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Archive for the 'General Info' Category

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Making it official (Anu leaving, that is)

Published by on 17 August 2007 at 17:52 in couchsurfing, Culture of Appreciation, employees, General Info, Leadership Circle, Participation, people and volunteer coordination. 7 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Whev – after quite a few weeks of cold feet and months of discontentment, it’s finally done: I’m no longer a CS developer. Since there was ample time to come to terms with this and make my own conclusions, rather than being told to take a hike, I am actually okay, and excited about lots of things (perhaps including some more volunteering as well, but only time will tell if that’s the right path for me from now on).

In any case, I would like to thank everyone I have had the pleasure to work with – regardless of the CS leadership team propaganda I do believe everyone writing and reading this blog are doing it because they care about CS, enough to be interested in the organizational issues as well. (consider this as my implementation of the culture of appreciation ;) )

German article about Hospitality 2.0

Published by on 17 August 2007 at 01:15 in General Info. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

For your interest: There is an arcticle about Couchsurfing in a German online magazin called Telepolis under the headline “Gastfreundschaft 2.0” (= “Hospitality 2.0″ – german only). I’ll try to summarize/translate some main points here. The article’s intention is more or less critical in a non-conventional way. So maybe there is something to learn out of it.

The author quotes the still not changed CS-Mission “Creating a better world” and starts with the following questions:

  • Is CS a globalization from the bottom, realising a cometogether of people solidly united from all over the world far beyond the leadership of profits?
  • Or is this all leading to a point where 270.000 people under the Couchsurfing logo will wake up with a hangover and have to realize that the party is over and they’re trained to be clients of another World Commerce Corporation?

After a general description of couchsurfing with some examples the author raises concerns, that a network like this is not spreading the idea of hospitality at all. On the one hand side the sophisticated criterias for searching and detailled profiles will bring only similar people to meet with eachother, excluding different people as a potential risk or at least too different. On the other hand side the networks could kill traditional hospitality, by replacing it with a technical solution or even worse simply with business models.

The author calls the CS Terms of Use a loud ticking bomb for everyone who is not deafening hisself because of enthusiasm about the idea. He recommend reading it and says he hasn’t read very often texts repeating in every thinkable detail the same thing: “We (the company) are allowed to do everything, you (the users) are not allowed to anything.”

A last quote (in bad translation):

“The thought, who obtrude the fan, the idea for this creepy conditions don’t suit the idea or the spirit of the community and are not invented from the founder of the CS-project, but from some mean consultants who talked him into it, should not calm down anyone: Very soon this kind of consultants will force him on selling to the highest bid. I for one haven’t found anything in the conditions, that would make such a buy-out difficult.”

My conclusion: Forget about CS corporation. Let’s save the idea. Which includes to think about the danger of creating networks connecting only similar people. Curiousity and openess has to be redefined and eked out everyday, that’s not a task for machines. At least if you want something else than clones of yourself.

Good night.

Round up

Published by on 16 May 2007 at 13:24 in General Info and Leadership Circle. 9 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

It is difficult to describe just how shocking the last 24 hours have been. The final result is pretty clear though: instead of taking any practical step towards Openness and Freedom, Couchsurfing has decided to take the path of a closed, protected, corporate-like structure.

A brief history:

  1. Sunday 6/May/2007: OpenCouchSurfing.org is launched after about 2 weeks of preparation. It was the result of months of uncertainty and dissatisfaction in the development group. First real reaction comes from Leo (who later turns out to not be a part of the “inner circle”. No “official” reaction.
  2. Wednesday 9/May/2007: The CS site goes down for 18 hours to upgrade the database. No warning to the tech team. Casey finally proposes to talk over the phone with me; on Sunday.
  3. Thursday 10/May/2007: Casey announces the Leadership Circle. Couchsurfing will be run by a self-appointed and closed group of (mostly) his personal friends.
  4. Friday 11/May/2007: Casey suddenly and unannounced decides to move the SVN server with all of the CS code, quoting “upgrades”. It stays offline until today and now everyone has to reapply for commit rights.
  5. Sunday 13/May/2007: I finally get to talk to Casey over the phone. He tells me he doesn’t want “politics” in Couchsurfing and clearly has no real-world knowledge or experience with code licensing. We agree to try and investigate two things together: a community code license of sorts and some form of elective experiment to determine a tech team “coordinator”. We agree to call again the next day. It gives me hope. (False hope as it turns out.)
  6. Monday 14/May/2007: Casey postpones the phone call by a day. He’s too busy communicating with others.
  7. Tuesday 15/May/2007: Everything seems to happen at once.
    • All day long, there is a flame-war (warning: long and ugly) between Naz (a completely new and unknown developer since 2 weeks) and Kasper on the developers mailing list. Naz is simply nasty and basically tells Kasper to take a hike. Chris Burley, our “tech team leader” does not step in at all.
    • I talk to Casey on the phone again. He basically states that he wants to split CS into a “staff” of sorts and “volunteers”. Ambassadors would be mere volunteers and developers would probably have to be split into people within and people outside of “the circle”. (I’ve now come to understand that they simply don’t want developers outside of the circle.)
    • Morgan Tocker resigns (see his Blog article).
    • Appearantly the long awaited NDA is now called “Volunteer Agreement” and is sent in secret to “core devs”, including John, Walter, Naz (who has been a developer for 2 weeks!) and Anu. Kasper, who has at least 1/3rd of the code commits to his name, is not included as a “core dev”. We learn all of this by accident. Chris Burley chats with both Kasper and me and tries to talk “off the record” with me, which I decline. We know it contains the following:
      - Automatic transfer of all intellectual property (=ideas) to CS.
      - A non-compete agreement, which basically states you can’t work on any travel or social network site simultaneously or 1 year after volunteering (working) for CS, profesionally or otherwise.
      - A complete gag order. You are not allowed to discuss anything “internal” with non-NDA people.
    • Kasper resigns.
    • Chris Burley offers me the Volunteer Agreement document, under the condition that I don’t talk about it. I decline. He tells me certain people might get “exceptions” to the NDA rules.
    • I quit.
    • After at least three people tell Chris that he should have stepped in with the Naztyness on the mailinglist, he finally does. The discussion is by that time already long over and done.

After that, there was a mixture of saying goodbye, total apathy and more nastiness (style: “Glad you guys are gone”). The Leadership Circle still doesn’t have the guts to publish the Volunteer Agreement.
So, what are we left with after 1,5 weeks of campaigning?

  1. A completely closed CS organisation that is heading for a semi-commercial structure. Volunteering is considered second rate.
  2. An NDA/Volunteer Agreement that is probably 3 times worse than the previous one. In all practicality, no IT professional could ever sign it, unless you never want to work on travel or social network related websites again besides CS.
  3. Open sourcing, transparancy and representation seem farther away than ever. They have succeeded in getting Kasper to quit, which clearly was something they wanted. “Not a core dev” is probably the closest one can come to being tarred and feathered.

To put it simply: OpenCouchSurfing has failed miserably in its goals. Even though around 70 people ended up signing our petition, including Heather O’Brian and Jim Stone (both part of the Leadership Circle), none of it made any difference.

Have we made matters worse? I don’t think so, because clearly these things were already being planned for a long time. We have however clearly accelerated the process and discovered things that were meant to be kept secret. The back-room dealings, the secrecy, the buddy-systems, the social manipulation, all of these things are not new to me and can happen in any organisation. The scale and rate at which they happen in Couchsurfing, an organisation that boasts a mission to “Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch at a Time” is however frightening.

There are only three options left:

  1. Waste energy and time whining and being ignored.
  2. Start taking destructive action.
  3. Bow out.

Out of self-respect, I will obviously choose the latter.
The End.

Silence and misunderstandings

Published by on 08 May 2007 at 11:49 in Casey Fenton and General Info. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

This site has been getting quite a bit of attention so far. Couchsurfers are responding to these issues from all sides, both positively and negatively. Overall, it can be said that the majority of reactions respond positively to the concept of more openness. The main objections are to the style of communication and to individual campaigns.

Why in this (direct and not so subtle) way? Why not through the organisation itself? Why now? Why not wait for … (insert something here)?

The Wiki main page adresses this more thouroughly, but simply put:

  • We believe direct action is needed because there is no real incentive for Casey and/or the admins to change anything or even communicate about these issues. By creating this (deliberate) tension, we at least force a discussion. Open Couchsurfing is not about forcing the changes themselves (all of our campaigns are in a proposal fase), but it is about forcing the dialogue.
  • You might be shocked by some of our disclosures: Security Concerns and Technical Information. Two points to keep in mind: 1) The issues listed in there are in direct contradiction to the Terms of Use and the Privacy statement on Couchsurfing.com. 2) I personally don’t consider the NDA as legally binding: it is misrepresentative and not enforcable. In fact, it’s dangerous and (again) in contradiction with the Terms of Use not to disclose this information. Couchsurfing promises to respect your privacy and protect your data and yet is not diligent in this. It is our moral duty to report this kind of thing.
  • There have been many attempts to do this through the organisation itself, by dozens of people. There is an Open Organisation CS group and especially within the tech team, protest has been loud and sustained. It is very logical that the tech team is at the fore-front of this discussion because they are closest to the core team (they see a lot of what happens) and are directly impacted by the closed decisionmaking of the core team, the NDA and all that stuff.
  • We have been waiting for too long.”Wait!” sounds exactly like “No!” at this point.

