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I saw a discussion about CouchSurifng International Inc attemping to trademark the term “CouchSurfing”. I feel like this is something I would like to take action on, but I’m not quite sure what action to take.
I guess that if we can find uses of the term “couchsurfing” before the incorporation of CS Inc, that would provide a basis to challenge the trademark registration. Does anyone have references to such uses?
Is this an issue worth pursuing? Comments on a postcard…
Our Alaska mirror blog has ruffled some feathers. Somebody changed the CouchSurfing blog feed. Instead of the whole post being included in the feed, now only the excerpt is included. So anyone reading the blog in a feed reader has been highly inconvenienced.
I’ll bet some clever bod thought this would stop our mirror blog. Wrong! It’ll take more than a little inconvenience to keep us pirates down. I’m pleased to report, that after a brief outage, the mirror blog is now back in full working order, with full post text.
So if you want to read the blog in your feed reader, subscribe to our feed instead, and get the comments!
We have won the battle, but I suspect this will not be the end of the war. As a Sun Tzu disciple, I have studied the enemy closely. I have anticipated their next seven moves. Fear not, their incompetence will not stand in the way of democracy and freedom. The pirates wil overcome their foolish attempts to quell free speech. Vive la revolucion!
You can see Alaska Collective blog here and subscribe to the feed here.
Unfortunately, comments are not allowed on the blog. To be more precise, you must be logged in to comment. But registration of new users is not allowed. So in effect, only those with permission can comment. Let’s hope this will change soon.
However, as a quick alternative, I propose to create a mirror of the blog content, with the same open-comments policy we use here at OpenCS. It’s fairly trivial to set up, and would allow open debate on each post. What do you think? Please provide a +1 or -1 in your comment if you think it’s a good or bad idea.
People ask, how can they support OpenCouchSurfing? Likewise, I often meet people who support the ideals, but also want to support CouchSurfing. They might have paid for verification. They don’t totally agree with the way CouchSurfing is run, but they want to support the organisation anyway.
My idea is to offer people a way to support CouchSurfing financially, while also supporting the ideals of OpenCouchSurfing. That’s the basic premise.
I think it could work as follows. We create one or more funds or trusts. These funds are clearly constituted. They exist to support the work of CouchSurfing, within certain conditions. Rather like the government supports universities in the UK, but the money comes with requirements. The universities must behave in a certain way to be eligible for the cash.
A simple example might be server costs. We could create a fund to pay for CouchSurfing’s server costs. So long as CouchSurfing International Inc submits invoices for these costs, the fund would reimburse the expenses. This is just a simple example.
The underlying concept is to give members a way to financially support CouchSurfing, while still upholding the principles of OpenCouchSurfing.
We could also provide a mechanism for members to display and verify their donations. For example, images which could be inserted into the user’s profile, showing how much that user has donated. This might help to spread the message amongst members. In effect, we would be creating an alternative to the CouchSurfing verification system.
This is very much an idea right now. It needs considerable research and discussion before being implemented. Please share your thoughts at this early stage. Can you see merit in the concept? Would you be willing to donate money through such a framework? All feedback will be appreciated.
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
This site has become very active. There are a lot of people spending time and energy here. I would like to propose that we begin to channel that energy into proactive, positive action.
I think the first step is to identify areas or projects which can make a positive difference to CouchSurfing. A great example is the recent idea to create elected ambassadors. I think that was a great idea, and if it takes off, will make a really big impact on CouchSurfing.
I have more thoughts to share on that, but I will share those in a new post. I’d like to keep the focus of this post simple. What can we do to make a positive difference? Please share your thoughts, as a comment here, or as a whole new post. If you have any trouble creating a post, contact myself, Kasper, Anu or Thomas.
Let the brainstorming roll… 
I believe CouchSurfing and Casey Fenton have broken, and continue to break, the law. Among other things, I believe that member’s “donations” are being misused. I think this misuse is the clearest breach of the law.
As the membership continues to grow, the potential for abuse also continues to grow. I think this situation must be brought to a head as a matter of urgency.
My proposal is to start a CouchSurfing legal fund. A financial fund where individuals could choose to donate money. That money would be used to pursue legal action against crimes perpetrated by CouchSurfing International Inc and Casey Fenton.
I think a number of issues would need to be addressed prior to any donations being accepted.
Pickwick has diligently researched the legal constitution CouchSurfing. I think this work has made the greatest progress towards the goals of OpenCouchSurfing. I believe this area of work should be financially supported on a larger scale.
To start the ball rolling, I, Callum Macdonald, pledge $100 to this fund. I’ll make the actual donation once the fund is in place.
I warmly invite you to share your opinion, and if you feel appropriate, make a financial pledge. (Dislcaimer, financial pledges will be entirely voluntarily, so any commitment you make here is not legally binding.)
We’re researching which visa type collective volunteers will need.
Later in the same paragraph:
CouchSurfing will ensure that all participants are in Thailand on the legal and appropriate visa, and that they are able to stay for the duration of the Collective.
The collective is due to start on 1 December, that’s in 6 days. Yet apparently they’re still researching visas? If I had volunteered to go to Thailand to participate, I’d expect to know by now what visa I need.
Volunteers are required to stay for a minimum of 2 months. To stay in Thailand for 2 months you need a visa, and you need to get that visa before you arrive. Visas on arrival are for 30 days and getting to the border and back can be costly depending on where the collective will be held.
I hope the volunteers are aware of the situation and have considered the consequences of volunteering for CouchSurfing, I fear most have not.
CouchSurfing members received an email yesterday telling them that, at long last, CouchSurfing has filed for 501(c)(3) status. The email also claimed that currently, CouchSurfing is a charity, and is legally dedicated to charitable purposes.
What was missing, as usual, was any sort of external verification. Casey helpfully provided a link to the Wikipedia page on 501(c)(3) status and an irs.gov page for those eager to learn more. Neither of these links have directly relate to CouchSurfing, nor do they do anything to confirm CouchSurfing’s current legal status, or confirm that any application for 501(c)(3) status has been filed.
There was no link to a copy of the paperwork, no postal tracking number, no evidence whatsoever that anything has been filed anywhere. There was no copy of any filed paperwork regarding CouchSurfing’s current status, no links showing that “non-profit” status cannot be easily revoked in New Hampshire. As usual, we are expected to trust our “visionary leader”.
Personally, I think it’s clear that Comrade Casey felt the pressure from Pickwick’s legal questions, and the openCS campaign in general. The response was as usual, ignore, ignore, ignore, then organise a seemingly unrelated press stunt to make people feel better without actually proving anything.
In conclusion, until I see independent confirmation that CouchSurfing has filed for 501(c)(3) status, I will consider it a possibility at best. It is clear to me that the CouchSurfing leadership cannot be taken at their word.
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