And if not for cash, then surely for the added marketing value (worth real money, and lots of it), to allow Google and every other web site and search engine to add what you thought you were sharing with only fellow CS-members, to their fully public, permanent record that is the global internet.

All the personal trip and traveler feedback you thought you were sharing only with other CS members? Sorry, surprise, now everything you posted on CS is part of the public record, forever. And, perfectly searchable.

I realize Casey’s announcement(s) have mostly to do with Groups posts, but isn’t he trying to put into place the exact same kind of exposure and sale of all your information, including your profile? Your profile picture? Isn’t he playing the exact same kind of despicable game that Zuckerberg plays?

Make no mistake about what Casey is attempting to do, exactly like Zuckerberg/Facebook – blatantly deceive you, to gain your trust and persuade you to add to his mountainous pile of traveler feedback, then once he has your trust (and your posts and personal information) he sells everyone’s posted information to enrich himself, personally.

This has been his goal since the inception of the entire CS project, he just didn’t have any buyers yet. Until now. Until Facebook became the story to copy. Until he invested considerable effort in building the largest list of users he could accumulate, to ensure the biggest pay-day he could arrange for himself.

I’ve noticed that despite several fundamental issues which members have complained about for literally years, that are never even acknowledged… in all this time, the most visible efforts seen from the inner circle and their hiring decisions, seemed to always be about PR (public relations), suppressing the publication of complaints, outright denial of reality, and spreading the gospel. To grow the list of users. To fatten the calf before the slaughter.

In classic Cult-of-Casey style, he sells you out without a warning or your consent, but when the backlash proves substantial and it turns out that people don’t want any part of what Casey’s selling, he tries to spin his scheme as something that he only intended in the best of ways, something to help you!

I don’t know which kind of people I despise more strongly – users, or liars. Let alone a career scam-artist highly skilled in both exploiting and lying to people. But the recent investors want the maximum return on their investment, so just as others have predicted… let the sale (of information you donated in good faith) begin!
 
 
Fresh email from HQ, just received, sent to all CS “members.” Stare into the face of pure exploitation and bald-faced lies:
 
 

“We’ve heard you: Change to plans regarding groups”
 
Dear CouchSurfers,

Last week, we sent an email in which we announced our plan to make CS groups available to search. We made this decision because the team had received member complaints that some newer members of the site didn’t seem to be joining for the right reasons. We thought that allowing people to see more of what CS is about before they join might help address this problem.

The members disagreed! We’ve heard from hundreds of people who are very opposed to this approach. I’m very sorry to have caused so much distress. It’s clear that this is something that members care deeply about, and I respect the need to approach it differently.

We have made two major changes to our plan:

Group posts created in the past will not be available to search. The only posts that will be visible to search engines will be those created after February 15, 2012. This will protect the privacy of any members who no longer use the site and may not be aware of the changes.

All members will have the option to keep all of their posts hidden from search and from non-members. Just as we currently allow you to keep your profile hidden from anyone who is not logged in, we are now building another privacy option that will allow you to easily specify that your group posts should not be visible to search engines or people who are not logged in. This privacy option will apply to all of your posts, both past and future.

These two factors combined mean that the only posts that will be visible to search will be those made in the future by people who choose not to make their participation in groups private.

I sincerely hope that this approach will protect the privacy needs of all CouchSurfing members while also giving people who are considering joining CS an accurate impression of who we are – a community, not a place to find a free place to crash.

If you still have concerns about this, I invite you to email me at casey.fenton@couchsurfing.org and share your thoughts. The team makes all of its decisions with the intention of making CS better for its members. It seems that this time the change we wanted to make would actually have made it worse, and for that I’m sincerely sorry. I’m glad that you responded with your concerns: your reactions helped us see various sides of the issue that we had not considered. I know that CS groups are considered to be a safe and comfortable place to express yourself fully, and I would never want that to change.

Thank you for your patience and for your passion,

Casey Fenton
Co-Founder, CouchSurfing International

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.)

It’s hard to assess in how far the CouchSurfing Board is meeting these requirements, apart from 4 (recommended) and 15 (essential): all 5 members of the board have American citizenship, are living in California, are in their thirties, there is one female member and 3 out of 5 are receiving a salary.

Most of the other points don’t seem to be available for public scrutiny (at this point it’s even unclear to me if there are any bylaws).  It would be nice if there were a bit more clarity about this charity.

http://www.bewelcome.info

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

1. * <1 minute: Nothing else is required.
2. * 1-4 minutes: Requires a “don’t panic” email to key volunteers through the emergency response channel notifying what is going on.
3. * 5-29 minutes: Requires at least 12 hours notice to the Tech Team, the Communications Team and the emergency response channel.
4. * 30-59 minutes: Requires at least one week notice to the Leadership Team (LT) & the Communications Team. A 12 hour notice should be given to the Tech Team and emergency response channel.
5. * 60-240 minutes: Require at least one week notice to the LT for approval. Communicate the same as 30-60 mins.
6. * >240 minutes: To be avoided at all cost. Break downtime into 240 minute increments separated by at least 1 week.

