The couchsurfing experience, the first five years
Casey Fenton, founder of CouchSurfing, is interviewed at length in Shareable magazine by What’s Mine Is Yours author Rachel Botsman about trust and reputation, community decision-making, social entrepreneurship, and the future of travel.
Just one question here as an excerpt, about the past and future of the project:
“RB: You have mentioned that the first five years of CouchSurfing were about establishing the global network and the next five years are going to be about enabling people to engage in different cultures. Can you please share more details about this plan?
CF: The first five years were about making CouchSurfing happen in the most basic form. Right now, we have provided a search engine where people can find each other and stay with each other, and hopefully they will have experiences that are positive and where they learn something. We have done that and proven we can.
The next five years are focused really deep on achieving our mission enabling people to understand their differences. We are really getting into the science and mechanisms of making that happen. A search engine is being created that allows people to search on different interests and ideas, ideas that would be traditionally to be dividing or unifying. These are the points that give us difference and similarities across the world. This will enable you to assess how likely are you to get along with that person or have common things to talk about.”
