This site was archived on 24 April 2012. No new content can be posted. The mailing list remains online and the site will stay in this archived state for the forseeable future. If you find any technical errors on the site, please contact Callum.



Archive for the 'Campaigns' Category

Page 3 of 9

She’s knocking on your door!

She’s the one that moves me! She is the one that takes me where I want to be! SHE found a church to share thoughts on sustainable hospitality exchange. The space SHE found is just awesome, it provides over 100 chairs, 7 tables, space for plenary sessions, space for workshops, space for art-exhibitions, a bar we can organise ourselves and… four toilets! She moves me alright!

SHE is a conference on Sustainable Hospitality Exchange that takes place during the last weekend of June. It will be based in the center of Amsterdam on a very accessible location. The place is an old and big squat that was recently bought and renovated by the residents. The financial cost for use is 500-750 euro.

She takes me to the place where I long to be! She moves me, does she move you yet? She moves me, yeah, she moves alright, she gonna move me yeah, alright! Check her out at wiki-space and contribute!

SHE & you for Sustainable Hospitality Exchange

Yeah! by robokow.netYeah! What about a conference on hospitality exchange, could we bring that about? A conference to share our experiences as volunteers, facilitators, organizers, hosts and guests? Let’s say a conference where we can create new concepts of sustainable hospitality exchange (SHE) and to discuss how hospitality networks currently interact with their users and members, how this could be improved and link this with sustainable forms of traveling, art, volunteer empowerment, cultural exchange, trust metrics, gift-economy and pre-modern roots of hospitality exchange? Wow, wouldn’t that be just awesome?!

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!

A survey?

I was wondering whether anyone would think it a good idea to start a survey / series of surveys on aspect(s) of Couchsurfing.com. Surveymonkey and other websites offer easy-enough tools for that; it may be a constructive effort that we can make quite easily.

Since my personal biggest frustration with CS is the communication, I guess that would be as good a place to start as any. A good question format for this purpose may be to give statements and ask people to rate whether or not they agree with them; anyone is welcome to contribute statements (would be nice if you could keep them somewhat serious, lol), or give me other feedback regarding this idea.

Abandon ship!

The following sounds familiar? It should, it’s the couchsurfing leadership style!

  • Take responsability (either assertively or, using the other CS-keyword, aggressively)
  • Make promises. The less tangible or the more gratuitous, the better
  • Silence the criticism when you don’t live up to your promise (by adapting the ground rules; by moving the criticism; by deleting threads?)
  • When the above doesn’t help: ignore the criticism
  • When the above doesn’t help: spin
  • If all else fails: ‘loose interest’ (i.e., abandon ship)

Many of you will find this a minor issue, and you’d be right. But today, Donna announced her intention to drop moderatorship of the CS Politics and Policy group. It is typical of the above style: if your blatant lack of skill / involvement to make a much-wanted change gets too obvious, simply drop your responsability and you’re done!

For some time now I’ve been having the impression that many ‘leaders’ and their groupies have distanced themselves more and more from the regular usership. This instance was particularly clear, but I’m sure there have been others as well. All these little kings and queens, much too busy with their self-created importance to bother about the actual cause they claim to work so hard for… it would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Sorry for ranting, I don’t usually do that. In any case, I do hope that none of ‘us’ will be foolish enough to lift this problem off Donna’s shoulders. Would do her good to actually address a (self-inflicted) problem for a change (gosh, did that sound bitter? ;) )

CouchSurfing member council

Following the recent idea to create elected ambassadors and my post about channelling our energy, I have an idea. I think the concept of elections are very powerful. While not a perfect mechanism, it is a good one. So I’m bouncing ideas around trying to figure out how we could use elections within CouchSurfing.

We want to avoid resistance from the established systems. So I think using the term Ambassador will cause confusion. However, a group of people could quite reasonably choose to elect a “community leader” or “community representative”. That idea got me thinking about creating a CouchSurfing member council.

A group of democratically elected representatives who have the permission of the community to address matters on their behalf. This could be a very powerful mechanism. These individuals could serve as a channel for members to interface with the CouchSurfing organisation.

I think most people agree that communication is the biggest operational problem facing CouchSurfing right now. A mechanism like a member council could help this process. If there was one person for each town / city, speaking on behalf of the community, the voice would carry a great deal of weight. Likewise if the system scaled up to regional / national representation.

