on travel or social network related websites again besides CS.
3. Open sourcing, transparancy and representation seem farther away than ever. They have succeeded in getting Kasper to quit, which clearly was something they wanted. “Not a core dev” is probably the closest one can come to being tarred and feathered.

To put it simply: OpenCouchSurfing has failed miserably in its goals. Even though around 70 people ended up signing our petition, including Heather O’Brian and Jim Stone (both part of the Leadership Circle), none of it made any difference.

Have we made matters worse? I don’t think so, because clearly these things were already being planned for a long time. We have however clearly accelerated the process and discovered things that were meant to be kept secret. The back-room dealings, the secrecy, the buddy-systems, the social manipulation, all of these things are not new to me and can happen in any organisation. The scale and rate at which they happen in Couchsurfing, an organisation that boasts a mission to “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time” is however frightening.

There are only three options left:

1. Waste energy and time whining and being ignored.
2. Start taking destructive action.
3. Bow out.

Out of self-respect, I will obviously choose the latter.
The End.

Why in this (direct and not so subtle) way? Why not through the organisation itself? Why now? Why not wait for … (insert something here)?

The Wiki main page adresses this more thouroughly, but simply put:

• We believe direct action is needed because there is no real incentive for Casey and/or the admins to change anything or even communicate about these issues. By creating this (deliberate) tension, we at least force a discussion. Open Couchsurfing is not about forcing the changes themselves (all of our campaigns are in a proposal fase), but it is about forcing the dialogue.
• You might be shocked by some of our disclosures: Security Concerns and Technical Information. Two points to keep in mind: 1) The issues listed in there are in direct contradiction to the Terms of Use and the Privacy statement on Couchsurfing.com. 2) I personally don’t consider the NDA as legally binding: it is misrepresentative and not enforcable. In fact, it’s dangerous and (again) in contradiction with the Terms of Use not to disclose this information. Couchsurfing promises to respect your privacy and protect your data and yet is not diligent in this. It is our moral duty to report this kind of thing.
• There have been many attempts to do this through the organisation itself, by dozens of people. There is an Open Organisation CS group and especially within the tech team, protest has been loud and sustained. It is very logical that the tech team is at the fore-front of this discussion because they are closest to the core team (they see a lot of what happens) and are directly impacted by the closed decisionmaking of the core team, the NDA and all that stuff.
• We have been waiting for too long.”Wait!” sounds exactly like “No!” at this point.

Things that have been long overdue:

• A new NDA was promised back in June 2006 (!). There is supposedly a new one, that has been seen at by everyone (lawyers, admins, etc) except for the people it applies to: the developers.
• First there was talk of a new governing structure to replace the admins, namely “The Leadership Circle” and now appearantly it has been implemented already. Nobody knows what it is, who’s in there, what they do, how it differs from the admin group, etc. But this is the structure that is currently governing the site? Weird.
• A simple reply from Casey Fenton to OpenCouchSurfing.org. So far, only Dan and Leonardo (both admins) have replied and there has been some (private) communication with Aldo (also an admin). The rest? Silent as ever.

On a side note, we’re trying (as per some people’s suggestion) to present the “other side” of the argument as well. Please help us complete the Wiki with pro’s and con’s.

For this exact reason, we have proposed a news item on Couchsurfing.com.

Mattthew Brauer posted the following in reply: “Constructive criticism is great and needed, but the purpose of the news is to inspire people and promote CouchSurfing, not to highlight the things that may or may not need improving.”

There are couple of things wrong with this attitude:

1. There is no good way for the community at large to understand what’s going on if this kind of news is effectively shielded from them. While not every discussion is worthy of news, this surely is it seems.
2. Quite often in Couchsurfing we hear the argument to “not be so negative”. This is certainly one form of that. And certainly, if there were channels where we could get answers to some pressing questions, we would take it there. However “don’t be negative” often just means “shut up”.

Help us publish this news item. Write Mattthew Brauer to show your support.

A very interesting reaction came from Leonarde Silveira, one of the admins. Most of the conversation was over the phone, but in summary he was definitely not against opening up a dialog. His main concern was a too polarized view on this site, the fact that the “other side” of the discussion is underrepresented. In my opinion this is certainly a valid concern; it is a valuable exercise to add possible reasons for the current situation. I did encourage him (and hereby other admins as well) to also send us their view on some of our topics, which he promised to do. Other than that, logging all of the discussions and different viewpoints seem like a fair and balanced approach.

You’ve probably noticed that CouchSurfing has become a very big organisation. There are over 200.000 active profiles and 30.000 people log in every week. And there is no indication that the current rate of growth is going to slow down soon.

There are quite a few people within the CS organisation that feel that in order to sustain this growth, we need to have a more Open, Free and Inclusive organisation. Right now, the “top” of the CS organisation (admins) is a very closed and non-transparant structure. There is no direct representation, it is almost impossible to find out what is being discussed, there are no meeting notes publicly available, etc etc. CouchSurfing could easily become a much more open and representative organisation, if enough people want it to be. We are all volunteers for this organisation, simply by hosting people, organizing meetings and helping each other we make Couchsurfing into what it is. We should be included in every level of the decision making process and not be considered just users.

The current closed structure does not seem very good for CouchSurfing. Communication fails regularly, questions don’t or can’t get answered and there is often a sense of unilateral decision making. On a more practical level, the way the site development is being run is very inefficient, precisely because of the constant desire to keep things secret.

That’s why we turn to you. Help us make CouchSurfing the Open and Free organisation it can be. Get involved. Bring your ideas here and help us improve CouchSurfing.

You can start here (Wiki).