]]> http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2008/06/12/couchsurfing-scheduled-downtime-policy/feed/ 2 http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2008/05/08/impressions-of-the-cs-thailand-achievements/ http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2008/05/08/impressions-of-the-cs-thailand-achievements/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 20:56:55 +0000 tgoorden http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/?p=203 To be honest, the list of CSCT achievements confused the hell out of me. Instead of a report on which objectives were achieved through which actions, it’s a huge list of “stuff that we’ve done”. How does all this relate to any kind of overall plan? Was there even a plan?

This is not a report, this is a “shut the fuck up” list. What this list tells me is: “LOOK! We’ve done A LOT! Leave us alone!” Doogies (a CSCT participant) sums it up best in one of his comments on this site:

You wanted to know everything we did in Thailand so you get a document with more than 500 achievements we accomplished there for couchsurfing.

More than 500 achievements! Wow! Unfortunately, I find it clearly symptomatic of a miserable professional result. I’ve seen this approach before: Whenever a large project failure had to be covered up. Been there, done that myself. It’s a sleight of hand technique: By pointing at a huge, unreadable and almost entirely unverifiable list of statements, they are hoping to hoodwink the CS donation base that all that money is serving a purpose and probably to fool themselves in the process. The person responsible for this style of writing is Mandie, showing us again how incompetent she is at what she does. Hold this report up to the standard of any serious non-profit organization and it just becomes sad. This is not a report, it’s a hastily thrown together list of things people could still remember doing.

There is plenty to learn from the report though. In general, it appears that the largest part of the participants has been busy analyzing and communicating. Also, tech has been very busy, probably the most productive team overall (this has always been the case in CS). If anyone seems to have done anything, it’s clearly the programmers. We’ll see how well it all holds up in the summer.

Things that I noticed right away:

• Jim Stone is a scary control freak, which we already knew from the way he bullied everyone in the CS Wiki. Look at what occupies him:
  • ” A reminder system to let people know they should update any reference that has been identified as violating our terms of use.”
  • “References are no longer completely deleted when removed, just hidden for safety concerns. We also know who deleted it, what the reference said, and when it was deleted.”
  • “Deleted Images: The safety team can easily delete images from accounts that are deemed inappropriate. The member is also emailed to let them know with instructions on what they can do next.”
  • “Refined a tool that more easily identifies real spammers and harmful users and doesn’t temporarily falsely identify members as being spammers as often now.”
  • “Deleted posts: every post that’s been deleted, why it was deleted, who did it, when, and ability to reactivate it with one click.” (I’d love to see this list of “whys” sometime.)
• Rachel is a one-stop CS police force: “Directly handled several member disputes.” She obviously doesn’t need to report to anyone, because obviously every communication is an achievement and a report of Rachel’s activities simply isn’t listed.
• Speaking of communication, Mandie thinks this is an achievement: “Email to ambassadors explaining website downtime.” My god. An email. The “report” is full of nonsense entries like that.

But all that is just fun and games. It clearly wasn’t edited anymore than the average OCS post (this says enough), providing hours of entertainment. Meetings are NOT achievements, neither are writing emails, calling people or “Finding a suitable caterer and arranging for daily delivery of food.” (Obviously nobody felt like cooking in a country with such a low wage scale.) Who cares about the “bi-weekly shopping trip”? Or what about ” Administered half-way point evaluation meeting with House Manger.”? That one was from Matthew Brauer, who has a truly sad list of achievements and still can’t spell his name right. (What the hell is it with using nicknames in an “official” report anyway?)

But what is really interesting is what is missing:

• Where is all this generated material being kept? Things like “plan for Alaska Collective including budget, roles, objective and location”, “desired skills sets for volunteers in team”, “‘Core concepts’ to help uncover and articulate what CouchSurfing is about, not about, what its mission is.”, etc etc. The server team doesn’t mention installing a document repository and the Wiki has been shot down Jim Stone style. So, unless I’m mistaken (no way to verify unless Doogie could come out his tower to enlighten us), all these wonderful documents either don’t exist or are sitting in someones harddrive or mailbox. Either way, that will mean 90% of “work done” will be tossed away again for the next collective, like it has happened 2 times already. Remember the huge “organizational chart” that was created before CSCNZ? Exactly. CS management = the way of the Dodo.
• There is absolutely NO mention of 501c3 status. None. Let me repeat that: the entire 501c3 process is completely absent from this report, even though it was in quite a few announcements. What happened guys? Didn’t you work on it or is it not an achievement? Or maybe, perhaps, it was a miserable failure?
• There is not one mention of drafting contracts and exactly one reference to legal work:
  “Phased out one-on-one verification on the advice of our legal team: verification now only available through credit card or a verified PayPal account.”
  Right, so all those expenses towards the CS lawyer(s), 14,234$ in 2007, have only resulted in another way to increase profits? It appears nobody had a contract or even insurance (only travel insurance is mentioned), since none of that is mentioned. (Search for: “legal”, “contract” and “insurance”.)
• What the hell is going on with Casey Fenton (who also doesn’t need a last name)? Why doesn’t he have his own personal achievements, like his buddies Matthew or Jim? Why is he mentioned in second place of a team twice? My guess is that they are trying to shield Casey from direct comments on his behind-the-scenes style of control. Who are they kidding? Where has the “leadership team” gone? Where are the board meetings? Who is on the board anyway? Of course, it’s also possible Casey couldn’t be bothered to write down his list of “achievements” and/or Mandie didn’t dare to ask him.
• Did you know CS has a new team in charge? Neither did I. This time, it’s simply called “CouchSurfing Management” and guess who’s in it? Matthew, Casey, Jim and Weston (member since April 15th, 2007). Congratulations guys, you have finally managed to create your little Northern American boys club.