Of course, there is a great risk that it would simply create politics for the sake of politics. But I do believe it could work.

Does anyone have experience of designing systems like this? Any experience in organisations of this nature? Would anyone care to share their comments / feedback / criticism / etc?

Channeling our energy

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… :)

Security through lies

Most readers here know that the famous MDST (Member Dementing & Sensorship Team) deletes threads for “security reasons”. No, there are no security problems at CS. Never heard about thieves, molesters and similar stuff. Of course it’s a stupid way to “clean” the community, but at least it helps to sell out the company if the application for “non-profit”/”charity”-stuff in New Hampshire fails. (Or Casey just get bored of CS.) But that’s not the issue here.

Yesterday the news at CS announces:

Buggin’ Out!

Fixes to the “location bug” brings back functionality better than ever!
20. March 2008 Once again, the shining stars on our tech team have successfully tackled an error in the system to get things back to normal on the site for you.

You may have noticed the site was offline for a short while today. This downtime was scheduled so the tech team could fix the recent issues experienced with correctly reflecting members’ locations.

Check out what features are back for you!

* Nearby travelers on members’ home page will now actually be nearby!
* When you search for a couch in a city, you can now effectively search for members within a chosen radius of that city. Let’s say you want to CouchSurf in Gdansk, Poland but there are only a handful of CouchSurfers there. You can once again search for a couch within, say, 20 km of Gdansk. Hurray!
* Location map on member’s profiles will reflect the correct location. Members will no longer randomly be placed in Africa… unless you live in Africa!
* Recent member login location will reflect correct location as accurately as possible. (Click here for information on why it may not always be right) If you were logged in during the downtime, you may need to log out and log back in to show the proper location.

A round of applause for the tech team volunteers- job well done!

First of all: Great, they finally not only do something with the code they also announce it. I’ve also noticed, some minor bug fixes have been done (months after reporting) and some small improvement are online, most of them asked for again and again in the last years. But nothing really impressing. And here the good news already stop.

So let’s “check out what features are back” for us: All the four points mentioned in the news are based on one single topic: IP adresses and their localisation. As even CS explains at the linked page it’s not accurate. There are several reasons for that, like wrong settings from your ISP, using of company firewalls etc. This caused a lot of CUQs and cockroach posts when I was doing this kind of stuff. And it’s simply not to fix, the whole idea is a mistake.

If it works properly IP localisation is a serious threat against privacy. Your company sees where and when you login (during work time? from somewhere else when you call in sick?), so you may loose your job. Your stalking Ex is able to track you. At some places the nearby couchsurfer feature is widely used to annoy females with inapprobiate mails. Exact localisation while travelling is a useful information for criminals interested in your unguarded flat (this is especially useful if you’ve got a verified adress and CS places the the google marker in search exactly at your home).

But the main point is: IPs can easy be faked/changed. There are several services in the internet who offer anonymous access to webpages, there is software like Tor to hide your IP and makes it very, very difficult to trace you. At the moment CS tries very hard to block IPs from those services/networks but it’s a ridiculous attempt and doesn’t work if you accept some reloads while using the software. If someone does the work to setup a profile for abusing CS, hiding the real IP is no big deal. And still CS calls this a security feature. As at least the techno crowd must know that’s not true, so insisting on IP-Localisation as security feature must be called what it is: a lie.

When you know an organisation is lying to you about a serious issue, how trustworthy it is at all?

PS – There is a lot to do about security at CS:
- encrypted login (SSL), especially because a lot of couchsurfers use the page from unsecure, public computers/connections while travelling
- really delete information, not only hide it (mails, profiles, …) but don’t hide useful information (profiles from thieves)
- don’t say it’s privacy VERSUS security,  it’s privacy AND security

A simple way to undo censorship and thread deletions on CS

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. ;-)

Hospitality Exchange Communities and real-life campaigns

This document is created because the discussion about the relation between HospExchNetw and the real-live comes more and more into the focus. The question “So how can we reach the 5 billion people that have no computer?” rose in a discussion on the BeWelcome Forum and a post on the the Open Couchsurfing Blog with the title: “Is travelling noble? Or: “The Emperor´s New Clothers”. The replies/comments to this thread/post motivated me to publish this approach.This document is a proposal for the second General Assemly of BeVolunteer in 2008.

