Archive for the 'history' Category

some thoughts about positive action

Published by guaka.org/ on September 27, 2009 in Culture of Appreciation, Proactive Action, ambassadors, history and people. 31 Comments

I’ve been a couchsurfing volunteer for about 9 months, in which I started the couchsurfing wiki, did tons of work on the code, and much more. I was trying to open the organization in a radical way, pushing for a free software license of the code and creating a bit of chaos here and there.

The day I quit 3 other coders who had contributed considerable work to the CS code base quit as well. It was a sad day. However, we thought that opencouchsurfing.org would be able to put pressure on the organization to open up. We thought wrong, obviously.

Now and then I’ve seen people quit volunteering for CS, for reasons uncommon to most organization. Still, I thought couchsurfing would continue, and people would be reasonably happy to volunteer within the framework provided.

Currently, with so many long-term volunteers quitting in such a short time span I’m wondering: what can we do to really open up couchsurfing – even if just a tiny wee bit? (And I prefer to wonder openly.) And is it possible to do this all together? Apparently the people who were against opencouchsurfing in the past seem to be sharing several goals. Is there another way to peacefully make a positive difference?

All the long-term volunteers are or have been friends with members of the leadership team, can we do something with that?

Or can a consensus be found to start something new or revive BeWelcome?

(Feel free to contact me by email if you prefer, firstname dot lastname at gmail dot com – I’ll keep things private if you prefer so.)

www.BeWelcome.info – the real background!

Published by veit on September 26, 2008 in BeWelcome, Campaigns, Censorship, Donations, Elections, Finances, General Info, Open Source, Participation, Transparency, Volunteer coordinator, cult, history, legal, networks, people and volunteer coordination. 18 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This blog is mostly run by BW-lovers with a clear agenda (make CS and HC look bad so their “oh-so-moral” alternative looks attractive). For all others, who still have a somewhat open mind and don’t fall so easily for Kasper & Co’s constant propaganda, here a link to our side of the story:

http://www.bewelcome.info

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

Trust decreasing among CouchSurfers?

Published by Kasper Souren on April 23, 2008 in BeWelcome, Participation, Proactive Action, history and people. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

Trust metrics are techniques for predicting how much a certain user can be trusted by the other users.CouchSurfing doesn’t really have a prediction mechanism, but trust values are registered for every friendship link.

I never thought the denominators for the trust value made a lot of sense for the friendship links on CS (especially when translated, I don’t really know how to best translate “I somewhat trust this person” into my mother tongue). Still, there seems to be a definite trend of linearly (in time) decreasing trust on the Quality of Service page. It would be interesting to compare this to values from before and do a deeper analysis. The “average quality” doesn’t seem to be changing significantly on the other hand, maybe slightly going up? Possibly because it’s actually visible to the receiver.

Joe Edelman wrote the QoS code, and wrote to me:

Wow, that *is* interesting!

So the avg trust is calculated among introductions added in the last
week that are reported as due to CS and in-person. So it’s not because
of virtual users, and it’s not because CS is accelerating and includes
less pre-existing friends.

The only confounding factor I can think of, is that it doesn’t take the
“date you met this person” field into account — a lot of people don’t
fill it out, or don’t fill it out correctly. So it includes
introductions that are finally being reported from the past, as well as
those that actually occurred that week.

We could be seeing an ever-greater percentage of weirdos from the past.
You know, those random people that blew through a collective, and much
later are friending everyone. And the people they are friending hardly
remember them and so don’t trust them. This would be a result of social
graph “fill-in”, perhaps as a kind of recoil from expansion last summer.

Or, perhaps it’s an accurate result, and as CS grows, people that meet
find they have less in common, since CS includes more demographics.

In that case, it could be interpretted as a *positive* result: perhaps
the ideal would be to take people who DON’T trust each other INITIALLY,
and give them POSITIVE EXPERIENCES such that later they DO trust each
other, or they start to trust other people from a new demographic MORE.

Let’s just hope this trend does not continue. If it would, the average trust would be zero by the end of 2010.

