Valeri on Project Management Improvement and Communication.
I’m removing this text, since it’s slightly out of context. You can find it through clicking on the link though. — Kasper, September 13th 2007
Tag Archive for 'couchsurfing'
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“ 't Must be said, one couch to burn is better than surfing ”
~ Oscar Wilde on CouchSurfing
After Jay Wellingdon Couch invented the couch in the year 1895 people have come up with many uses for this remarkable device. Couchsurfing is one of these: the act of taking a couch and jumping off a big cliff, usually they run after the visionary couch lemming. This is called “the mission”. For this reason Couchsurfers are not known for their old age. They usually tend to flock with other would-be couchsurfers in small congregations. Bigger congregations are also known to take place sometimes, which can have detrimental effects on the couch populations in some areas, especially in places where there is sea and lots of couches to steal. Anyone critical of the mission is usually thrown of the cliff anyway.
Some people just can’t get enough
There is even an organization and a website dedicated to this act of surfing couches, but most people on this website only watch other people surf with their couch. This is usually called interspecial understanding, though only few people really understand the deeper act of understanding other species.
Because not everyone owns a house next to the sea it is also allowed to burn yourself on other people’s couches. Couchsurfers frown upon financial transaction and judge each other on the “size” of their “couch”. Because of this, it is not a dating site.
Some couchsurfers are only just fakers and prefer Burning stuff. The Leadership Team of the organization are known for their yearly gathering at this festival. Sometimes they also practice the act of burning dog. During these events they often honour Host, the Greek god of hostility. The relationship between the visionary couch lemming and the leadership team is not quite clear, as the existence of them belongs more to realm of mythology – besides these, rare sightings of popes and cardinals carrying yellow flags and chanting hymns of the long-lost holy couch have been reported.
“Participate in creating a better burn, one couch at a time” – quote by visionary couch lemming, circa 2007 (unknown origin)
Tom Cruise showing Oprah how to properly use a couch.
In 2007 a splinter group of unhappy couch surfers, led by Tom Cruise, started OpenCouchSurfing, a terrorist organization entering people’s homes to slice open couches and hide themselves for unexpecting old ladies. They made the news in many places, especially in Nelson, a picturesque little town also known as the Florida of New Zealand, where many old ladies where found dead – with their couches slit wide open. The crazed couch surfers become especially violent when they hear the phrases “No worries” and “You rock!” – or the now infamous “Big hugs” – a phrase bringing along a series of gory massacres across the globe after its introduction to couchsurfer lingo.
Other related notorious organizations are Hostility Club, BeHorny and CrashAtMines (aka CrashAMime), all of which serve the noble mission of hostility ie the act of worshiping Host.
From Uncyclopedia, available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike NonCommercial license
So, I’ve become a consumer of our own product, and I am happy to report that “the dogfood tastes great”. This weekend, It looks like I’m all set to BeWelcome surf in Paris. I didn’t even bother to try with Couchsurfing.com because I knew that although only 1000 members, BeWelcome seems to already be getting enough geographic coverage. Having not been involved in usability of either CS or BW (I’m a database guy), it was refreshing to see how much more intuitive BeWelcome already is. Top marks to the devs.
Reading recent posts on this blog I realise that a number of people signed the CouchSurfing NDA under the impression “it was going to be fixed”.
I think there’s an important lesson for volunteers to learn here. Don’t sign unless you’re happy with what you’re signing.
It’s impossible to say how things could have happened if people had made different choices, that’s not my purpose here. I’m looking forward, both to new CouchSurfing volunteers and to other NDAs. If you’re not happy with the terms, don’t sign them. A verbal agreement to change the terms later simply doesn’t cut it.
I held off signing the NDA on the basis that it would interfere with future businesses I might be involved in. Now, I’m glad I made that choice, because it seems clear that CouchSurfing (Casey) have no intention of producing an NDA I would be willing to sign.
“It just feels bad to be asked for help and promised something in return by the captain after he set the boat on a riff and than when the ship is running being told: ‘What do you want here? This is the captains lounge. I’ve hired professional help now. You are just a stupid little member. Now stop whining, go down to where the swimming pools are and have fun.’ ” – Torsten (from the Brainstorm group).
