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Archive for the 'Campaigns' Category

Page 8 of 9

The CouchSurfing Corporation

Warning: This post contains sarcasm, read it at your own risk. You have been warned.

CouchSurfing recently announced that they have hired two new staff. As we’ve come to expect, there were no interviews, no positions advertised, no visible application process. Instead, Casey invited two of his close friends to join him in receiving a salary from CouchSurfing.

In other news, Chris Burley said in a recent group post, “I wish you the best with democracy, it is known that it tends to crush minority voices. Besides, the majority rarely knows best.” Wow, that’s an interesting statement. But we all knew CouchSurfing isn’t a democracy, didn’t we? Now we do.

One might suggest Chris is in danger of falling foul of the US Patriot Act if he’s not careful. ;-)

One small victory

I woke up this morning to find that the finances have been posted here. It’s good news indeed. I’m yet to take a closer look myself though; I’m surprised that travel related expenses were so high.

CS Chief Financial Officer since April 2006

 

So, you might have heard about Mr Whatley because of his amazing NDA writing skills. I just found out on the social business network that he’s actually been CouchSurfing’s Chief Financial Officer since April 2006. Note that this must have been updated fairly recently, with “over 200,000 members and growing strong”. Note that there is no mention of a Chief Financial Officer on CouchSurfing.com.

Matthew T. Whatley, Esq.

Owner, The Law Offices of Matthew T. Whatley

Current
  • Chief Financial Officer at Couchsurfing International, Inc.
  • Owner at The Law Offices of Matthew T. Whatley (Sole Proprietorship)
  • Owner at Ninja Tax Services (Sole Proprietorship)
Education
  • Mahawithayalai Mahidol

  • Golden Gate University, School of Law

  • Carnegie Mellon University

  • Keio Gijuku Daigaku

Connections

41 connections

Industry
Law Practice
Websites
Public Profile
http://www.linkedin.com/in/whatley

Summary

I am an entrepreneur at heart and love helping others found and grow their own small businesses. I am interested in taking on new clients and founding relationships with other attorneys. I primarily serve the Arts and Small Business communities. I would say the majority of my clients go to Burning Man every year.

 

Specialties:

Personal and Small Business Income Tax Preparation and Minimization, Business Planning, International Business Contracts, Sarbanes-Oxley Auditing, Offshore Asset Protection, Personal Injury Law

Experience

Chief Financial Officer

Couchsurfing International, Inc.

(Non-Profit; 11-50 employees; Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

April 2006 – Present (1 year 3 months)

www.couchsurfing.com
Profile Name: Matt
With over 200,000 members and growing strong, Couchsurfing allows people to host or be hosted in over 100 different countries throughout the globe thus sponsoring cultural exchange and creating a world wide community of travelers.
I manage the finances.

BeWelcome

During the first week of the CS Collective in New Zealand I heard about the rumors of Hospitality Club volunteers who decided to finally break away from Veit to start a new network. I was very excited about that! I discussed it with Casey. He saw this as an opportunity to attract more volunteers to CS. I uttered my doubts about that. Better let the HCvols continue whatever they were doing, and stick to cooperating and finding ways to communicate. So even though I perceived some sense of bureaucracy, I tried to become a volunteer for BeWelcome.

Unfortunately it took 6 months before I actually was given access to the BeVolunteer wiki and the non-public part of the forum. But considering the hundreds of people who never ever heard back from CouchSurfing after indicating their offer for help right after the CS Crash 1.0, half a year is not that bad for a brand new organization!

On the wiki I saw that 13 out of 14 people had voted to release the software under the GNU General Public License (one undecided). In the forum I saw that people were having meaningful discussions and that everyone is open to ideas. I saw that about half the Board of Directors of the official organization had been replaced by new people. I noticed that releasing more information is mostly hindered by trivial issues – finding and removing personal information on a wiki takes time. The source code is not (yet) as feature rich as CS, but it’s built on a decent framework, and it looks amazingly clean – in comparison.

BeWelcome does not yet have a super nice running system, but everything is in its right place, or Coming Relatively Soon: free software, a fairly representative official power structure, open data, and transparency.

P.S. the founders of OpenCouchSurfing were aware of BW, but remained sceptical. The main goal of OCS is still a more free and open CouchSurfing, but at present volunteering for the newly born BW seems a much more efficient way to achieve a free and open hospitality exchange network.

In retrospective

During all recent events I often thought about what must be going on in Casey’s head. He’s the one pulling the strings. Then I remembered an email I received from Casey Fenton, a long time ago, November 29, 2005 10:01 PM to be exactly.

