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Archive for the 'Corpganization' Category

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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

The nature of the beast

Published by on 03 December 2007 at 13:58 in Censorship and Corpganization. 1 Comment

This post from the private ambassadors list was forwarded to me from at least 3 separate channels (2 of whom I never heard from before), so I guess it’s a public secret anyway.

I am just popping in here with a small but very important
request.

Recently we had two Ambs posting information from this group
at the Brainstorm. While no serious harm has been caused I
think that it is crucial that we have a common ground about
privacy issues.

Please, do not under any circumstances re-post, in public
groups information that is posted in the Ambs private. It
does not matter if you in person think it is fair or nice
or informative for the community. Let the person who has
done the original post decide if he/she wants it in a
public or in a private group (like this one).

If for any reason you think that a post should appear
somewhere else as well let the moderators and author of the
original post know and ask their permission and help (to
move a whole thread for example).

Please respect the privacy policy of this group. It’s an
essential requirement of your Ambassadorship.

Thanks,
Promitheus

This is how the party is run. It shows a few things very clearly:

  1. Couchsurfing as an organisation (assuming Promitheus is representative) is not interested in transparancy whatsoever.
  2. This message implies that they have something to hide. While I don’t think there are that many interesting things being talked about in the private ambassador group, the idea of a secret club, strongly reminiscent of little boys clubs, is definitely there.
  3. It shows how clueless Couchsurfing is about running an international, largely online/virtual organisation. The very idea that it would be possible to hide certain aspects of your organisation is simply naive. It’s counterproductive and it’s the nature of such a community to unravel this kind of secrecy. Translated: It just gives people the incentive to want to find out, and they do.

T.

Congratulations and some worried thoughts

Published by on 25 November 2007 at 17:01 in 501c3, Casey Fenton, Corpganization, Donations and Finances. 6 Comments

If you are a member of CS, undoubtedly you have received an email from Casey Fenton himself  announcing the new 501(c)3 status. The email seemed a bit confusing, because the envelope he’s holding is obviously the application to the new status, but then it seems implied CS is already a 501(c)3? I have no idea how fast the US bureaucracy works, but it seems awfully fast from application to acknowledgment. Is CS applying for it or is it already a charity? Is the outcome guaranteed?

However, congratulations are in order. After 3 years of talking about it and no less than 100 hours of work by Casey himself (a full two and a half weeks!), they were finally able to get the right papers in order. Phew. Good news is that CS is now eligible  for grants and your donations will be tax deductible (if you live in the US). There is money to be made!

Since we can take at least a bit of credit for speeding the process up, basically by shaming Casey into action, here are some of the things I would like to see CS take up:

  1. Reduce the operational cost and significantly reduce the cost of “verification”, far beyond the sliding scale idea. There is absolutely no obvious need to be collecting and spending such a large amount of money. It is almost the anti-thesis of an organization that is based on free and voluntary lodging and low-cost traveling.
  2.  Finally make the organization reflect the community. Get rid of the heavy US centric distribution in the leadership team. Organize elections.
  3. Set up localized non-profit organizations, to allow the same financial and legal “benefits” for European CS-ers (the largest community in any case) and to allow a better local functioning.
  4. Open up, become at least a bit more transparent. Get rid of the multitude of private groups. Publish meeting agenda’s, publish regular and non-PR reports.
  5. Give back to the world. Share the code that so many people have worked on voluntarily or payed for by the community back to that community and to the world at large.
  6. Cooperate. Finally get over your pride and cooperate with HC and BeWelcome. Not a single one of the users benefits from the fragmentation and competition between the different hospitality organizations.
  7. Learn to be humble. Learn how to admit mistakes when you make them instead of lying about it or covering it up. Talk to people like the OCS-ers, even if every fiber in your body seems to struggle against that. You fears are unfounded.

My 7 wishes for CS in 2008.

Thomas

The trouble with the ambassadors

Published by on 22 November 2007 at 16:31 in ambassadors, Campaigns, Corpganization, Elections and Transparency. 112 Comments

We’re doing a little experiment in Antwerp, called elections. Once in a while, somebody makes the simple observation that it might better to base any kind of hierarchy in a community on representation instead of appointment. This is one of the core problems as well in CS and something we’ve been tackling in our “Open Organisation” campaign for a long time now. I think it would be very much worth it to see if the Antwerp CS community would support this or not. So, the best way to find out is to actually call for community elections. We could have gone straight after the city ambassador positions, but since that’s practically uninforcable, we made up our own title: “community elected CS city ambassador”. Sounds cool huh?

