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Monthly Archive for January, 2008

What is OpenCouchSurfing

Published by Callum on 22 January 2008 at 16:47 in General Info and Participation. 55 Comments Tags: , .

There seems to be some confusion around what exactly this thing called OpenCouchSurfing is. I thought now would be a good time to remind people of what OpenCS is and what it is not.

Let’s start with what it is:

  • It is a label, a title, a word, a term
  • It is a web site, a blog, a mailing list, a wiki
  • It is a loosely (dis)organised campaign
  • It is related to CouchSurfing and hospitality networks
  • It is a movement, a meme, an idea of loosely shared values

Now what it is not:

  • It is not an organisation, it has no offices, no officers, no constitution
  • It has no members, there is no list of “OpenCSers”
  • It is not “official”, nobody can speak on behalf of it, nobody can say they represent it

OpenCouchSurfing cannot agree or disagree with statements. It’s simply a means to communicate. As one can’t say “I am not E=MC2“, so one cannot really say “I am or am not OpenCS”. OpenCS is an idea, a campaign, at the very most, a petition.

Of course, all of this is simply my own opinion, because OpenCS cannot express an opinion or describe itself. So I speak on my own behalf, not in any official capacity on behalf of OpenCS. :)

Casey Fenton needs to go.

Published by on 20 January 2008 at 18:02 in Board of Directors, Casey Fenton, Collective, Corpganization, employees, Finances, general director, Jim Stone, Leadership Circle, legal, Matthew Brauer and Uncategorized. 68 Comments Tags: , , .

Disclaimer: I am not OCS, if the OCS doesn’t like me utilizing their venue, I can perfectly understand them removing this, so go ahead Callum or whoever runs this site ;)

That title works to grab everyones attention. Hello there lazy bums in Thailand, celebrating ineptitude under the sun!

I was thinking how all the work of the motivated volunteers full of ideals and good intention can be saved. The title was my only answer. One thing i have learned is that people dont really change, i dont expect Casey or the majority of his buddies to be different, despite all the visionary leadership.

Why do I point out that people don’t change? Because I am convinced that they would have to change if Couchsurfing is supposed to progress. Couchsurfing as a website and Organization has grown beyond the size that is governable with the attitude and management employed by Casey and his appointed BurningManBeer Buddies. We are dealing with an Organization that is crooked and mismanaged from the Top. Casey might be a nice guy, he might be a good coder, he might even have that MC1R sexyness to get all the good bitches in the pack, but he is about as good as a manager as Paris Hilton is an expert on Quantum Mechanics.

From the Top down, it was all about happiness and fun, NEVER about accountability and results. Casey initially, when first launching cs.com public, already made a claim on how cs is a 501c3 non profit. He either made a false claim, which would make him a liar and crooked person, possibly a felon, since he collected the donations, or an amazingly inept manager. You don’t run an Organization without knowing its legal status, dot! I tend to go with a third option though. He is a hopeless dreamer, who wants to make a 501c3 and heal the world, but gets ahead of reality way too much. This pattern was followed in the whole CS team and Spirit of Organization. Sure, it would be great to have a good manager, but lets settle for someone who COULD be a good manager, such as TTT, but who actually sucks ass since he settles for having a manager title, rather than doing the job, just like Casey and 501c3. On CS, the culture of Vaporware needs to go. The people will not change, so unless they go, Cs will never proceed beyond the Fratboys who would LOVE to be cool, but end up being drunk failures.

They ALL lack the self confidence to critically reflect upon their managerial skills or the apparent lack of. The root of all this is of course, Casey. He appointed Managers who lack the wit and gut to debate with a dissenting community. A dissenting community that actually argues constructively and is kind enough to share all the solutions.

CS, thanks to the pressure built up by Pickwick, is about to arrive in the cloud of Accountability that is the real world. I hereby Claim that there will be no milestone accomplishment at the Thai Collective, which will make it nothing more than an expensive party for Casey and his equally inept cronies.

You run an Organization and fail to deliver, you go. If Couchsurfing.com is all about buying Caseys’ Burning Man crew 4 Months of sponsored Holidays on the beach along with pussy that would not be available to this elusive group of mediocre men, then Couchsurfing.com is indeed a brilliant success for aforementioned visionary leader and his associates. It would of course make it a racket and scam, morally at least, regardless of how it would be judged by a legal professional.

If Couchsurfing is not a racket and scam but instead an organization with genuinely good intentions, then it is a failure on all accounts. Absolute top-performing professionals in their respective field get alienated or sacked by a management that has possibly not even learned how to spell (project) management. The Couchsurfing Management in its current incarnation is a direct result of Casey Fentons inability to accept superior skill from employees and volunteers. The current management has a track record of rejecting highly skilled employees and outside advice, lacks skill and self confidence along with the inability to accomplish anything themselves.