Subject: Censorship in Hospitality Club / CS

Hi Kasper,

I was just sent a link to your page about HC censorship.
(http://www.industree.org/guaka/index.php/Censorship_in_Hospitality_Club)
You said: “The thing that I find most revolting is that it, at least to
me at this point, seems such a closed process. Rules are somehow being
set up, and the 90000 members of HC are just to follow them.
CouchSurfing has actually the same problem, and I think it will be good
to address this.” I was wondering what the problem is that CS has that
you’re referring to? We always want to make sure that we’re doing
things right… and it there’s something we’re not doing right, please
let us know! If you need any questions answered, I’d be happy to answer
them.

btw, love your photos… especially the one of those kids in Bamako and
the one of you on the beach with the guitar.

Cheers,
Casey

Which implies that Casey read about the ideas I have for hospitality exchange a long time before we actually met in Montreal. As Joe wrote: “Many aspects of CouchSurfing have been marred by these issues: (a) a tendency to do
things in the dark, (b) a tendency to tell people what they want to hear, and (c) a tendency to work *near* people, but not *with* them.”

Sometimes I feel sad, sometimes I feel bitter. But…

Life is still good, though I hope that some things will change. In my opionion there are several principles a free hospitality exchange network must follow:

  1. Open policies
    It should be clear what is going on. Policies and guidelines should be accessible by anyone.
  2. Democratic processes
    All people making part of the network should be able to take part in discussions.
  3. Open data
    People should be able to “take” their own data in a portable, open format onto their computer, into their phone. It should be possible to give permission to others (based on a trust level) to copy part of one’s information. Similar to ideas implemented in Indyvoter (http://beta.indyvoter.org).
  4. Free software
    Like Wikipedia, hospitality exchange networks should be based on free software. This will attract more programmers, open up new possibilities (like integrating electronic authentification and encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuPG) or efficient access on portable devices (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/25/139202&from=rss), extending it into a getting-car-rides system where drivers and hitchhikers can get in touch using GPS…).

I’ve Been Fired!

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… :)

“A new discussion about improving the NDA”

Chris Burley announces new possibilities:

We agreed about the following action items
1. Triple T, Casey and I will start a moderated public working group
inside CS groups to invite current and future volunteers to ask for
feedback on the NDA. We will allow feedback and suggestions for
improvement and do our best to include this feedback into a revised
version.
2. I personally will contact two unbiased corporate lawyers who have
experience in international law and have offered assistance to ask for
their help in drafting certain portions of the NDA which are in
question.

I hope this means that the current draft will be scrapped, but anyway,
this message is all very very positive compared to the whole draft itself.

Kasper

The horror! The horror!

The fun never stops:

  • The proposed Volunteer Agreement in all its paranoid glory. Read it and weep.
  • Appearantly the tax ninja that wrote it* is on the Board of directors! Who knew? (Hint: noone.)
  • We’re also keeping track of everyone that quit or will never start developing for CS because of this fiasco.

That’s all for today.

*: Or copied it from here. CS really seems to have problems writing original text. Maybe they need a copywriter to volunteer for that?

A Sad Day for CouchSurfing

At least three volunteer developers have resigned from the CouchSurfing Tech Team on account of the new NDA that all volunteers will be required to sign.

The new NDA includes a non-compete clause preventing volunteers from working with any other travel or social networks. It also requires that volunteers transfer their Intellectual Property rights to CouchSurfing International Inc.

I heard that somebody describe it perfectly, they said “it’s not volunteering, it’s slavery”.

And here I go

I said I would continue to contribute if it does “more good than harm,” but I’ve decided to change my stance on an issue, and I’m resigning from the CS dev team & mailing lists.

Prior to working on couchsurfing, I decided that I only wanted to work on Open Source software. When I heard that Kasper was pushing for couch surfing to be open it sparked my interest.

Open source is important to me, because it represents a freedom of information and ideas. But for the record, it wasn’t the non-opensource thing that made me leave per-se; it’s the resistance & lack of communication to comment on, or work towards a New NDA.

Maybe I should hang on and wait, because something is right around the corner?
These issues are old, months old. Now I’m cynical enough to think a delay or a ‘not now’ is a politically correct way of saying ‘no’. So, I’m now changing my tactic; If they get addressed then I’ll rejoin.

There’s no reason we need a non-compete clause. I had contemplated signing a non-compete that still permits me to just work for MySQL; but now I’ve decided I’ll choose who I work for.

I had some good times at the Collective. My two most treasured memories include learning how to drink scotch and beer with Gardner (a first for me, and a lesson that will no doubt further me in life), and performance hacking with Joe & Kasper in a 3-way screen, sitting next to each other.

Walter: I’d like to still come and visit the Collective, but I’m withdrawing my request to participate. I enjoyed seeing your comments on MySQL optimization, and that you could also spot so many of the changes that needed doing. It’s unfortunate we didn’t really get the
change to work together.

I’ll still keep couchsurfing like everyone else, so keep making the site better!