In the meanwhile, some active work can be done on designing and implementing a trust system from scratch on BeWelcome.

The data:

year   week introductions users  quality  trust

2008    16         6625   3890    1.526   0.370

2008    15        14238   7345    1.506   0.377

2008    14        14818   7591    1.490   0.379

2008    13        16520   8201    1.527   0.388

2008    12        13895   6952    1.500   0.387

2008    11        12252   6291    1.479   0.379

2008    10        12303   6490    1.493   0.392

2008    09        12796   6482    1.480   0.382

2008    08        11336   5875    1.483   0.376

2008    07        12484   6408    1.486   0.391

2008    06        11778   6215    1.469   0.409

2008    05        11201   5945    1.453   0.406

2008    04        10570   5998    1.479   0.415

2008    03        10757   5983    1.489   0.410

2008    02         9560   4872    1.503   0.410

2008    01        13972   6425    1.484   0.417

2007    52         7749   4279    1.476   0.414

2007    51         9332   5118    1.467   0.421

2007    50        10975   5500    1.480   0.422

2007    49        10309   5632    1.454   0.415

2007    48        10664   5500    1.454   0.413

2007    47        10335   5734    1.487   0.425

2007    46        10835   5762    1.492   0.429

“Happy” birthday.

Published by tgoorden on April 17, 2008 in 501c3, Blogroll, Campaigns, Casey Fenton, Censorship, Collective, Elections, Transparency and history. 4 Comments

Happy birthday.

Almost exactly a year ago, the OCS initiative was started. Initially, our hope was to entice the LT with concrete ideas and campaigns, to get them to address the various serious issues we had discovered at the heart of CS. Not much has changed however and most of the changes have not been for the better:

  • CS is legally still in very dubious water. Still no 501c3 status, after… 3 (or 4?) years of claiming it?
  • Casey still holds all the legal (and financial) strings and has decided to set up camp in Alaska next, which is essentially his home.
  • Transparancy is down, censorship is waaay up. (Search engines have been blocked and CS has a permanent censorship/security team now, almost like during the cold war!)
  • CSC Thailand can be declared a failure as well now, after the NZ meltdown. I haven’t seen anything positive come out of it, but we’re still waiting for the “memo”.
  • “Not talking to anyone” has become the official communication mode for the entire organisation.

And so, with a heavy heart, I’m renewing the OpenCouchSurfing.org domainname by 2 years. In all honesty, I had serious hopes that it wouldn’t be necessary to have this website for more than a year. I (personally) was perfectly willing to “bury the hatchet” if there was even some semblance of progress. Alas, it is not to be. CS still makes me angry, especially for the obligation I feel towards its wonderful community to speak up about its numerous failure, shortcomings and shady deals.

Maybe now is a good opportunity to start thinking about OCS “2.0″. The way I see it, the signal to noise ratio on the blog could be better and there have been some points of discussion we could re-raise at this point. Anonimity, re-posting and privacy concerns come to mind. More importantly, I believe OCS should refocus its efforts towards a clearly understandable and easy to navigate website. Right now, I can only imagine the confusion of a random surfer on OCS. I still heavily support our “open for all” attitude, even with all the negativity that comes with that, but I think it can be channeled better.

So, in the spirit of transparancy and cooperation: Who would be interested in helping “revamp” and organise OCS? We’ll need to digg through a lot of information and restructure quite a bit, but I also think there is room for new activism. Things on my mind:

  • An open call to ALL ambassadors for transparancy (and perhaps elections)?
  • A good Q&A section, where we try to answer what CS doesn’t answer.
  • Video?
  • …

I also wouldn’t mind separating this “public blog” from a better structured blog with some editorial control that we could move to the front page. We could “rewrite” a lot of the current knowledge into practical, well researched and well written articles that would be aimed at the general public (including new members and press) and not just people with CS background knowledge.