You guys all need to go. I am glad CS is in the Real World SOON, legally speaking. Casey and friends, you guys talk all the talk, all the time. I have yet to see anyone walk the walk. I invite you to prove me wrong, but you and me, we both know, you fail.

p.s. i invite everyone to personally attack me on my position, preferably somewhere in real life

p.p.s please, since i am so full of shit, be so kind and make a list of all the accomplished managerial successes of the current leadership team, since thats all that it takes to turn my whole posting into a pile of shit. hint: most mangers work 45-50h a week and deliver results correlating to this

Casey Love

Published by on 16 January 2008 at 12:19 in Casey Fenton, Collective, Transparency and volunteer coordination. 17 Comments Tags: , , , .

Damn Kasper, how do you do those quotes?

Thanks ;)

For your information: this is an extract of the original post by Kasper (http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2008/01/14/ill-communication/)

Thomas said:

It would be nice if Diederik could speak up about his experience and his own evaluation of the CS organisation.

@Diederik
A (small) word of warning: Speaking out against CS will almost automatically get you lumped in with the “OCSers”, even if you specifically state that you aren’t.

Well, to be honest, I probably already am. Some months ago, I had some posts, also on my own website. Seems that the communication went dead afterwards.

Let’s start at the beginning. I think this gives a better insight in my current feelings towards the Techteam, and in general: the leader of it, and Casey (ok, here comes my ban…)

My CS experience started at my former employer. Walter was a programmer then. I and Walter could (and still can) get along quite well, and I was invited in his house.
There were several great people, which had the same “frequency” (another word of saying we could get along, but that sentence would became corny ;) ). I met Duke, Aldo, Tiina, Paul and some others I forgot due to the use of ethanol ) My current position then was system engineer, and I was asked for that position at couchsurfing.

That would become handy, because of the start of the Rotterdam Tech Collective. Some several others were there too. Anu* (love!), Weston, Naz (great friend), Chris where several of them.
I got introduced with Nicco and we had great chats about the code (I’m not a programmer, so having some insight is perfect for me), system engineering, the couchsurfing system etc, etc. At that time, there were several things an issue. Nicco and I (as the only admins, besides some Indian people) started to work.

We had an agenda, and could start.

Several issues were addressed quite quick. Most of them are not-to-be-disclosed, but several were visible from the outside:

That time, the collective was already 3 months (or something like that) in the past. Several people came to become “sysadmin”, Nicco was degraded as leader, while Weston became TT-Leader (managing dev and sysadmin). Communication became less and less. From some times, we couldn’t reach Casey, which was our first contact for the code. At that time, my irritation began (my irritation towards the OCS was already there ;) ). Could some parts from OCS be *INDEED* true?

(Anu isn’t really stupid, you know, and Daz is just Daz and should drop dead, etc etc ;) ) At that time, it seemed to *ME* that some people were only busy programming, and not with management.

We had a great CSInterklaas weekend, and the Thai-collective started. We had several “incidents” before and after that (not-to-be-disclosed), and my irritation was at top. When I decided to resign (1 week ago) at the same time the poweroutage at the datacenter happened. Bad timing… Or probably not, because there were some more “incidents”.

This morning, I pulled the plugs from cs-sysadmins, cs-erc, cs-devel(|public). At my desktop is a Freemind scheme (http://freemind.sourceforge.net, go get it) with my thoughts, idea’s and remedies. I had the idea to post it in the CS-Sysadmin group for learning. If only someone would not only *READ* it, but also *REPLY* to it. Therefor, I decided not to do so. I have the feeling that I’m being ignored, so why should I put more energy in it?

From my opinion (an censored version of the mindmap):

  • Where’s the communication?
    We are having more and more people, which asks more communcation to happen. The group only has 3 or 4 skype-meetings, and no real agenda. LT has, I believe that dev has. Why doens’t sysadmin have one?Miscommunications happen too often. Get a good IRC channel, AND STICK WITH IT. Use it like SVN, and make sure that you are the only one working on one problem.
  • Weston should resign from being a techteam-leader.
    Weston is a great guy (as well as Casey btw), but he is a programmer (as well as Casey). I believe that Casey and Weston should either resign from sysadminning and start programming OR do resign from both, and become a real manager (that is: delegate and check).
  • Get things prioritized
    Sticks with the communication part. Changing passwords is not an problem, but if changing OSes is having an higher priority, get that done.
  • Have more communication between CS-Sysadmin and development
    Commit often
    Commit the build to the webservers *NOT* often, but on an weekly base, and *COMMUNICATE* what the differences are. This ensures that everyone knows what is going on, and can act upon unexpected behaviour…
  • Learn from mistakes
    D’oh ;)

Let’s end with some positive notes:

  • I met all those great people. Some of those I want to mention: Nicco (thanks mate), Anu, Naz, Aldo (thanks a lot with the thinking), Martine (hug), Stijn, and all those others. Not to mention all those people that we hosted, will host, and I blatantly forgot.
  • I still believe that CS works. It needs to change. An negative one here is that I don’t believe that that will happen in the near future.
  • I still will be hosting with my girlfriend. We have a lively community in Rotterdam, which I love.
  • I seem to understand better and better where this OCS is all about. I only hope that I won’t reach the cynical level of communication that some of OCS have. At the same moment I feel that I will become only more bitter.

