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Tag Archive for 'OpenCouchSurfing'

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Announcing The CouchSurfing Leadership Team

Published by on 10 May 2007 at 21:47 in Casey Fenton and Leadership Circle. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Great! Finally! Some tangible (public) information about the Leadership Circle! Mattthew started articles on the CS wiki about the Leadership Team and the Leadership Qualities. I will refrain myself from any comments, since I won’t do any better than Anu:

How about these?

  • Ability for respectful conflict resolution through confrontation rather than avoidance
  • Ability for open, direct and sincere dialog with the community
  • Ability to take in and reflect upon constructive criticism and act on it accordingly
  • Ability to operate in a multi-cultural environment, actively realizing the mission of inter-cultural understanding in accepting varying communication styles and other differences stemming from diverse cultural backgrounds
  • Ability to operate in a largely virtual organization


… then I went to sleep for a couple of hours.
When waking up I was surprised to see that:

To create a bit of balance I then started the Dissident Team.

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.

Why a non-compete clause will be very harmful to CouchSurfing

Published by on 08 May 2007 at 05:13 in Casey Fenton, general director, NDA and Open Source. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Mattthew Brauer is one of the people who is involved in the creation of a new Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for CouchSurfing. The current NDA is simply ridiculous, it transfers all trade secrets from the volunteer to CouchSurfing. A trade secret is a very ill-defined term that literally can include anything you can think of, such as “programming techniques” and “software patents”. The NDA should be limited to giving CouchSurfing a license to use the work of the volunteer, it should not try to transfer copyrights or just ideas.

My main concern for the new NDA used to be this part. A secondary concern is the non-compete clause, which forbids the signee from working for related organizations or companies, which is, again a bit vague. It could mean that if you sign the NDA, you can’t work for any other website. Or you can’t work for a travel agency.

When I signed the NDA in August 2006, Casey told me the NDA would be changed. This year I found out Casey Fenton had already been promising a new NDA in June 2006. It’s nearly one year later and no draft has been shown to people outside the Leadership Circle. Mattthew, one of the people who was working on this wrote yesterday:

I support a reasonable non-compete clause. The non-compete clause will apply only to other travel related social networks and will last for one year. It’s good for CS to require a commitment from volunteers. They have to make the choice to work for CS over competitors, and if they make that commitment, they are likely to be dedicated and motivated. It’s also safest for CS to ask that volunteers don’t immediately go work for competitors with the knowledge they’ve gained from CS.

…and I am deeply shocked. I know that many CS volunteers are also volunteers for Hospitality Club. I know that most people don’t give a damn about whether it’s called CouchSurfing, Servas, HomeStay, WWOOFing, WarmShowersList, BeWelcome, or WhatEver, as long as they meet interesting people. Most volunteers care about the mission of all these organization a lot more than that they care about the individual organizations.

And what about Hitchwiki, Wikitravel and other websites created by travelers. Add “friend links” and voila, suddenly it’s a travel related network, and anyone who has signed the NDA for CouchSurfing can’t work on these projects anymore.

from feeling part of something bigger, from responsibility. Someone who takes the step to find out how to volunteer is already motivated, and in CS, if they actually get to do something they must have been truly very dedicated, going through mires of information, contacting many people without getting replies. Commitment doesn’t come through the force of law.

If there will be any non-compete clause in the new NDA, I will stop doing any work for CouchSurfing and demand that the NDA I signed in August is declared void. I am sure that other technically inclined people will do the same. Since the NDA is also supposed to be signed by many more people CouchSurfing will loose a lot of its core volunteers, the people who have been struggling for more transparency, who have been working off their asses for free, and who have been able to keep the site running. If they leave, CS will be left amputated and there will just be a core of people who highly value secrecy and prefer to work with people who think the same as they do and with whom they have been close friends with for a long time.

Kasper

P.S. If there will be a non-compete clause the OpenCS project could be terminated very soon: Yesterday I heard it’s likely that BeWelcome will soon release their code under the GNU General Public License.

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).