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Check here and here. You’ll see “Blocked Site Error.”
The site used to be available in the wayback machine, so it would seem that somebody at CouchSurfing International Inc has specifically requested that the site be removed from the archive. Is there any legitimate reason why such a request would have been made? Personally, I can’t think of any.
Today I noticed that the CouchSurfing 2008 finances have been updated for the whole year. I whipped up a graph to show where the money goes.
Employee related expenses account for 62.8% of total expenses. In that figure I’ve included salaries, tax, payroll fees, rent, travel, food, and staff development. Admin expenses includes anything not in hosting / verification. Hosting is server costs plus telephone / communication. I suspect most of the telephone / communication expenses belong in Employees, but I left it there to be on the safe side. Finally, verification, the source of 99% of the income, costs only 6% of total expenses. I included printing and mailing in the verification cost.
The numbers are:
Employees: $405’440.59
Admin Expenses: $116’901.33
Hosting costs: $86’723.33
Verification: $36’589.83
It costs more than $400k to staff CS Inc with how many employees? Five? That would be a cost of $80k per person per year.
Hopefully this helps to understand where the money goes.
If you’re interested, you can see some overview visitor statistics for couchsurfing.com on quantcast.
Why CouchSurfing is enabling QuantCast to measure visitors is an interesting question. No doubt this will spark lots of “theories”.
Personally, I think it’s interesting to note that the weekly reach of couchsurfing.com is circa 300k people, nothing like the 1m “members” that CS Inc claims (at best their are 1m profiles).
I saw a discussion about CouchSurifng International Inc attemping to trademark the term “CouchSurfing”. I feel like this is something I would like to take action on, but I’m not quite sure what action to take.
I guess that if we can find uses of the term “couchsurfing” before the incorporation of CS Inc, that would provide a basis to challenge the trademark registration. Does anyone have references to such uses?
Is this an issue worth pursuing? Comments on a postcard…
If I read the 2008 CouchSurfing Inc finances (citation) correctly, CS Inc is on track for income in excess of $600’000 USD this year. Contributed support for 1 Jan – 31 Mar is listed as $155,616.73.
Web/ Internet/ Host Fees – $ 2,960.59
Telephone & telecommunications – $ 2,208.03
Equip rental & maintenance – $ 13,923.46
Salaries of Professional Staff – $ 19,384.68
Payroll Taxes – $ 1,955.63
Office Expenses/ Supplies – $ 3,195.01
Rent, Parking, and other occupancy – $ 4,777.81
Meals/ Groceries – $ 10,895.37
Total cost of running the site around $19’092.08. Total salary bill (payroll plus taxes) $21’339.63. Total expenses related to “staff” around $40’207.82. A total of more than $10’000 spent on meals / groceries!
The total “staff” cost is more than twice the actual hosting cost. Yet since the organisation has added so many “professional staff” I see little difference in the actual site. Few new features, little increase in stability. Certainly no change in transparency or solving any of the “we’re too busy to publish details” problems.
CouchSurfing might well have an income in excess of half a million dollars this year. Looks like it’s becoming a viable business opportunity.
Our Alaska mirror blog has ruffled some feathers. Somebody changed the CouchSurfing blog feed. Instead of the whole post being included in the feed, now only the excerpt is included. So anyone reading the blog in a feed reader has been highly inconvenienced.
I’ll bet some clever bod thought this would stop our mirror blog. Wrong! It’ll take more than a little inconvenience to keep us pirates down. I’m pleased to report, that after a brief outage, the mirror blog is now back in full working order, with full post text.
So if you want to read the blog in your feed reader, subscribe to our feed instead, and get the comments!
We have won the battle, but I suspect this will not be the end of the war. As a Sun Tzu disciple, I have studied the enemy closely. I have anticipated their next seven moves. Fear not, their incompetence will not stand in the way of democracy and freedom. The pirates wil overcome their foolish attempts to quell free speech. Vive la revolucion!
As per my proposal I’ve installed a blog which syndicates content from the Alaska collective blog but allows comments.
www.OpenCouchSurfing.org/alaska
I’ve installed the WP-SpamFree plugin for WordPress and set very loose spam restrictions. Only posts with 4 or more links should be held for moderation. Otherwise, all comments that meet the WP-SpamFree criteria should appear instantly. If you do have any problems posting a comment feel free to contact me directly.
Here’s to freedom..
Update: Logins are now linked, so if you’re logged into this blog, you’ll also be logged into the Alaska blog.
You can see Alaska Collective blog here and subscribe to the feed here.
Unfortunately, comments are not allowed on the blog. To be more precise, you must be logged in to comment. But registration of new users is not allowed. So in effect, only those with permission can comment. Let’s hope this will change soon.
However, as a quick alternative, I propose to create a mirror of the blog content, with the same open-comments policy we use here at OpenCS. It’s fairly trivial to set up, and would allow open debate on each post. What do you think? Please provide a +1 or -1 in your comment if you think it’s a good or bad idea.
People ask, how can they support OpenCouchSurfing? Likewise, I often meet people who support the ideals, but also want to support CouchSurfing. They might have paid for verification. They don’t totally agree with the way CouchSurfing is run, but they want to support the organisation anyway.
My idea is to offer people a way to support CouchSurfing financially, while also supporting the ideals of OpenCouchSurfing. That’s the basic premise.
I think it could work as follows. We create one or more funds or trusts. These funds are clearly constituted. They exist to support the work of CouchSurfing, within certain conditions. Rather like the government supports universities in the UK, but the money comes with requirements. The universities must behave in a certain way to be eligible for the cash.
A simple example might be server costs. We could create a fund to pay for CouchSurfing’s server costs. So long as CouchSurfing International Inc submits invoices for these costs, the fund would reimburse the expenses. This is just a simple example.
The underlying concept is to give members a way to financially support CouchSurfing, while still upholding the principles of OpenCouchSurfing.
We could also provide a mechanism for members to display and verify their donations. For example, images which could be inserted into the user’s profile, showing how much that user has donated. This might help to spread the message amongst members. In effect, we would be creating an alternative to the CouchSurfing verification system.
This is very much an idea right now. It needs considerable research and discussion before being implemented. Please share your thoughts at this early stage. Can you see merit in the concept? Would you be willing to donate money through such a framework? All feedback will be appreciated.
Following the recent idea to create elected ambassadors and my post about channelling our energy, I have an idea. I think the concept of elections are very powerful. While not a perfect mechanism, it is a good one. So I’m bouncing ideas around trying to figure out how we could use elections within CouchSurfing.
We want to avoid resistance from the established systems. So I think using the term Ambassador will cause confusion. However, a group of people could quite reasonably choose to elect a “community leader” or “community representative”. That idea got me thinking about creating a CouchSurfing member council.
A group of democratically elected representatives who have the permission of the community to address matters on their behalf. This could be a very powerful mechanism. These individuals could serve as a channel for members to interface with the CouchSurfing organisation.
I think most people agree that communication is the biggest operational problem facing CouchSurfing right now. A mechanism like a member council could help this process. If there was one person for each town / city, speaking on behalf of the community, the voice would carry a great deal of weight. Likewise if the system scaled up to regional / national representation.
Of course, there is a great risk that it would simply create politics for the sake of politics. But I do believe it could work.
Does anyone have experience of designing systems like this? Any experience in organisations of this nature? Would anyone care to share their comments / feedback / criticism / etc?
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