We received an announcement on the creation of the Open Couchsurfing project , as a development within the couchsurfing hospitality exchange community, which seems to originate from a number of participating volunteer programmers.

Here’s a copy of the announcement by Thomas Goorden (for the cs-dev-public list):

My dear fellow developers,

You might have noticed that there has been a lot of discussion on these lists concerning a more open Couchsurfing organisation. The Non-Disclosure-Agreement is certainly a part of that, as are other very important organisational issues. A lot of us have feel that a solution to these problems has been long overdue.

Our questions are ignored too often, too often have we heard “Wait! We’re working on it!”, too many empty promises have been made.

The time has come to help Couchsurfing in a different way. We have started www.opencouchsurfing.org with the specific goal of creating a more Open and Free Couchsurfing organisation by campaigning for specific goals.

There has been a lot of effort to do this from within the Couchsurfing structure, but none of these efforts have been very effective. The most recent Wiki incident (involving some “secret” information about the servers) has convinced us even further to take our quest to a seperate site, to be able to let everyone speak freely without the threat of an NDA/censorship/
etc. Everyone is equal on our site, no-one is “more equal” than others.

Please understand that we love Couchsurfing and have no intention of harming it. However, we do believe we need to create this kind of tension to be able to start the kind of change that is needed to make it into a better and more stable organisation. We believe non-violent “civil” disobedience is the best way to finally get things moving.

Read more information on the Open Couchsurfing Wiki