A simple way to undo censorship and thread deletions on CS

Published by tgoorden on March 20, 2008 in Censorship, Transparency, history and legal. 14 Comments

I think there are quite a number of people that will agree with me that the way threads and posts are deleted from various CS groups, security is not increased in any way and in fact: it may have the opposite effect.

Deleting posts from troublesome members or even about dangerous incidents is simply ridiciulous. It only creates an illusion of safety and this is especially dangerous for new members.

But, it is also easily undone. Here is what you do:

  • Create a fake profile with an new, untraceable email address. (Plenty of fake profiles anyway.)
  • Register for the groups that might be interesting and check “receive all mail”.
  • Register the email address on the CS-uncensored group.
  • Set up the email address so it forwards ALL mail to CS-uncensored.

Extra added bonus? A fully searchable, unlimited (in time) archive of all interesting CS group posts. It would be even funnier if we could get into Private Amb somehow.

Disclaimer: Of course, this post is just an idea that I wanted to float around. I can take no responsibility for anyone actually doing this. You might be breaking some CS rule, but I didn’t check that. ;-)

Modes of Governance

Published by Anu on October 18, 2007 in BeWelcome, Participation, couchsurfing, history and networks. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

For me, the failure of CS to sustain any democratic principles, freedom of speech, or abiding to the law or ethics, equality was the breaking point. So realizing they were not, nor ever would become that kind of an organization I had to go before further hurting myself being involved with people who could never understand what I stood for, what made me tick, and originally made me want to volunteer for CS. I tried as long as I could and was in no way “politically active” as the new race of outcasts on CS now is called (I was present in a situation where new person for some site tasks was needed, and the ones in charge went through their groups posting history to see there was nothing whatsoever that could indicate this was a person with critical thinking of any kind, especially towards CS). It’s only after seeing quite a bit of behavior and attitudes that I could not align with, as well as quite a bit of undermining, bullying and ignoring those who had, despite their differences with the LT worked very hard for CS that finally destroyed my faith in the leaders.

As an interlude, there was a strong push (in earlier times also officially sanctioned by the CS elite) to act in a more ad-hoc way (term coined by Dani I believe as “do-ocracy”). For me, this provided a way to get things ahead when no leadership was around to deal with many real issues rising up from the “bottom”, the community, through various means: groups, contact us section on the site, personal connections, real-life meetings. But at some point it became clear that in absence of leadership of any kind, it was those only interested in their own goals and visions for which Couchsurfing was merely a supporting platform, who were going to be the ultimate winners of the do-ocracy model. So naturally the LT might have been scared, I know I was. The critical error the Admins aka Leadership Team did in regaining their power was however to not take the good coming out of do-ocracy model so far, and not learn ways to actively listen to and engage with their community, which could have made all the difference in creating a network truly in line with its (current or future) vision statement and the values of its members.

On BeVolunteer/BeWelcome on the other hand the statutes clearly state what the values are, so that anyone wanting to volunteer clearly knows where they stand since the start. I’ve seen & heard “democracy doesn’t work” quoted by some along with rather condescending wishes of good luck. Well, this might be true – it’s certainly not easy to handle multi-national organization just starting out where many of the active people haven’t even met (yet). But still I’d say there’s a far bigger chance of survival thanks to the explicitly stated democratic principles (so neither dictators nor lone gunmen with their own motives can thrive for very long) to produce a sustainable organization and gradually grow into a viable alternative for those seeking hospitality.

opencouchsurfing.hyperboards.com

Published by Kasper Souren on September 29, 2007 in Collective, Crash 2.0, Jim Stone, Transparency, couchsurfing, history and volunteer coordination. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Right after the crash some people at the CouchSurfing Collective in Montreal had set up a Hyperboard. This appeared to be a huge success. (Unfortunately archive.org’s web archive didn’t archive very deep. Please let us know if you happen to have some backups around.) A lot of people offered to help with rebuilding the site, with a slight slant towards a bit more transparency, decentralization and democracy. So this was probably a bit too overwhelming, since it was promptly closed by the current Volunteer Coordinator (2000 US$/month).

