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Archive for the 'Leadership Circle' Category

Page 5 of 5

Round up

It is difficult to describe just how shocking the last 24 hours have been. The final result is pretty clear though: instead of taking any practical step towards Openness and Freedom, Couchsurfing has decided to take the path of a closed, protected, corporate-like structure.

A brief history:

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

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

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

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

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

There are only three options left:

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

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

Deconstructing the Leadership Circle

Wow. Within a week of launching OpenCouchSurfing, we’ve seen an immediate upgrade to the CS DB (resulting in the site being down for 18 hours). They (*) have announced upgrading the webservers as well (to reduce the current security risks). The “Leadership Team” has finally been made official. Now, some of these things have been announced before (the DB upgrade and Leadership circle), but it seems like to much of a coïncidence that all this happens in one week. So, this effort seems to have good and positive effects which strengthens us to continue to improve things.

What I wanted to talk about is the Leadership Team. At first view, it seems like it is indeed a step in the right directon. At second view it actually makes matters worse and formalizes the closed culture of CS. Let’s have a look, shall we? The most important sections to pay attention to:

  1. To become a new member of the leadership team (after May 2007), a volunteer must have been an ambassador in good standing for at least one year.
  2. To become a new member of the leadership team (after May 2007), a volunteer must be approved by consensus (unanimously) by existing leaders.
  3. [For a leader to remain active, he/she must] produce a biannual departmental progress report and goals for the coming semester.
  4. Ambassadors may officially censure any one or more leaders. Censure requires:
    - a petition of specific grievances endorsed by a simple majority of ambassadors
    - the leaders to immediately make a public statement regarding the planned course of action to correct the grievances.

What does this mean in practice? A boys club. You are not allowed in unless you are in good standing with the Leadership group, because they hold each and every means to allow or disallow you. Dissenting ambassadors are explicitely discouraged from even trying to apply (“in good standing”), not that they could get in anyway. Oh, wait. There is no application process defined. Never mind. But there’s no official end to a Leadership position anyway, so we don’t actually need candidates. But hey! Ambassadors can censure a leader, right? Uhm. No. Leaders are only required to make a public statement regarding the “planned action” to address this. Case closed. There is no way in and no way to get anyone out. A proper way to do it would have been to let the ambassadors actually vote for their “leaders” every year or so, but I guess that is too threatening for the existing power structure. The current state of affairs is just outrageous.

Transparancy by biannual reports? This is not transparancy, this is PR. We need insight into the decision making process and there need to be tools in place to ensure accountability, not just promises of “focussing on the mission”. We don’t need binannual PR reports.

Funny intermezzo: Look at the Leadership Qualities page. Now have a look at the self-evaluation form for level B registered nurses. E.g. “Teamwork: Interacts effectively and builds respectful relationships among individuals and in teams” (leader) versus “Teamwork: Interacts effectively and builds respectful relationships within and between units and among individuals.” (nurse). Some requirements are copied almost verbatim. So, are we getting leaders or nurses? On a more serious note, this is indicative of the increasing use of marketing speak coming from the Leadership Circle. They’re not talking, they’re making announcements/press releases. This is no way to treat a community run by volunteers. And it doesn’t speak well for the effort put into this document that parts are just copied of the net, it definitely makes it seem like a rushed PR job.

What is all of this lacking?

  1. Real transparancy. Where is the agenda/meeting notes section for the Leadership Circle? Where is any serious timeframe for anything? Biannual? When? In 6 months? Tomorrow? These people have consistently shown an unwillingness to commit to any kind of deadline, which is plain bad leadership. Slipping deadlines? Fine, worst case for that is a bunch of angry people and a bit of stress. No deadline? Not acceptable.
  2. Real representation. Not another boys club system please.
  3. Where the hell is the new NDA? It was announced half a year before the Leadership Circle was even mentioned. It shows you where the priorities are. (Hint: Power, not your average volunteering developer)

Say no to the circle of level B nurses**. Write to them and demand direct representation, transparancy and accountability. Help us make CS more Open and Free.
*: There has been a lot of complaining about using “us vs. them” language, which is just annoying. Raise your hand if you don’t know who “they” are. You’ll know when you’re not part of “them”.
**: It’s called humor people.

Announcing The CouchSurfing Leadership Team

Great! Finally! Some tangible (public) information about the Leadership Circle! Mattthew started articles on the CS wiki about the Leadership Team and the Leadership Qualities. I will refrain myself from any comments, since I won’t do any better than Anu:

How about these?

  • Ability for respectful conflict resolution through confrontation rather than avoidance
  • Ability for open, direct and sincere dialog with the community
  • Ability to take in and reflect upon constructive criticism and act on it accordingly
  • Ability to operate in a multi-cultural environment, actively realizing the mission of inter-cultural understanding in accepting varying communication styles and other differences stemming from diverse cultural backgrounds
  • Ability to operate in a largely virtual organization

… then I went to sleep for a couple of hours.
When waking up I was surprised to see that:

To create a bit of balance I then started the Dissident Team.