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Monthly Archive for March, 2011

Why People-Powered Projects Are Ruled by Tyrants

Published by on 14 March 2011 at 20:25 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

Any of this sound familiar?

…the paradox is that they’re often more authoritarian, even autocratic, than the most tightly controlled for-profit firms. The volunteer model makes them almost feudal in structure: an enormous mass of unpaid serfs, kept in line by a small group of paid manager-nobles, in turn serving at the pleasure of the kingly founder, whose authority is more or less absolute. After all, when you create a dominant website but eschew the vast wealth that could come with it, conventional checks on your power no longer apply. You have no shareholders or paying customers to mollify. Competitors don’t bother challenging you, since how can they beat a market leader when that leader is unbound by market forces?

…Assange, similarly, has said that he alone makes the final call about what WikiLeaks will post. To this list of digital sovereigns we might someday add two young barons: CouchSurfing’s Casey Fenton and 4chan’s Christopher Poole.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/st_essay_assange/

Unprofessional Couchsurfing Safety Team?

Published by on 12 March 2011 at 13:43 in legal. 8 Comments

The Couchsurfing Safety-team has never been without criticism. They are too closed, communicate not well enough and are too paranoid for legal actions against them, are just some of the regular comments I have heard in the past 4 1/2 years I am a member of Couchsurfing. I have no insider knowledge on this side but am a bit shocked but not surprised when I came across this posting:

Ulto contacted CouchSurfing to report the host’s misconduct and left negative feedback on his profile warning other women to stay away. The host retaliated by posting nasty comments to Ulto’s profile, including calling her a “psycho.” CouchSurfing remained silent. So, she contacted them again. Silence. On the third try, she threatened legal action and got their attention. But even that failed to keep it.

The amount of misconducts that happened due to hosting or being hosted by and through people met on Couchsurfing and other hospitality networks are as far as I am aware thankfully limited. But is seems that the safety-team is not up to understanding how to deal with acute safety issues adequately.

Still, the online service ignores complaints from women and LGBTQ travelers who have been attacked, drugged, raped, molested, and harassed by hosts. (These complaints can be found on CouchSurfing’s own message boards, and elsewhere around the Internet.) CouchSurfing denies responsibility with the pat response that victims should more vigorously vet potential hosts and report illegal behavior to the proper authorities in the country in which they’re traveling. The onus for safety is on the victim, not CouchSurfing. But this manner of thinking ignores the way the system itself facilitates illegal behavior, or at least, does little to prevent CouchSurfing from being used for nefarious purposes.

How the safety-team currently operates might even become a reason why hospitality exchange networks soon will be on the decline again, or change how people trust strangers. Maybe it is time for Couchsurfing to come out in the open about their safety-policies, have their policy more public and facilitate a public or at least a semi-public debate about it.

Find more information and critique through this comment posted on an earlier post.