What’s the major difference between the CS ambassadors and what we propose?

  1. CS ambassadors are appointed from “above”. Depending on the level you wish to attain, the group that decided changes to higher levels, so it might be other ambassadors, up to LT. Community ambassadors would be elected from the local community.
  2. CS ambassadors have to follow a “code of ethics”, which ironically includes accepting the legally dubious terms of use. Not only is protesting any of that de-facto not allowed (you can only accept or you don’t get to be ambassador), it may require you to agree to semi-legal and ethically dubious rules and systems. Community ambassadors do not have such a code, but would be judged for their behaviour, which obviously includes real ethics.
  3. CS ambassadors get a “job” description, like organizing meetings, etc. Community ambassadors would be required to outline a program before their elections.

In general, I would say the official CS ambassadorship looks much more like a corporate job than anything else. There is a job description, an appointment process (including fairly subjective selections) and even a contract (“code of ethics” – cough). Or, in other words, a CS ambassador is representative of the Couchsurfing corpganization. By contrast, a community ambassador would be much more about being a representative of the local community instead.

The resulting proverbial shitstorm that resulted from the announcement was both predictable and suprising. Predictable because it obviously threatens some people’s positions (even indirectly). Suprising because so many of the LT cliché’s popped up in the discussion. Arguments and techniques that seemed to come straight from the LT playbook. Let me give you some examples:

  1. “It is really easy to participate, just apply! Why are you complaining?”
    It’s easy to participate as long as you agree to everyting yes. Groupthink example nr 1.
  2. ” We are just doing the best we can here! Why are you complaining?”
    The sympathy card. Avoidance tactic nr 1.
  3. “We’re not a closed group (the ambs), we just didn’t make an agenda because it was a private meeting/we didn’t have time/…”
    This wouldn’t be accepted in any other non-profit. Meetings behind closed doors? Please. Groupthink nr 2.
  4. “Democracy is a wonderful thing but it is not applicable to all organisational structures.”
    The poster did apologize for this, but still one of the major points seems to be that democracy for some weird reason can’t work in CS, the evidence of countless democratic non-profits being discarded in one swift stroke. Avoidance tactic nr 2.
  5. “Please give us feedback instead of complaining.”
    This basically is the brainstorming red herring: allow people to “provide input” to be able to ignore what you don’t like while still looking like you “care”. Whatever. I disagree with the way ambs are choosen, period. That means I don’t want to provide legitimacy to what you’re doing by giving you suggestions. Although, I do have one suggestion: resign and participate in the election instead of clinging to your current position. Avoidance tactic nr 3.
  6. “I don’t support the whole election but I will not block it in any way.”
    This is basically claiming ownership over something you don’t have. Elections don’t need amb support, it needs people support. Groupthink nr 3.
  7. ” You will always get a quick and honest reply for us, as we are the CS freaks.”
    How this can be claimed in any serious way is beyond me. You’re probably not even allowed to talk about certain things.
  8. “You’re just being paranoid.”
    Thanks buddy, but I don’t think you’ve met a real paranoid person in your life – I have. Personal attack, yay!
  9. And then came the stuff that really reminded me of the LT:
    “Would you please stop this discussion? It damages the CS project a lot. [...] for us, CS-members, it seems a lot of bullshit! and a lot of spam too !!!!!”
    immediatly followed by:
    “I’ll create a group within the antwerp group about the election so we can have our discussions over there without bothering the people too much…”
    This made me so angry, to see that same argument “you’re all a bunch of haters, go away!” followed up by the same kind of censorship “please step over here sir, so the good people can’t hear your complaints”.

The only tactics that haven’t been tried (yet):

  1. Permanent silencing. (Deleting posts and or manually moving threads.)
  2. Discredit the people/movement behind this. (Although point 9 is pretty close to that.)
  3. Direct threats (remember the “your account will be closed if you make vague legal threats thing?”)

Shameful. Shameful and painful.

Thomas