It does only raise one idea of how Hospitality Exchange Networks, in this case BeWelcome, could take a step into the real world. It s not intended to be the only way/step but one of plenty. It brings up reasons why BeVolunteer should be a part of The Other Campaign which is based on the Sexta Declaracion de la Selva Lacandona of the EZLN.

I m posting this on the OpenCouchsurfing Blog because most of the reasons I bring up here could be applied to Couchsurfing as well.

What is the Other Campaign?

The goal of the The Other Campaign is to create a diverse, plural and multiple world-wide network of subjects of social rebellion. The mission of the Network is the creation of another way of organizing our entire world – without exploitation, unequally, oppression or discrimination. It is explicitly anti-capitalistic and anti-systemic. Invited for participation in this network are: Truly left-wing parties without an official register of members, social movements, collectives, cultural groups, independent and critic media, civil organizations and Non Government Organizations. The organization of this network is fundamentally horizontally without any hierarchy or authorities. It refuses all uni-personal leadership. It encourages all members to take there own decisions and use there talents in their own way. The lax network refuse from the beginning all tendencies of homogenization or uniformity. It is intended to be a Network of help, solidarity and mobilization of all the members. This network should be able to create alternative ways of social communication. This is the point where BeVolunteer comes into the game. [1]

Why does BeVolunteer/BeWelcome fit in this description of participants of the other campaign?

The members of BeWelcome and all our Volunteers are creating an alternative way of bringing people together. We offer hospitality, and soon other things like bikes or books to share, without expecting money for it.

Lots of Volunteers working voluntarily for our common dream. It would actually violate statutes of BeVolunteer if any volunteer would receive money for his work. Voluntary work does not fit in the capitalist logic. In the pure capitalism you exchange your work force for other goods or money.
The organization BeVolunteer is a Non Profit Organization. An organization in the capitalistic way has to make profit to be competable with other concurrents.
BeWelcome is not a competitor to other networks. BeWelcome is more likely another option for people who care about democratic way of organizing an organization. (at least thats what I believe)

The members of BeVolunteer have all the power. This makes us, like the the other Campaign slower, weaker and lower but like this we guarantee that BeVolunteer is really driven by its members. The Board of Directors is based on annual elections and the members of BeVolunteer or lets say the General Assembly is the highest power. We refuse uni-personal leadership. Each year there are elections of the Board of Directors who are representing the members of BeVolunteer and managing the daily issues.

One of our goals is the intercultural exchange with people from all over the world. Thanks to that our members are aware of the consequences of the neoliberalistic policy in the world. We meet face to face with people who are suffering in the current system. We are desperate for a high plurality within our members to increase the possibilities of our members to really enter in a intercultural experience. One objective of the Other Campaign is to bring the political discussion into daily life. Democracy is not done with going to vote each 4,5 or 6 years not even with a vote every year at the GA of BeVolunteer. Everyday there are decisions to take. It s not always necessary to organize a huge congress or a manifestation to get people together for a discussion or for protest. That can happen everyday in the decentralized network of BeWelcome.

To be Part of the Other Campaign BeVolunteer has to subscribe the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lancandonan. I don t know yet how you sign this declaratio but thats just a formality. The question right now is if BeWelcome/BeVolunteer or any other Networj wants to take this step into real life political campaigns or not.

[1] Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, Chiapas, Planeta Tierra, Mexico 2006, S.165ff

PS: I hope it s readable – the Spell Check didn t work …

Trust circles, reputation and the perception of trust.

Studying trust and perceived trust I came across this excerpt in the brainstorm group

the only reason i am waiting, is because i see certain things which these people are planning to do half done technically and i know how easily they can be undone by people who know how to buck the system…and we do know of people who are VERY GOOD at bucking the system

i hate cloak and dagger myself, and to be fair, the information has been liberally shared with all the people who were there in the meet over a phone call, so i do not really think it is only being given to a few privileged members….

but i do understand that some information on a forum like brainstorm might defeat the purpose…i myself am cagey about spelling out some of the stuff i would be involved in (when they are of the sensitive nature) on this forum as i know who are the people watching this group…

A couple of keywords caught my attention “Cloak and dagger” “Bucking the system”

What does bucking the system mean? And how does Cloak and dagger come into the couchsurfing equation.

wikipedia
Cloak and dagger is a term sometimes used to refer to situations involving espionage, mystery, or even assassination. The
phrase dates from the early 19th century.
thefreedictionary
cloak-and-dagger cloak-and-dagger – conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods; “clandestine intelligence operations”; “cloak-and-dagger activities behind enemy lines”; “hole-and-corner intrigue”; “secret missions”; “a secret agent”; “secret sales of arms”; “surreptitious mobilization of troops”; “an undercover investigation”; “underground resistance”
Some of reference I found about “Bucking the system“. So I am not sure what cryptic message where hidden in those words.