As someone who was present in Montreal during the week of the crash, I can add some detail to the Captain’s behavior in those days.
We have been told that the particular combination of events leading to the crash (“The Triple Storm”) was highly unlikely, but even if accurate this excuse for the disaster obscures the fact that the organization’s extreme dependency on Casey in the technical area was a great vulnerability to the organization, and a disaster waiting to happen.
I believe this dependency was not due to the lack of willing, trustworthy and qualified members to spread the responsibility among (and thus provide redundancy and checks and balances), but to Casey’s intention to maintain control of the website and thus, in part, I strongly suspect, justify his privileged (and salaried) position. i.e., If others were doing all the work Casey was doing voluntarily, then it would be harder to justify being the only salaried member of the organization.
If the major crash was unavoidable (we’ll never know for sure), certainly many of the chronic server problems since then, that at times put members traveling in foreign countries at greater risk, were really a direct result of Casey’s policy.
A few days after the crash, Casey terminated the Couchsurfing Project. He did not discuss this with any of the members at Montreal that I talked with: people who had traveled from great distances at their own expense and on their vacation time to answer the call for community participation. It was as though in Casey’s mind, CS was the website and with the website gone (in his opinion) there was no CS.
But most of us there understood that CS was not a website but a community. The Community still existed and needed to come together for each other more than ever. Especially, there were members out on the road, traveling in foreign countries, using the website to make contacts with hosts as they went, many on a low budget who couldn’t afford to just start staying in hotels. It was the beginning of summer, and many others had made vacation plans based on CS. These people needed our help and support. Casey abandoned them.
I was stunned by Casey’s behavior. Not knowing him, I just assumed that there must be factors I did not know of, and gave him the benefit of doubt.
There was a leadership vacuum immediately following the termination, as Casey was absent for much of the time. Members were dazed and directionless, wondering if they should just go home. I organized some meetings, as did Heather. I proposed that the first order of business was to take care of the members. I suggested that we set up message boards on some free site so that members could at least communicate with each other. All agreed and we got to work right away.
Once we were set up, there was only one problem: how to let members know about the message boards? We knew that the home page of couchsurfing.com was still working. So all we needed was an announcement with a link to the message boards put on it. It took about a day to find Casey and get him to put the link in place. No one else could do it because Casey was the only one with the password to the servers.
The next order of business was to get the website back up. While Casey was still out of the picture, we made a group decision to bring back CS any way possible, however long it took. This was the true beginning of CS 2.0.
We knew that the software was not lost, only the data (i.e., members personal information and friendship links). So, the website could be restarted quickly, but members would have to re-register and re-establish their friendships. If this was the only obstacle, I could not understand why Casey would shut down the organization, unless perhaps, he was burnt out and just wanted to be done with it.
One thing very crucial here is that Casey did not offer the community access to the software. We could have quickly (in a matter of a couple weeks at most, which is how long it took anyway to restart the site with salvaged data) brought the site without the data. There was a tremendous, self-organized offering of support from programmers all over the world. They even formed themselves into teams and began extracting member data from Google’s caches. This was the community I was proud to belonged to and wanted to support.
It was clear that Casey considered the software to be his own property, not the property of the community, and he was not willing to just give it to us. The Captain had abandoned the ship and took the steering wheel with him, being willing to let the ship sink rather than give up control and let others save the ship.
In this crucial meeting, I personally committed to take the responsibility to rebuild the website myself, if necessary, but was sure many would help in the effort. I would have done it free of charge and claim no ownership of it. Also, I would have always been accountable to the community, and followed their guidance and stepped down if they asked me to. But I was a new member, and did not have a reputation within CS. Heather, who was an Admin, argued that “we have to get Casey back on board”. She held sway. I did not know at the time that she was romantically involved with Casey (or so I have been told), as this was kept discreet.
Over the next few days, pleas were made with Casey to come back, led by Heather, although, at least, the group insisted that the new CS must be different from the old, and that there should be much more emphasis on member participation. Casey agreed to this. In Heather’s word’s: “CS should not be about just one person”. Heather even expressed that the crash was a blessing in disguise, and urged that the recovery be delayed if necessary to ensure that fundamental changes were made and that CS did not just return to business as usual.