Another Hyperboard was opened by “Mentor” with whom I’ve been in touch through email and chat, without knowing his or her identity. Mentor had also set up thecouchsurfingbuilding2.hyperboards.com, which was a huge collection of messages, and random information, with funny and sometimes harsh comments. In the beginning I think it was kind of silly, but I gradually started to appreciate the board. So I wasn’t happy when I saw it was closed a while ago.

Now Mentor is back with a new board: opencouchsurfing.hyperboards.com!

October 2nd Addition

Apparently the opencouchsurfing hyperboard, which is not accessible anymore now, was not started by Mentor of thecouchsurfingbuilding2 hyperboard. Also, as you can read in the comments on this posts, Mentor never took part in the public discussions that are OpenCS. Let’s discuss it on the mailinglist first if you think a public OpenCS forum is a good idea,

So long, and thanks for the fish

Published by Anu on September 25, 2007 in BeWelcome, Crash 2.0, Crash at Mine, Culture of Appreciation, Leadership Circle, Participation, Transparency, Uncategorized, couchsurfing, employees, history and volunteer coordination. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Also posted in: ambassador’s public

It’s finally time to let go of all my remaining ties to volunteering in CouchSurfing, a few words about the why, if you will…

It wasn’t a bad year (1) In fact, it was a very good year. How often do you get a chance to see the world, settle down a bit in places, work for the things you believe in and meet the people you’ve been craving to meet all your life?

I’m still coming to terms with my feelings of this year, and CS more specifically. There’s a strong component of unjust treatment, and many questions which are to date not answered. I could probably write a book about all this but this will have to wait until a later date (you might want to check here in the near future though ;) (2)

There’s definitely some anger: after all, I started doing CS work after already been burned once in a volunteering setting (3) and for this reason really did not want or need a second similar experience. However, I got one. What makes me angry is not the “wasted time” itself, it’s more the fact that had I known the fundamental attitudes (4, 5) of the leadership a year ago, I would probably not have started volunteering to such an extent – my anger is more directed towards concealing these attitudes (with lack of real communication there was no way of telling what the admins were thinking) rather than having them in the first place – for at least it would have offered an opportunity for me to choose if these were the kinds of people I’d like to work with (or as it seems, for). This by now almost feels like purposeful deception to lure in willing volunteers (6).

There’s also sadness: thinking of what might have been, the possibilities for creating real difference, all in vain. And not because people, the community didn’t want it, they were ready to take CS to the next level, to decentralize (7) along with the mission crafted up after the big crash of 2006 (7, 8 ) to create a better world, one couch at a time. No, it was the attitudes of the leaders, lack of any real communication by them, lack of meaningful, respectful dialogue with the community or even volunteers who are actively striving to make things better that stopped (sometimes even reversed) (9) the momentum of the community to decentralize itself. I also feel sad that this potential of the community was never recognized by those in power and that corporate structures, top-down management and weeding out all possibility to self-organize were seen as the only way to go forward – where’s the space for diversity, more bohemian attitudes towards life and independent thinking that are very present in the spirit of this community?

But there’s (always?) a silver lining: if it wasn’t through CS, it would have probably taken me years longer to find the people I connected and hope to continue working with (some, though by means not all ;) of them here: 10,11) to create a better world, one whatever (Line of code? Guest bed? Idea? Freedom?) at a time!

I’d like to thank all the great people I have worked with and met on my 21st century version of the”Grand Tour” (11). Regardless of my issues with the leaders at the moment, I believe the rest of you are still good people and deserve far more credit and appreciation than what you’re given now.