What else do you see missing from the report? What do you think is the funniest “achievement”?

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

Argument By Selective Reading:

making it seem as if the weakest of an opponent’s arguments was the best he had. Suppose the opponent gave a strong argument X and also a weaker argument Y. Simply rebut Y and then say the opponent has made a weak case.

This is a relative of Argument By Selective Observation, in that the arguer overlooks arguments that he does not like. It is also related to Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension), in that the opponent’s argument is not being fairly represented.

Your argument conveniently omits the more relevant information:

American Red Cross
Top Person: Marsha Evans
Top Salary:* $651,957

Easter Seals
Top Person: James E. Williams Jr.
Top Salary:* $488,300

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Top Person: Thomas Priselac
Top Salary:* $1,503,080

On average these executives from other non-profits made:
$881,112.33

Mattthew Brauer mentions in his post:
~$24,000

Even if we take the lowest figure in that list MB is still only making 4.9%

That title works to grab everyones attention. Hello there lazy bums in Thailand, celebrating ineptitude under the sun!

I was thinking how all the work of the motivated volunteers full of ideals and good intention can be saved. The title was my only answer. One thing i have learned is that people dont really change, i dont expect Casey or the majority of his buddies to be different, despite all the visionary leadership.

Why do I point out that people don’t change? Because I am convinced that they would have to change if Couchsurfing is supposed to progress. Couchsurfing as a website and Organization has grown beyond the size that is governable with the attitude and management employed by Casey and his appointed BurningManBeer Buddies. We are dealing with an Organization that is crooked and mismanaged from the Top. Casey might be a nice guy, he might be a good coder, he might even have that MC1R sexyness to get all the good bitches in the pack, but he is about as good as a manager as Paris Hilton is an expert on Quantum Mechanics.

From the Top down, it was all about happiness and fun, NEVER about accountability and results. Casey initially, when first launching cs.com public, already made a claim on how cs is a 501c3 non profit. He either made a false claim, which would make him a liar and crooked person, possibly a felon, since he collected the donations, or an amazingly inept manager. You don’t run an Organization without knowing its legal status, dot! I tend to go with a third option though. He is a hopeless dreamer, who wants to make a 501c3 and heal the world, but gets ahead of reality way too much. This pattern was followed in the whole CS team and Spirit of Organization. Sure, it would be great to have a good manager, but lets settle for someone who COULD be a good manager, such as TTT, but who actually sucks ass since he settles for having a manager title, rather than doing the job, just like Casey and 501c3. On CS, the culture of Vaporware needs to go. The people will not change, so unless they go, Cs will never proceed beyond the Fratboys who would LOVE to be cool, but end up being drunk failures.

They ALL lack the self confidence to critically reflect upon their managerial skills or the apparent lack of. The root of all this is of course, Casey. He appointed Managers who lack the wit and gut to debate with a dissenting community. A dissenting community that actually argues constructively and is kind enough to share all the solutions.

CS, thanks to the pressure built up by Pickwick, is about to arrive in the cloud of Accountability that is the real world. I hereby Claim that there will be no milestone accomplishment at the Thai Collective, which will make it nothing more than an expensive party for Casey and his equally inept cronies.

You run an Organization and fail to deliver, you go. If Couchsurfing.com is all about buying Caseys’ Burning Man crew 4 Months of sponsored Holidays on the beach along with pussy that would not be available to this elusive group of mediocre men, then Couchsurfing.com is indeed a brilliant success for aforementioned visionary leader and his associates. It would of course make it a racket and scam, morally at least, regardless of how it would be judged by a legal professional.

If Couchsurfing is not a racket and scam but instead an organization with genuinely good intentions, then it is a failure on all accounts. Absolute top-performing professionals in their respective field get alienated or sacked by a management that has possibly not even learned how to spell (project) management. The Couchsurfing Management in its current incarnation is a direct result of Casey Fentons inability to accept superior skill from employees and volunteers. The current management has a track record of rejecting highly skilled employees and outside advice, lacks skill and self confidence along with the inability to accomplish anything themselves.

