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Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Alleged rape through CouchSurfing

Published by on 12 August 2009 at 06:10 in legal and Transparency. 32 Comments Tags: , .

I just read this article on the British Dailiy Mail web site.

Terrible, terrible news. I only hope this leads to CouchSurfing improving the trust systems. I hope they don’t use it to promote verification even more, or make verification compulsory.

Hospitality Club Dictatorship

Published by on 02 August 2009 at 21:14 in Hospitality Club. Closed Tags: , , , .

Seriously, since the beginning this is one of my most important dogmas for the HC: no official structure for decision taking. I will always discuss issues openly with the people involved and with knowledge to come to good decisions that are the best for the network. But the final decision will always be with me.

This excerpt is from an e-mail by Veit Kühne (dated, 19 Jan 2005) as an answer to a Hospitality Club volunteer discussion. It has now been published on Wikileaks. According to Wikileaks’ “Latest Leaks and Censored Media”, Hospitality Club founder Veit Kühne planned organizational dictatorship for life and the e-mail “describes his plans for the power structure of the club: a benevolent dictatorship for life”.

Three and a half years after writing this e-mail, Veit also publicly gave away his strategy for taking over BeWelcome, the democratic hospitality exchange network that was started as a result of Veit’s ignorance towards members and volunteers of Hospitality Club.

Read the full e-mail “HC democracy and strategy” at Wikileaks.