Finally, just a fair warning from someone who cares about all of you: please keep your eyes open before jumping in the deep end with CS or if you’re there already, and don’t stop asking the questions (13) in case there’s something worrying you…

Goodbye, and happy surfing,
Anu

1. http://anujossain.blogspot.com
2. http://www.opencouchsurfing.com/author/anu/
3. http://anujossain.blogspot.com/2007/09/dj-vu.html
4. http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=7161&post=329495#post332871
5. http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=7161&post=329495#post331893
6. http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/22/follow-the-money/
7. http://www.couchsurfing.com/recovery_page.htm
8. http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/23/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-cs-20/
9. http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Idea_to_feature:_lessons_learned (original)
http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/wiki/Idea_to_feature:_lessons_learned (backup)
10. http://www.bevolunteer.org
11. http://www.crashatmine.org
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
13. http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=379068

Casey’s Magic

Published by Callum on September 22, 2007 in Casey Fenton, Leadership Circle, Participation, couchsurfing and history. 32 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

While reading an NY Times article about CouchSurfing (thanks Mary) I was reminded of the magic that Casey created in the CouchSurfing project. I’ve definitely lost track of the magic over the last few months since becoming involved in the inner workings of the CouchSurfing organisation.

There’s a great sense of community, a great PR image, a wonderful “feeling” when reading about CouchSurfing. It’s a feeling that Hospitality Club and BeWelcome definitely don’t have. It’s more bohemian, more offbeat and quirky, yet somehow more mainstream.

Casey struck a great balance between the hitch hiking “true” traveller and the mainstream. CouchSurfing appeals to people from all walks of life, and that’s undoubtedly because of Casey’s ability to pitch it well.

In many ways, this makes it even more tragic that Casey chooses to run the organisation in the way he does. There’s such a huge opportunity to do something really, trully exceptional here. Unfortunately, it’s being stifled by the closed door, backroom politics style of leadership.

So here’s my question. Can we create the same magic in another network? Can we recreate that wonderful bohemian feeling in BeWelcome? Or CrashAtMine? Or a whole new network? Or is it something uniquely Casey that can’t easily be copied? Is it a quality that can’t be replicated?

In retrospective

Published by Kasper Souren on May 24, 2007 in Casey Fenton, Crash 2.0, Leadership Circle, Open Source, Transparency and history. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

During all recent events I often thought about what must be going on in Casey’s head. He’s the one pulling the strings. Then I remembered an email I received from Casey Fenton, a long time ago, November 29, 2005 10:01 PM to be exactly.

Subject: Censorship in Hospitality Club / CS

Hi Kasper,

I was just sent a link to your page about HC censorship.
(http://www.industree.org/guaka/index.php/Censorship_in_Hospitality_Club)
You said: “The thing that I find most revolting is that it, at least to
me at this point, seems such a closed process. Rules are somehow being
set up, and the 90000 members of HC are just to follow them.
CouchSurfing has actually the same problem, and I think it will be good
to address this.” I was wondering what the problem is that CS has that
you’re referring to? We always want to make sure that we’re doing
things right… and it there’s something we’re not doing right, please
let us know! If you need any questions answered, I’d be happy to answer
them.

btw, love your photos… especially the one of those kids in Bamako and
the one of you on the beach with the guitar.

Cheers,
–Casey

Which implies that Casey read about the ideas I have for hospitality exchange a long time before we actually met in Montreal. As Joe wrote: “Many aspects of CouchSurfing have been marred by these issues: (a) a tendency to do
things in the dark, (b) a tendency to tell people what they want to hear, and (c) a tendency to work *near* people, but not *with* them.”

Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel bitter. But…

Life is still good, though I hope that some things will change. In my opionion there are several principles a free hospitality exchange network must follow:

  1. Open policies
    It should be clear what is going on. Policies and guidelines should be accessible by anyone.
  2. Democratic processes
    All people making part of the network should be able to take part in discussions.
  3. Open data
    People should be able to “take” their own data in a portable, open format onto their computer, into their phone. It should be possible to give permission to others (based on a trust level) to copy part of one’s information. Similar to ideas implemented in Indyvoter (http://beta.indyvoter.org).
  4. Free software
    Like Wikipedia, hospitality exchange networks should be based on free software. This will attract more programmers, open up new possibilities (like integrating electronic authentification and encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuPG) or efficient access on portable devices (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/139202&from=rss), extending it into a getting-car-rides system where drivers and hitchhikers can get in touch using GPS…).