You guys all need to go. I am glad CS is in the Real World SOON, legally speaking. Casey and friends, you guys talk all the talk, all the time. I have yet to see anyone walk the walk. I invite you to prove me wrong, but you and me, we both know, you fail.

p.s. i invite everyone to personally attack me on my position, preferably somewhere in real life

p.p.s please, since i am so full of shit, be so kind and make a list of all the accomplished managerial successes of the current leadership team, since thats all that it takes to turn my whole posting into a pile of shit. hint: most mangers work 45-50h a week and deliver results correlating to this

I have left the couchsurfing system administration team. The main (and almost only) reason is communication, and the bad, or even non-existent version of it.

I am not surprised and not particularly happy with this news. CouchSurfing keeps on growing and growing and it’s not healthy to depend on a stream of new and unexpecting volunteers who are not experienced with the specifics of the technical and social side of the CouchSurfing website and organization with an ever growing number of members.

Diederik, I’m looking forward to finally meet you. If not in Antwerpen this weekend surely somewhere in the Randstad very soon.

Hint: don’t use MyISAM tables for mission-critical data. And try to get some MySQL support engineers working on it. Oh but wait, one year ago there actually was a MySQL support engineer that joined the Collective with money out of his own pocket and was working for CouchSurfing in his own spare time.

Now, since I am still blocked from the wiki that I founded, can someone please add the following text to http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Stranded_Travelers

==Trento meeting 11th and 12th January==

Call +39 33 47 18 30 42 (Kasper).

Thanks.

Kasper: “major source of income”

Is that income needed? Surely a much smaller stream of new members, recruited in a better way, could raise the moderate amounts necessary to pay server costs, paper clips and a few postage stamps.

Current spending is mostly for
A) salaries, and I think we had much better quality work from the volunteers “no longer retained”;
B) the exodus to Thailand, and I have yet to see any actual WORK mentioned that was done there in the 31 days of December (other than picking the place for January).

So the money seems to benefit those who make the decisions. Thankfully we are a charity now and published accounts have to be more accurate and more detailed than hitherto. Which reminds me that there are still areas of concern regarding the charitable status:

1. The financial statements online are still not identical with the ones filed with the US tax authorities and the New Hampshire charities regulators.

2. Casey may have perjured himself by stating falsely to the Attorney General that from 2003 to 2006 the company had several directors besides himself. The major reason for that could be that the truth may affect the legality of his own employment.

a) New Hampshire law requires a minimum of five directors, so with Casey as sole director the company had no legally composed Board of Directors. For that reason alone contracts entered into during that time may be invalid, including the employment contract he made with himself.

b) Casey as sole director signed his own employment contract on the dotted lines of both sides of the contract. There could not be a more blatant violation of all ‘conflict of interest’ principles, and for that reason alone this contract may be invalid.

c) New Hampshire law does not allow the chairman/president of a charity to be an employee at the same time. So when Casey as chairman/president signed his own employment contract he violated that law, and for this reason alone the contract may be invalid.

d) If Casey’s employment contract is invalid, he will have received his salaries without legal grounds, and may have to pay ~$70,000 back to the company. (That, and the other ~$70,000 of accumulated profits in the bank should keep CouchSurfing going for a good many years to come, as a volunteer based charity, without ill prepared world trips for the management.)

At the New Hampshire Department of Justice the case has been queued for review by an investigator in early 2008. My advice to the new Board of Directors is: sort it out before they start asking questions.

To sum up: I don’t think money is a valid argument to continue this unhealthy growth pattern.

On 14th November 2007 you eventually filed Annual Reports for the years 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 with the Attorney General of New Hampshire, where under penalties of perjury you falsely stated the composition of the Board of Directors in 2004, 2005 and 2006 to be: Casey Fenton, Daniel M Hoffer, Leonardo Silveira, Sebastien G LeTuan.

My advice is to file a correction immediately. An investigation for perjury in connection with filed Annual Reports may have unfortunate consequences for the application for federal tax exempt status according to section 501(c)(3) IRS code.

2. New Hampshire statute also says in RSA 292:6-a that “No employee of a charitable nonprofit corporation shall hold the position of chairperson or presiding officer of the board” [3]. This means, Casey, that you need to resign either your chairmanship of the board, or your employment.

My advice is to do it immediately. An unlawful composition of the board or unlawful tenure of the board’s chairman can have unfortunate consequences for the validity of board decisions or signatures on documents, like for instance the application for federal tax exempt status according to section 501(c)(3) IRS Code.

[1] www.sos.nh.gov/imaging/9649082.pdf
[2] groups.google.com/group/cs-dev-public/msg/c8d070ae5333e5f4?
[3] www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/XXVII/292/292-6-a.htm

CouchSurfing now has 4 full time, paid members of staff. That’s a 300% increase in professional resources within the organisation. What exactly are all these professionals doing?

