Just to satisfy my curiosity; did any of the regular readers/posters of OCS receive this mysterious ‘quarterly questionnaire‘ about CS QoS? Not trying to prove a conspiracy (yet, lol), but since no information about this is given on CS, it would be interesting to reconstruct the user pool it was sent to.
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
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
dawg,
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%
For those who read French, there’s an interesting thread in the CS Group France, started by BINARY, who gives reasons for giving up his ambassador flag.
I think it’s good there are discussions in languages other than English. Especially in France, where the existence of an official organization related (or not?) to CouchSurfing. I asked some questions about the ACSF (Association Couch Surfing France) in the same group.
Happy birthday.
Almost exactly a year ago, the OCS initiative was started. Initially, our hope was to entice the LT with concrete ideas and campaigns, to get them to address the various serious issues we had discovered at the heart of CS. Not much has changed however and most of the changes have not been for the better:
- CS is legally still in very dubious water. Still no 501c3 status, after… 3 (or 4?) years of claiming it?
- Casey still holds all the legal (and financial) strings and has decided to set up camp in Alaska next, which is essentially his home.
- Transparancy is down, censorship is waaay up. (Search engines have been blocked and CS has a permanent censorship/security team now, almost like during the cold war!)
- CSC Thailand can be declared a failure as well now, after the NZ meltdown. I haven’t seen anything positive come out of it, but we’re still waiting for the “memo”.
- “Not talking to anyone” has become the official communication mode for the entire organisation.
And so, with a heavy heart, I’m renewing the OpenCouchSurfing.org domainname by 2 years. In all honesty, I had serious hopes that it wouldn’t be necessary to have this website for more than a year. I (personally) was perfectly willing to “bury the hatchet” if there was even some semblance of progress. Alas, it is not to be. CS still makes me angry, especially for the obligation I feel towards its wonderful community to speak up about its numerous failure, shortcomings and shady deals.
Maybe now is a good opportunity to start thinking about OCS “2.0″. The way I see it, the signal to noise ratio on the blog could be better and there have been some points of discussion we could re-raise at this point. Anonimity, re-posting and privacy concerns come to mind. More importantly, I believe OCS should refocus its efforts towards a clearly understandable and easy to navigate website. Right now, I can only imagine the confusion of a random surfer on OCS. I still heavily support our “open for all” attitude, even with all the negativity that comes with that, but I think it can be channeled better.
So, in the spirit of transparancy and cooperation: Who would be interested in helping “revamp” and organise OCS? We’ll need to digg through a lot of information and restructure quite a bit, but I also think there is room for new activism. Things on my mind:
- An open call to ALL ambassadors for transparancy (and perhaps elections)?
- A good Q&A section, where we try to answer what CS doesn’t answer.
- Video?
- …
I also wouldn’t mind separating this “public blog” from a better structured blog with some editorial control that we could move to the front page. We could “rewrite” a lot of the current knowledge into practical, well researched and well written articles that would be aimed at the general public (including new members and press) and not just people with CS background knowledge.
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!
Interesting… a more obvious attempt to cover one’s *ss would be hard to conceive.
hi guys,
there is this bad guy bouncing around our couches and taking things with him that doesn t belong to him.he is leaving behind empty pockets and broken hearts. I have researched his way around Europe and he has been doing this on CS since spring 2006. I will write a story on him and how the CS is handling his case. There is a self-defensive system going: people warn each other, start threads, etc., which is fine. I just have the impression, that the leadership is slowing this down. Anyone who wants to give me his opinion about it or speak up for the contrary I would appreciate to get to know your arguments. Please send me a Mail via CS:
HIER+DORT
Thanks,
Pia
“Blocked Site Error. http://couchsurfing.com/ is not available in the Wayback Machine.”
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