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Archive for the 'Blogroll' Category

“Happy” birthday.

Published by on 17 April 2008 at 13:55 in 501c3, Blogroll, Campaigns, Casey Fenton, Censorship, Collective, Elections, history and Transparency. 4 Comments

Happy birthday.

Almost exactly a year ago, the OCS initiative was started. Initially, our hope was to entice the LT with concrete ideas and campaigns, to get them to address the various serious issues we had discovered at the heart of CS. Not much has changed however and most of the changes have not been for the better:

  • CS is legally still in very dubious water. Still no 501c3 status, after… 3 (or 4?) years of claiming it?
  • Casey still holds all the legal (and financial) strings and has decided to set up camp in Alaska next, which is essentially his home.
  • Transparancy is down, censorship is waaay up. (Search engines have been blocked and CS has a permanent censorship/security team now, almost like during the cold war!)
  • CSC Thailand can be declared a failure as well now, after the NZ meltdown. I haven’t seen anything positive come out of it, but we’re still waiting for the “memo”.
  • “Not talking to anyone” has become the official communication mode for the entire organisation.

And so, with a heavy heart, I’m renewing the OpenCouchSurfing.org domainname by 2 years. In all honesty, I had serious hopes that it wouldn’t be necessary to have this website for more than a year. I (personally) was perfectly willing to “bury the hatchet” if there was even some semblance of progress. Alas, it is not to be. CS still makes me angry, especially for the obligation I feel towards its wonderful community to speak up about its numerous failure, shortcomings and shady deals.

Maybe now is a good opportunity to start thinking about OCS “2.0″. The way I see it, the signal to noise ratio on the blog could be better and there have been some points of discussion we could re-raise at this point. Anonimity, re-posting and privacy concerns come to mind. More importantly, I believe OCS should refocus its efforts towards a clearly understandable and easy to navigate website. Right now, I can only imagine the confusion of a random surfer on OCS. I still heavily support our “open for all” attitude, even with all the negativity that comes with that, but I think it can be channeled better.

So, in the spirit of transparancy and cooperation: Who would be interested in helping “revamp” and organise OCS? We’ll need to digg through a lot of information and restructure quite a bit, but I also think there is room for new activism. Things on my mind:

  • An open call to ALL ambassadors for transparancy (and perhaps elections)?
  • A good Q&A section, where we try to answer what CS doesn’t answer.
  • Video?
  • …

I also wouldn’t mind separating this “public blog” from a better structured blog with some editorial control that we could move to the front page. We could “rewrite” a lot of the current knowledge into practical, well researched and well written articles that would be aimed at the general public (including new members and press) and not just people with CS background knowledge.