Here’s a few things they’re not doing which they could be doing.

• Publishing finances, up to the minute (it’s really not hard)
• Getting 501(c)(3) status (again, really not hard)
• Publishing LT meeting minutes (extremely easy)
• Getting a new NDA sorted (seriously, it doesn’t take 15 months)

Perhaps they’re too busy partying, having threesomes, burning da man, banning people from the wiki, spreading the verification disease, etc. Who knows eh?

• CouchFinder: “Choose any location on the glob, specify a within-range and click search. This handy tool will show you all couches within your chosen area.”
• Joined Members: “A little tool that, provided any CS group-id, will list the last recently signed up members in chronological order”.

I wonder how far this approach can be taken though…

Now I’m trying to get the profile export tool somewhere in a public space, so that it can be added.

503 Service Unavailable

No server is available to handle this request.

I hope this will be quickly resolved. Still, funny how this technical issue coincides with CS’s dodgy legal status.

An addition, after some complaints about this blog post, which is, I contend, a bit silly on its own…

The dodgy legal status of CS is related to the financial situation. A 501(c)(3) status means paying less tax, and complete transparency (if a politician in San Francisco can make his Quicken books public, in real-time, why not CS?).

And it’s clear how finances and server issues are related. The time and money Casey spent on partying with Jim on his birthday (and renting a limo) would have been better invested in server hardware and maintenance.

It’s getting heart breaking in here. And cold. Icy cold. All the ‘open source’ and ‘charity’ debate left me disagreeing, but unhurt. This Thai project does me in.
www.couchsurfing.com/collective_thailand_application.html

First the cold, demanding, uppity language itself. Then what looks like a “suck ‘em dry & spit ‘em out” attitude of present and future ‘Volunteer Coordination’. Then the cynicism luring generous, well meaning people to commit crimes and risk jail for lying to immigration police in a post 9/11 world.
www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=429&post=401914#pos…

Shame on you. Shame on those who do it. Shame on those who sit close by and watch in silent complicity. It’s time to hold Casey & Friends accountable, if not to members, then at least to the law.

The Royal Thai Government have received a formal query about the immigration requirements for the project. They know you are coming, so you better cut out the criminal part of your plan.

The charity question needs a decision. Casey opened his mouth in 2003, and he now either sings, or shuts it again. No more smoke screens. Run the show how you think you must, but run it well, and stop lying. A thoroughly documented formal query about possible Unlawful Charitable Solicitations will be placed before the Attorney General of New Hampshire “practically tomorrow”. My advice: hurry and be there first, with a genuine charity.

So, what is the current status? Why hasn’t there been an annual report of 2006? As of this day, is there more variation in the official positions of CouchSurfing International Inc.? We were informed that Dan and Seb are members of the board now, but before January 2007, when Casey announced that he was the only member of the Board, many people thought that all 4 Founders were on the Board. Or not? We can’t know, since…

More burning questions:

• Why did CS  (or rather Casey) pretend to be a 501(c)(3)?
• Are there bylaws? And if so, what do they look like?
• How can we get more insight in the situation? Is it possible to get informed about organization at US government instances, e.g. the IRS, or the N.H. Dept. of Revenue Administration?
• And why is there not more public information?

With the nauseating smell of deception all around, it’s probably about time for Casey Fenton to start thinking about disclosing some more of “the facts”.
Disclaimer: Do not believe everything you read here. But do check out the links.

Yesterday, I loaned two American girls a key to my house. I had met them about 30 minutes before that. They followed me home from the train station, happily handing over parts of their luggage to relieve their own back. None of us asked for passports, identification, or anything. They are 19 years old. If you would try to explain this to an average person, they’d probably declare us nuts, but they would be mistaken. It is pure and simple “trust by default” and an extremely refreshing feeling considering the world we live in.

Oddly enough, it appears that for the organisation of Couchsurfing, this basic principle of trusting each other has been completely turned on its head. Of course, the most obvious and glaring distrust is between people in the leadership team and anyone critical of them. We have come to the point that practically any statement critical of the leaders results in the commenter being filed under the “haters” category, which can only happen if CS leaders like Jim Stone or Matthew Brauer distrust any interested volunteers by default. Worse, they have taken actions in return that can only be interpreted as defensive (moving of threats on forums, taking away rights on the Wiki, etc etc).

If you look at the organisational structure of Couchsurfing, you will notice that “distrust by default” is present everywhere. You cannot become ambassador if the already established ambassadors don’t explicitly trust you and it is very obvious they have a very different standard for that than they would as CS hosts. Worse still, you can’t ever become an admin or a leader if Casey doesn’t trust you personally and his criteria are, to say the least, murky. What do Jim and Matthew have in common which makes them elligable for this top position?