Things that have been long overdue:

  • A new NDA was promised back in June 2006 (!). There is supposedly a new one, that has been seen at by everyone (lawyers, admins, etc) except for the people it applies to: the developers.
  • First there was talk of a new governing structure to replace the admins, namely “The Leadership Circle” and now appearantly it has been implemented already. Nobody knows what it is, who’s in there, what they do, how it differs from the admin group, etc. But this is the structure that is currently governing the site? Weird.
  • A simple reply from Casey Fenton to OpenCouchSurfing.org. So far, only Dan and Leonardo (both admins) have replied and there has been some (private) communication with Aldo (also an admin). The rest? Silent as ever.

On a side note, we’re trying (as per some people’s suggestion) to present the “other side” of the argument as well. Please help us complete the Wiki with pro’s and con’s.

News item: not allowed!

Published by on 07 May 2007 at 12:20 in general director and General Info. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

It seems obvious that it is important to reach as many Couchsurfers as possible with Open Couchsurfing. If nothing else, it allows us to see the community’s thoughts and opinions on the topic.

For this exact reason, we have proposed a news item on Couchsurfing.com.

Mattthew Brauer posted the following in reply: “Constructive criticism is great and needed, but the purpose of the news is to inspire people and promote CouchSurfing, not to highlight the things that may or may not need improving.”

There are couple of things wrong with this attitude:

  1. There is no good way for the community at large to understand what’s going on if this kind of news is effectively shielded from them. While not every discussion is worthy of news, this surely is it seems.
  2. Quite often in Couchsurfing we hear the argument to “not be so negative”. This is certainly one form of that. And certainly, if there were channels where we could get answers to some pressing questions, we would take it there. However “don’t be negative” often just means “shut up”.

Help us publish this news item. Write Mattthew Brauer to show your support.

First reactions

Published by on 06 May 2007 at 21:43 in General Info. 9 Comments Tags: , , , .

As expected, the topics addressed on this site have caused quite a few reactions already. For the sake of Openness, we will try to list as many as possible on the Wiki in Category:Reactions.

A very interesting reaction came from Leonarde Silveira, one of the admins. Most of the conversation was over the phone, but in summary he was definitely not against opening up a dialog. His main concern was a too polarized view on this site, the fact that the “other side” of the discussion is underrepresented. In my opinion this is certainly a valid concern; it is a valuable exercise to add possible reasons for the current situation. I did encourage him (and hereby other admins as well) to also send us their view on some of our topics, which he promised to do. Other than that, logging all of the discussions and different viewpoints seem like a fair and balanced approach.

Launch of Open CouchSurfing – don’t panic

Published by on 06 May 2007 at 12:00 in General Info. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Welcome fellow couchsurfer. Perhaps you are wondering what this site is?

You’ve probably noticed that CouchSurfing has become a very big organisation. There are over 200.000 active profiles and 30.000 people log in every week. And there is no indication that the current rate of growth is going to slow down soon.

There are quite a few people within the CS organisation that feel that in order to sustain this growth, we need to have a more Open, Free and Inclusive organisation. Right now, the “top” of the CS organisation (admins) is a very closed and non-transparant structure. There is no direct representation, it is almost impossible to find out what is being discussed, there are no meeting notes publicly available, etc etc. CouchSurfing could easily become a much more open and representative organisation, if enough people want it to be. We are all volunteers for this organisation, simply by hosting people, organizing meetings and helping each other we make Couchsurfing into what it is. We should be included in every level of the decision making process and not be considered just users.

The current closed structure does not seem very good for CouchSurfing. Communication fails regularly, questions don’t or can’t get answered and there is often a sense of unilateral decision making. On a more practical level, the way the site development is being run is very inefficient, precisely because of the constant desire to keep things secret.

That’s why we turn to you. Help us make CouchSurfing the Open and Free organisation it can be. Get involved. Bring your ideas here and help us improve CouchSurfing.

You can start here (Wiki).