I guess that the post shuld be called “Casey Love”, the feeling that you were loved, but the other end just decides to move on to the next one.

Love from Rotterdam!

Diederik (And Frank Sinatra… “The best is yet to come”)

p.s. When resigning from cs-sysadmins this morning, I saw the description of the group. Guess that this one is not NDA bound:

“Description: This group is free from political agendas and personal ideologies. It is a place to serve the one of the core needs(server administration) of the CS Organization in order to make sure that the members have access to the site at all times so that they can experience inter cultural understanding.”

Ill communication

Published by on 14 January 2008 at 13:20 in Collective, Participation, tech team leader and volunteer coordination. 53 Comments Tags: .

Diederik wrote:

I have left the couchsurfing system administration team. The main (and almost only) reason is communication, and the bad, or even non-existent version of it.

I am not surprised and not particularly happy with this news. CouchSurfing keeps on growing and growing and it’s not healthy to depend on a stream of new and unexpecting volunteers who are not experienced with the specifics of the technical and social side of the CouchSurfing website and organization with an ever growing number of members.

Diederik, I’m looking forward to finally meet you. If not in Antwerpen this weekend surely somewhere in the Randstad very soon.

Thailand Collective members communicating

Ummphhhf

Published by on 11 January 2008 at 12:02 in Collective, Crash 2.0, Culture of Appreciation and tech team leader. 40 Comments Tags: , , .

CouchSurfing has been mostly offline the past 48 hours – due to a “power outage”. Great, especially now that I tried to organize my goodbye meeting in Trento.

Hint: don’t use MyISAM tables for mission-critical data. And try to get some MySQL support engineers working on it. Oh but wait, one year ago there actually was a MySQL support engineer that joined the Collective with money out of his own pocket and was working for CouchSurfing in his own spare time.

Now, since I am still blocked from the wiki that I founded, can someone please add the following text to http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Stranded_Travelers

==Trento meeting 11th and 12th January==

Call +39 33 47 18 30 42 (Kasper).

Thanks.

Pickwick: money no valid argument for unhealthy growth pattern

Published by on 08 January 2008 at 16:17 in Board of Directors, Casey Fenton, employees, Finances, pickwick and Transparency. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

About limiting the acceptance of new members Pickwick writes: 

Kasper: “major source of income”

Is that income needed? Surely a much smaller stream of new members, recruited in a better way, could raise the moderate amounts necessary to pay server costs, paper clips and a few postage stamps.

Current spending is mostly for
A) salaries, and I think we had much better quality work from the volunteers “no longer retained”;
B) the exodus to Thailand, and I have yet to see any actual WORK mentioned that was done there in the 31 days of December (other than picking the place for January).

So the money seems to benefit those who make the decisions. Thankfully we are a charity now and published accounts have to be more accurate and more detailed than hitherto. Which reminds me that there are still areas of concern regarding the charitable status:

1. The financial statements online are still not identical with the ones filed with the US tax authorities and the New Hampshire charities regulators.

2. Casey may have perjured himself by stating falsely to the Attorney General that from 2003 to 2006 the company had several directors besides himself. The major reason for that could be that the truth may affect the legality of his own employment.

a) New Hampshire law requires a minimum of five directors, so with Casey as sole director the company had no legally composed Board of Directors. For that reason alone contracts entered into during that time may be invalid, including the employment contract he made with himself.

b) Casey as sole director signed his own employment contract on the dotted lines of both sides of the contract. There could not be a more blatant violation of all ‘conflict of interest’ principles, and for that reason alone this contract may be invalid.

c) New Hampshire law does not allow the chairman/president of a charity to be an employee at the same time. So when Casey as chairman/president signed his own employment contract he violated that law, and for this reason alone the contract may be invalid.

d) If Casey’s employment contract is invalid, he will have received his salaries without legal grounds, and may have to pay ~$70,000 back to the company. (That, and the other ~$70,000 of accumulated profits in the bank should keep CouchSurfing going for a good many years to come, as a volunteer based charity, without ill prepared world trips for the management.)

At the New Hampshire Department of Justice the case has been queued for review by an investigator in early 2008. My advice to the new Board of Directors is: sort it out before they start asking questions.

To sum up: I don’t think money is a valid argument to continue this unhealthy growth pattern.