1. A long term relationship with Casey.
2. Americans.
3. A fondness for partying hard*. (Burning man, etc.)

*This is something we hardly ever talk about, but common knowledge for anyone who’s been to a collective. It’s one of those unspoken truths that everyone seems to avoid on OCS, because it can easily be interpreted as a personal attack. To be clear: I’m not making moral judgements here about how they spend their free time (hey, go nuts!), but it does worry me that the organisational top is held together by this. However juicy the rest of the gossip is, I’m happy it doesn’t appear here.

Perhaps, and this is speculation of course, this situation has to do with some fundamental aspect of Casey’s psyche. If anything, the structure of CS is a reflection of his personality. And aren’t Jim and Matthew merely “channeling” Casey’s fundamental distrust, while of course taking it a bit further than Casey ever did? The fact that Casey started a trust network doesn’t have to be a contradiction to this, it could easily be an overcompensation on his part.

I don’t expect Casey to suddenly see the light and invite “us” into his castle. This would require an almost superhuman effort. But, something will happen eventually. Maybe something or someone will “break” eventually. (Casey has quit the project before, he might do it again.) Maybe people will drift off in separate directions.

The only thing I can hope for is that – somewhere in the future – the Couchsurfing organisation will reflect the one thing that it’s members rely on every day: trust.

Have a great weekend. Thomas

Mikky:

found a member recently who sent the money but when i verified her, she had her profile already deleted, guess we should refund her the money.
right?

Mikky

Jim:

We only refund when asked to do so.

Jim

Mikky:

 would you (“we”?) qualify this as fair, serious and professional behaviour?

i would call it a second class behaviour

+ it doesn´t fit to all the wannabee speech…

“we” might wanna reconsider this

Mikky

Jim:

As far as I know this person has not asked for a refund. It’s not up to us to decide that they suddenly want their money back unless they ask for it. What do you not get about that?

I don’t appreciate your tone here, Mikky. If you have a problem with me please try to learn to be respectful of your other teammates and take this out of this group where we can deal with this privately.

Jim

Mikky:

well i asked a simple question if CS will follow a professional well will spirit of fair trade

you gave a simple answer

easy as that

i don´t think that your privat appreciations are a topic here.
feel free to email me and i would gladly inform you what RESPECT is all about.

Mikky

CS is “accepting applications for a small number of specific positions, including a full-time House Manger whose airfare to Thailand will be paid by CouchSurfing.”

I hope the Leadership Team is aware of the very strict laws in Thailand.

I agree. I’m also Anu’s #1 fan

And I thought I was!

Although I have moved on to support the hospitality movement through BeWelcome.org, where a true democracy exists and no one is making money off the generosity of others, where volunteers are respected and treated with honesty and fairness by other volunteers acting as leaders with the consent of the community, I sometimes check in at CouchSurfing to see what my friends are up to and to check on the community I love and gladly worked for as a full-time volunteer until it was led away from the CS 2.0 vision by the current management.

Not well, I would say.

I feel that trying to influence the power elite of CS is futile through any other than legal means, but I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of Anu.

I worked very closely with her for more than six months. During this time, she demonstrated excellent qualities of self-motivation, leadership, responsible communication, and technical competence. But more impressive was her tireless devotion to the community, always advocating for it, always nurturing it, always defending it (even with anger at times). And above all, most impressive was her direct honesty and integrity.
She was the obvious choice for Tech Team leader, in the minds of Kasper and I, and I believe she had the support of Joe by that time. We were the 4 core volunteer developers who together did the bulk of the technical work on this website during most of the year following the Montreal Collective, where CS 2.0 was launched.

Anu was blacklisted by the CS elite, and passed over as leader of the Tech Team. After many months of devoted work on behalf of the community, the wishes of the Tech Team on this matter were completely ignored, not even consulted.

Anu has been unappreciated and treated with disrespect. This is unconscionable. Myself and other volunteers of the Tech Team were mislead and treated with disrespect.

When I resigned as a volunteer, I had strong suspicions about the motives of the CS elite, but I gave them what benefit of the doubt I could and was willing to support CS as a corporation providing a service to the hospitality community. After what I have seen and what has come to light since, no longer can I support it under the current management.

Casting dispersions on Anu’s integrity is going too far. She deserves an apology.

Calling people who gave heart and soul to this community, but now feel mislead and betrayed by the CS elite, and are angry about it, “CS-haters”, is reprehensible.

This is in the style of the Bush administration, which brands all critics of its policies “unpatriotic“.

Let me out of here. I’m deleting my profile.

John

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 )

“as apparently one of “them”… all I have to say I have said elsewhere (see below).

For a quick read (online time is scarce these days) I can’t help but agreeing with Pickwick – this call for positivity is starting to sound a bit too cult-like to me. Also, how can you claim you know “those guys” hate CS? Have you actually talked with them about why they volunteered for CS in the first place? What aspects of CS they do enjoy, and why? Have you asked why they stuck by while being treated like shit? Would you have done the same, if received the same treatment, repeatedly?