Casey tentatively agreed to explore the possibility of reviving CS, and when he began to have success recovering the data, resumed control over the project. I was relieved at the time, because Casey’s return meant that I could go on the vacation I had planned. But now I realized that those few days were the one chance for CS to become a truly community-based self-governing organization. The seeds of the demise of CS 2.0 were planted almost as soon as it began.
John
No, Couchsurfing.com is not in financial trouble… Yet.
On June 19th, I published a analysis of the CS finances (sheet) , predicting that CS (technically it’s actually just Casey) would be able to hire 3 to 5 extra “employees” by the end of this year. It happened a lot quicker than I thought however (Jim Stone and Mattthew Brauer got hired as well as a thus far unannounced and unnamed developer). This is the part where I say “See! i was right!” and continue speculating.
Let’s have a look at where this money comes from. As far as we know, there is only one source of income for Couchsurfing: donations. This is logical, since there are no banner ads, no paid subscriptions or anything and Couchsurfing has been unable to register as a 501(c)3 organisation in the US so far, which excludes the organisation (actually, just Casey and his friends, since there is no officially elected board) from US government money.
But! Surely people that (mostly) like to travel cheaply cannot afford to collectively donate over 150.000 $ a year (projected for 2007)?!? You’re right. They aren’t donating, they are “getting verified” at 25$ per person (or less if you can prove you live in a poor area of the world). Verification is essentially proving to CS that you are who you say you are and nothing talks like money. If it was just verification they were offering, money wouldn’t need to be involved. I’ve heard of CS meetings where you could bring a passport and 25$ to get verified by an admin. Why would you need to pay if you could just show your passport and be done with it? Because, of course, this verification/donation scam is the main revenue stream for CS. Yes, a scam. If CS was genuinly interested in getting people verified for “security reasons”, a showing of passports would be more than enough. However, I have thus far never met anybody who was able to get verified without paying cold hard cash. The administrative cost of sending you a “verification code” is also negligable, a 2$ “donation” would be much closer to the actual need since all the physical posting is done by volunteers anyway.
In and of itself, this verification/donation scam is mostly harmless, even if the “sliding scale verification” is pretty cynical if you really think about it. (We’re asking people to pay as much as they can affor, so they can “prove” their identities and get the same benefits as those who can afford it, how’s that for intercultural understanding.) I mean, even I fell for it and payed to get verified. Then why is it such a problem?
The trouble is that verification money scales directly with new subscriptions to CS. This in turn means that CS can only continue to afford paying people like Jim Stone if people keep registering (and verifying) at the current rate. This definitely explains why there is so much “verification spam” on CS (visible when you haven’t “verified/donated” yet). If at any point the amount of new users starts to slow down, verification/donation money will automatically slow down as well. If CS ever hits the peak of possible subscribers, income will fall, rapidly. Subsequently, Couchsurfing cannot afford it’s employees anymore and soon it will be in real trouble.
How likely is this? Well, Hospitality Club seems to have hit it’s high point already, with subscriptions slowing down significantly. We can only assume that it’s only a matter of a year or 2 (at the most) before the same thing happens to CS, since both organisations tap more or less the same userbase.
At that point – as they say – things will start falling apart. CS will be practically forced to work with volunteers again at the “top of the food chain”, which no doubt will cause enormous amounts of stress on the tightly formed group that is privately running CS right now. Note that Casey is not preparing “his” organisation for this. It doesn’t appear that any of the donation money is being saved (for instance by not hiring Jim and Mattthew but opening a savings account) and long-term thinking doesn’t appear to be a strength of the organisation anyway. Couchsurfing is technically running on “borrowed” time, on finances that will only last as long as new users keep coming in.
An organisation like CS almost has to run on volunteers, unless it drastically changes its business model. So, either we see banner ads, “payed subscriptions”, “golden accounts”, regular “donation drives” or whatever or we’re going to see a financial breakdown. When that happens, and it most likely will, we’ll be here to pick up the pieces.
“I agree. I’m also Anu’s #1 fan 
”
And I thought I was!
Although I have moved on to support the hospitality movement through BeWelcome.org, where a true democracy exists and no one is making money off the generosity of others, where volunteers are respected and treated with honesty and fairness by other volunteers acting as leaders with the consent of the community, I sometimes check in at CouchSurfing to see what my friends are up to and to check on the community I love and gladly worked for as a full-time volunteer until it was led away from the CS 2.0 vision by the current management.
