This morning I woke up to find an email in my inbox telling me that my volunteer services are no longer required by CouchSurfing.
Apparently I have “fundamental differences in ideology and communication styles”. I’ve asked for clarification on that, fundamentally different from whom. I’m not holding my breath for an answer!
One thing was stated clearly in the email, CouchSurfing is not going open source. Not now, not any time soon. So at last the OpenCouchSurfing campaign has received one answer. That’s real progress I think.
Interesting times… 
Man, this is shocking. Just another brick they are putting right now in order to construct even a bigger wall against normal criticism. I have been working in several volunteer-organisations but really, I am quite upset by the way an ‘ideology’ is currently being enforced top-down by “The CouchSurfing Leadership Team”, whatever that may be. One couch at a time is being destroyed right now, let’s get rid of the volunteers we don’t want in our ‘team’ and who don’t go away voluntarily. And then I read that Casey says he doesn’t want politics? Politics pur sang.
Casey makes his living out of politics, he talks the same language to be able to do that, this has shaped him. He says he doesn’t want politics, saying that, he does make politics, without realizing it.
http://www.google.coml/search?q=Casey Fenton politics
e.g.
Tony Knowles, Alaska Democrat
Candidate for US Senate
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/dean.html?pg=4
***
Casey Fenton, the campaign’s director of Internet strategy, is a 26-year-old dotcom veteran with blond spiky hair and a slick black rubber jacket. He stays up nights in the Knowles office, coding to psychedelic trance music. A few years ago, Fenton built his own network, the Couch Surfing Project, which hooks up 100 people a week with places to crash. Now he’s using the same tricks – questions, prompts, and ways of profiling that encourage people to reveal themselves.
[..]
“Casey is a genius,” Knowles says. “He’s like a fly fisherman. You study the structure and become part of the environment, rather than taking a big net and scooping. You have to think like a fish, become a part of the scene.”
***
Yes, it smells fishy. Think…
It is called Proxy politics .Proxy politics is strategically significant for it helps take the battle to someone else’s physical space, create distractions and circumvent internal crises.
People, don’t moan about it. It is like a consumer going to a shop and not finding what (s)he wants. Would you moan? No! You go to the shop where you find what you are looking for.
Volunteering for a great goal is nice. Volunteering for a great goal AND the right organisation is even nicer. And it is a lot of fun. We don’t fire people…BeWelcome!
@ Florian, this is a quite strong statement you make. The whole dicussion here is about idology, not just about leaving things and moving on… but nice that you like your volunteering, for whatever motivation you might do it.
I gotta say CS isn’t the CS I used to know. I read that letter that you got from Chris. I may make you feel better that I got a similar piece of garbage from him in my CS mail, essentially on the same grounds. Question anything, and you’re just not welcome anymore. I thought he was an OK guy when I met him first in Warsaw, only to be sadly, sorely disappointed. He essentially singled me out for holding contrarian political views on CS groups, views that went against the “alt” culture so prevalent on CS. He was completely disrespectful. He even tried to publicly pop-psychoanalyse me.
This isn’t the CS I used to know. The politicos have grabbed hold of CS, and are using it to crusade for whatever cause they have. “Making the world a better place” was a ridiculously stupid, ignorant, utopic idea, selfishly imposed on the whole of the membership by the “self appointed ones”, i.e. those that decided to make the pilgrimage to Montreal during the summer of 2006… and never asked anyone what they thought of this.
CS has given all of us here a lot, which is why I think it saddens us so much to see what is happening to it. I find myself seriously considering, given that nobody seems to care about deep ideological differences (i.e. the vast majority who want NO POLITICAL IDEOLOGY at all in CS), perhaps it may be time to start giving negative publicity. Part of me wishes it had stayed dead in July 2006 just so I wouldn’t see what has happened to it since. The radical politicos are coming! They’re worse than Commies, run for your lives!
I’m here in Belfast and two people at the hostel here just started talking about CS, this ‘interesting new thing’. The word is getting out. I wonder how they will feel when they see it’s been made more about politics than AHEM travelling?
hi
i’m new to this whole thing
what are these ‘major ideological differences?
what would it mean to make it open source?
and why dont ‘they’ want it open source?