For me personally, I would have left long ago IF I didn’t care about what this community still stands for for me. The fact that I’m still somewhat involved (the thread is getting thinner, just in case you haven’t noticed) is because I still have all the faith in the community, if not the leadership.

Anu
PS. yes it IS starting to feel like a waste of my time to keep kicking this particular dead horse, so perhaps you can all “be positive” soon enough (thankfully there are other projects where some critical thinking is actually welcome, and responded to with due respect, and where *gasp* even Kasper’s input is more than appropriate!)
————————————————
Current opinion of CS:
It’s an adventure machine, and a world full of friends I haven’t met yet! I cherish the CS community, which is full of amazing people and hope to meet many more of them on the remaining paths of my trip.

BUT after a year of volunteering I can say I’m not happy of the current events: seeing CS disregarding its culturally diverse member base (with a non-American majority) and entertaining values of the American corporate culture. Although my belief in the community itself is strong, I don’t share this view on the way CS is currently lead. Feel free to disagree, or take the red pill…

www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/14/hc-might-soon-be-open-so…
Anu Aug 15th, 2007 at 3:52 pm

Along the same lines here – for me it was never about open source (though by seeing the most recent standpoints of CS, I do tend to agree more and more with OCS views), but about overall fairness and openness in policies and decision-making. So I would not just blindly jump onto HC or any other organization that does not actively address these issues.”

* D did interesting_user to D (20070816070640)
* P did interesting_user to I (20070816070517)
* G did interesting_user to G (20070816070453)
* S did interesting_user to E (20070816070117)
* c did interesting_user to c (20070816070104)
* B did password reset to B (20070816065925)
* M did interesting_user to T (20070816065628)
* M did interesting_user to L (20070816065410)
* T did interesting_user to COUCHSURFING SYSTEM (20070816065307)

(Note that people find themselves very interesting.)

The CouchSurfing volunteer coordinator (2000 US$/month), who should be able to fix this in 10 minutes, respond on August 15th:

Basically, I’d need to do what you should have done and go post it myself in the bug tracker. That’s not really efficient for anyone. Also, since only one other person has bothered on discussing this it’s not likely to be changed. I’d suggest to wait and see if anyone else supports this idea and go from there. I don’t personally see a problem with it, myself.

I’m sure that the CS VC doesn’t see a problem, since he can read the messages of all CouchSurfers, so he’s not very used to people fathoming their privacy. But I’m sure his attitude will lead to herds of new volunteers posting stuff in the bug tracker, or removing spam on the CouchSurfing wiki. Yay for efficiency for anyone!

That’s probably true. Did you do this for everyone that is not very active (or simply inactive) on this Wiki or only people associated with OpenCouchSurfing.org? As an aside, I have to say I’m a bit shocked to see you consider it your right to make that decision all by yourself without any type of communication. Maybe you don’t see the problem with such arbitrary actions, but I surely do. –Tgoorden 12:48, 7 August 2007 (EDT)

Yes, the conflict of interest regarding your active affiliation with an anti-CS website was taken into consideration but was not the full reason as I stated already. Thanks for your opinion. –RedCouchGuy 13:35, 7 August 2007 (EDT)

I still think that the CouchSurfing Leadership Team knows the difference between the concepts open and anti.  But it worries me that they mix them up so easily. I think that everyone involved in OpenCS is doing this because they love CouchSurfing as a community. (Its members, the activity of meeting, hosting and staying with them.) I am involved in OpenCS because I cannot accept a Leadership that bullies its (former and current) volunteers around like this, not as a (former) volunteer, nor as a member.

It seems that Jim wants to keep all the power for himself. No longer will he be sharing his Wiki admin rights with us mere CouchSurfing Corporation Customers, no, no, no. He’s a paid member of staff now, he’s special…

It’s a little ironic, I was thinking about unblocking Kasper from the Wiki, but I decided it would be better to try and talk it out with Jim. With hindsight, perhaps that was a mistake. Jim apparently ain’t one for talking.

From Jim Stone ^{Aug 4}

Extremely Negative

I once thought Kasper was able to separate friendship from business and keep things professional. I was wrong. Friends don’t routinely bash each other personally in public and scream “you’re a f*cking asshole!” in public forums. I should have known better, but Kasper will do whatever it takes to push his twisted agenda. He’ll demand special treatment and then cry when he doesn’t get his way. Beware – this man will stab you in the back after he borrows the knife from you. In his own words ( http://www.couchsurfing.com/group_read.html?gid=3886&post=304127 ): “I don’t know what I’m trying to achieve. But I’m not stopping.”

Thanks Jim. How do you seperate friendship and business now that you get 2000 US$ a month to coordinate volunteers?

So the CouchSurfing Corporation is finally starting to pay off…

Jim says that Kasper blanked a bunch of pages, then posted links to another web site. In other words, Kasper moved content from one Wiki to another. Kasper explained that he felt the content was more appropriate on the other Wiki.