Bucking the system: Andrew Wilkie and the difficult task of the whistleblower

Buck the System, Cosby Tells Teachers — nytimes
I want you to realize who you are and stop these people from grading you until they grade the system,” he said. ”How can you teach if you have no books? The system ties their legs and says, ‘Run.’ It ties their arms and says, ‘Defend yourself.’ ”

The post was very interesting because of the trust matrices involved and a the different in the perception of trust on a global scale.

Effect of Culture, Medium, and Task on Trust Perception Qiping Zhang

DISCUSSION
Most of hypotheses were confirmed except that the interaction effect of culture and media on trust perception.
The results of higher level of trust perceived by Americans than by Chinese actually contradicted with our hypothesis.
The theory of nationality trust and social distance provide a possible explanation. In our study, AA pairs seemed more willing to treat each other as a temporary in-group member instead of a “real stranger”, while CC pairs seemed treating the partner as an out-group relationship due to lack of longterm relationship.

The ambassador system is placed on the two factors perceived trust and reputation .It is perceived and not real trust as you can see the scales fluctuating so wildly. People going from best friend to no friend to being deleted from the friends list.

http://www.trustlet.org/ A trust metric is a technique for predicting how much a certain user can be trusted by the other users of the community.

But by the above interactions you can see the perception of trust.

A recent definition of trust has been put forth by Grandison and Sloman [Grandison and Sloman, 2000] who define trust as – the firm belief in the competence of an entity to act dependably, securely, and reliably within a specified context.

Related to trust is the concept of reputation. Abdul-Rehman and Hailes define reputation as an expectation about an individual’s behavior based on information about or observations of its past behavior

The cloak-and-daggercloak-and-dagger – conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods; “clandestine intelligence operations“; “cloak-and-dagger activities behind enemy lines“; “hole-and-corner intrigue”; “secret missions”; “a secret agent”; “secret sales of arms”; “surreptitious mobilization of troops”; “an undercover investigation”; “underground resistance

Got me thinking on trying to see if Kerckhoff’s Principle can be applied to member safety and perceived trust.

The following article relate to cryptography and they have been used before by kasper to highlight security concerns. In the code. I feel these laws are universal and can be used to highlight global social networking trust perceptions as related to global member security.

Kerckhoff’s Principle states.
“a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge”

The team moves on trust and this perceived trust fluctuates wildly as shown above. The weakest link needs to be located to gain trust.

Social engineering reloaded
Kevin Mitnick,in his book The Art of Deception, goes further to explain that people inherently want to be helpful and therefore are easily duped. They assume a level of trust in order to avoid conflict.

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1860/2

“anyone who thinks that security products alone offer true security is settling for the illusion of security.”

Risky business: Keeping security a secret — zdnet.com
If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it’s hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you’re stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system.

How to use cryptography in computer security –itmanagersjournal.com
Myth 3: Secrecy is important for security.
The prevalence of this myth may be attributed to the historical confusion between keeping your data secret and keeping your security algorithms themselves secret. On the contrary, the only worthwhile insurance of security comes from having your algorithm published and well analyzed by as many cryptographers as possible. The principle that security should not rely on algorithms being secret has been well-established for over a century, and various pithy restatements of it are often cited:
“Security should reside only in the key” (Kerckhoff), “The enemy knows the system” (Shannon), and “Anyone can design a cryptosystem which he himself cannot break” (Schneier).

wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs’_principle
http://www.fplc.edu/risk/vol7/spring/kunreuth.htm

At this juncture, we need to move forward in one of two directions. One path that has been advocated by a number of researchers is to work toward increasing public trust in risk management. While it is much too soon to express either optimism or pessimism about the likely success of this strategy, it is a significantly challenging problem that at the moment appears to have no easy answers.

Now what we need to find out is, does it help making the system public knowledge .Or does it help having a system which is continuously leaking information due to the perception of trust.

Would a system be more secure with the system being public knowledge (only the system not the cases)?