Not well, I would say.
I feel that trying to influence the power elite of CS is futile through any other than legal means, but I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of Anu.
I worked very closely with her for more than six months. During this time, she demonstrated excellent qualities of self-motivation, leadership, responsible communication, and technical competence. But more impressive was her tireless devotion to the community, always advocating for it, always nurturing it, always defending it (even with anger at times). And above all, most impressive was her direct honesty and integrity.
She was the obvious choice for Tech Team leader, in the minds of Kasper and I, and I believe she had the support of Joe by that time. We were the 4 core volunteer developers who together did the bulk of the technical work on this website during most of the year following the Montreal Collective, where CS 2.0 was launched.
Anu was blacklisted by the CS elite, and passed over as leader of the Tech Team. After many months of devoted work on behalf of the community, the wishes of the Tech Team on this matter were completely ignored, not even consulted.
Anu has been unappreciated and treated with disrespect. This is unconscionable. Myself and other volunteers of the Tech Team were mislead and treated with disrespect.
When I resigned as a volunteer, I had strong suspicions about the motives of the CS elite, but I gave them what benefit of the doubt I could and was willing to support CS as a corporation providing a service to the hospitality community. After what I have seen and what has come to light since, no longer can I support it under the current management.
Casting dispersions on Anu’s integrity is going too far. She deserves an apology.
Calling people who gave heart and soul to this community, but now feel mislead and betrayed by the CS elite, and are angry about it, “CS-haters”, is reprehensible.
This is in the style of the Bush administration, which brands all critics of its policies “unpatriotic“.
Let me out of here. I’m deleting my profile.
John
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.
Being off the grid has its benefits 
however I couldn’t help but responding to the thread below – where “negativity” is once again being shut down and anyone who is even remotely associated with “heretic” views is actively being marginalized.
“as apparently one of “them”… all I have to say I have said elsewhere (see below).
For a quick read (online time is scarce these days) I can’t help but agreeing with Pickwick – this call for positivity is starting to sound a bit too cult-like to me. Also, how can you claim you know “those guys” hate CS? Have you actually talked with them about why they volunteered for CS in the first place? What aspects of CS they do enjoy, and why? Have you asked why they stuck by while being treated like shit? Would you have done the same, if received the same treatment, repeatedly?
For me personally, I would have left long ago IF I didn’t care about what this community still stands for for me. The fact that I’m still somewhat involved (the thread is getting thinner, just in case you haven’t noticed) is because I still have all the faith in the community, if not the leadership.
Anu
PS. yes it IS starting to feel like a waste of my time to keep kicking this particular dead horse, so perhaps you can all “be positive” soon enough 
(thankfully there are other projects where some critical thinking is actually welcome, and responded to with due respect, and where *gasp* even Kasper’s input is more than appropriate!)
————————————————
Current opinion of CS:
It’s an adventure machine, and a world full of friends I haven’t met yet! I cherish the CS community, which is full of amazing people and hope to meet many more of them on the remaining paths of my trip.
BUT after a year of volunteering I can say I’m not happy of the current events: seeing CS disregarding its culturally diverse member base (with a non-American majority) and entertaining values of the American corporate culture. Although my belief in the community itself is strong, I don’t share this view on the way CS is currently lead. Feel free to disagree, or take the red pill…
www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/08/14/hc-might-soon-be-open-so…
Anu Aug 15th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Along the same lines here – for me it was never about open source (though by seeing the most recent standpoints of CS, I do tend to agree more and more with OCS views), but about overall fairness and openness in policies and decision-making. So I would not just blindly jump onto HC or any other organization that does not actively address these issues.”
On August 2nd, Couchsurfing Announced that they were looking to hire a full time developer. I look back today (August 10th) and I notice that:
***We Are No Longer Accepting Applications***
I’m not sure what day they posted this notice, but it seems a very short period of time to advertise a vacancy. I always suspected that announcing this was just to escape criticism about “hiring all of Casey’s friends”. I guess soon we will get to see who the developer is, and if it is indeed a familiar face.
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