In typical CouchSurfing fashion, there was no discussion, no explanation, no consultation, Jim simply blocked Kasper’s account. Gotta love dictatorships huh?!

CouchSurfing recently announced that they have hired two new staff. As we’ve come to expect, there were no interviews, no positions advertised, no visible application process. Instead, Casey invited two of his close friends to join him in receiving a salary from CouchSurfing.

In other news, Chris Burley said in a recent group post, “I wish you the best with democracy, it is known that it tends to crush minority voices. Besides, the majority rarely knows best.” Wow, that’s an interesting statement. But we all knew CouchSurfing isn’t a democracy, didn’t we? Now we do.

One might suggest Chris is in danger of falling foul of the US Patriot Act if he’s not careful.

06:32 (Block log) (diff; hist) . . RedCouchGuy (Talk | contribs) (blocked “User:Guaka” with an expiry time of 1 week: blanking 20+ pages and replacing them with links to another website – spam

Way to go, old pal. That’s coordinating your volunteers, and a great step forwards on the way to the Culture of Appreciation!

So, you might have heard about Mr Whatley because of his amazing NDA writing skills. I just found out on the social business network that he’s actually been CouchSurfing’s Chief Financial Officer since April 2006. Note that this must have been updated fairly recently, with “over 200,000 members and growing strong”. Note that there is no mention of a Chief Financial Officer on CouchSurfing.com.

Matthew T. Whatley, Esq.

Owner, The Law Offices of Matthew T. Whatley

Current

• Chief Financial Officer at Couchsurfing International, Inc.
• Owner at The Law Offices of Matthew T. Whatley (Sole Proprietorship)
• Owner at Ninja Tax Services (Sole Proprietorship)

Education

• Mahawithayalai Mahidol

• Golden Gate University, School of Law

• Carnegie Mellon University

 

• Keio Gijuku Daigaku

Connections

41 connections

Industry

Law Practice

Websites

• My Company
• My Blog

Public Profile

http://www.linkedin.com/in/whatley

Summary

I am an entrepreneur at heart and love helping others found and grow their own small businesses. I am interested in taking on new clients and founding relationships with other attorneys. I primarily serve the Arts and Small Business communities. I would say the majority of my clients go to Burning Man every year.

Specialties:

Personal and Small Business Income Tax Preparation and Minimization, Business Planning, International Business Contracts, Sarbanes-Oxley Auditing, Offshore Asset Protection, Personal Injury Law

Experience

Chief Financial Officer

Couchsurfing International, Inc.

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

April 2006 – Present (1 year 3 months)

www.couchsurfing.com
Profile Name: Matt
With over 200,000 members and growing strong, Couchsurfing allows people to host or be hosted in over 100 different countries throughout the globe thus sponsoring cultural exchange and creating a world wide community of travelers.
I manage the finances.

…

It is much better to know that the Couchsurfing admins really don’t want to discuss our issues than to be left with a false glimmer of hope. CouchSurfing has – for good or for bad – decided to show itself as a top-down run community and while I don’t agree with that decision, it is at least clear and final.

There are a few small corrections I would like to make (read the letter first):

1. OpenCouchSurfing was primarily about a Free and Open CouchSurfing organisation. While OSS (Open Source Software) would certainly have helped in getting there, it was hardly the only proposal that has been made. For me personally, an Open Organisation was a much more important issue for instance.
2. “We value group consensus above individual ideology” seems a bit weird to me. We had over 90 people signing the petition, including two admins, so its hardly an individual ideology. There were many people that really would have like to see some of our proposals come true, but unfortunately we don’t have the keys to the castle.
3. As has happened before, Chris makes it sound like it was more about style than about content (“constructive criticism”). I think most people will agree that there has been ample opportunity to engage in friendly debate for the admins, which was never taken up. Most critical (but friendly/constructive) questions have simply been ignored over several months. It should be of no suprise that this angers people in many ways and it is therefor quite unreasonable to expect friendly banter all the time. “We’re working on it” or “we’ll publish something… soon” can hardly be considered constructive debate either.

In conclusion I would like to personally thank everyone who has tried to help us make a positive change within CouchSurfing towards a more Open and Free organisation. I do not feel that this was a wasted effort as getting the admins to make up their minds is an added value by itself. Amongst the relatively few cases of outright hostility, there were plenty of comments that helped us to continue this extremely difficult effort. Thank you for that support.

• The proposed Volunteer Agreement in all its paranoid glory. Read it and weep.
• Appearantly the tax ninja that wrote it* is on the Board of directors! Who knew? (Hint: noone.)
• We’re also keeping track of everyone that quit or will never start developing for CS because of this fiasco.

That’s all for today.

*: Or copied it from here. CS really seems to have problems writing original text. Maybe they need a copywriter to volunteer for that?