Comments on: Couchsurfing emerging as a case study in company-community foul up https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:20:36 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam » Surf around the world! An analysis of Couchsurfing.com https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17/comment-page-1#comment-310447 Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:35:16 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17#comment-310447 […] Then I came across a blog which is completely tearing down the couchsurfing project: http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/2007/07/20/couchsurfing-20-is-dead/ . They don’t think it is a web 2.0 application since they’ve hired more staff who need to be paid and still use volunteers for programming but not letting them co-decide in decisions about the website. One volunteer who worked for the website a long time says Couchsurfing has become a corporation who do what they want without listening to its users/volunteers, he writes: ” Unless, of course, one regards CS as a corporation, and the management has absolute authority to do what they will and volunteers are just “hired” help who should just be thankful for the opportunity to work for such a respected international corporation. This was NOT this spirit of the community that brought CS back from the crash, but something precious has been lost along the way.” So the non opportunistic website it seems to be is changing and maybe becoming less web 2.0 than before. Still, users are the ones making this website possible, it’s still free to use and the website functions as a platform/community website like a web 2.0 application should. Another blog about the question if couchsurfing.com is using it’s volunteers has a comment from someone saying it is just about the question of making CS open source or not, which they decided to do not, this commentator understands the CS corporation for wanting to protect their work and not make it an open source application. (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/200…) […]

]]> By: PMgD https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17/comment-page-1#comment-153754 Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:33:42 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17#comment-153754 Disclaimer: I’m not one of volunteers who’s programming or any of the other major volunteering tasks. I don’t know everything about every little detail but I have been following the “OpenCouchsurfing” movement.

About them I would like to say that:
1) they don’t represent such a big group of CS-members as you make it appear in the post.
2) it was a discussion about making CS OpenSource or not indeed. OCS lost the discussion. Ever since then they have been ranting on CS. Out of this disagreement BeWelcome grew (which I believe is a good initiative) and it’s good to see it grow but I still want to see how it will be like when there are +300.000 members. The source code will probably still be open but will they still have their “open organisation structure”. We’ll have to wait and see and it’s too early to compare both CS and BW (which OCS tries to do).
3) CS has applied has always been a “not-for-profit” corporation with the aim of becoming a “non-profit-organisation”. Again, I’m not an expert on these legal issues but as far as I understood it is easier to start a “not-for-profit” cooperation and change it to a non-profit then start a non-profit from the ground up. Anyhow, they have applied for the non-profit status. Just wanted to point that out too.
4) I do understand that CS wants to protect their sourcecode. I do agree that an API or alike would be great and I do believe that the “OpenSource” movement is the best thing that happed to any kind of community. It’s a difficult discussion. If I design something (recumbent bike for example) it is something I’ll protect too (both in legal ways as in any other way). Not comparable? I believe it is. It’s both a product of hard work, inspiration and transpiration. It’s great people can open that all up for others but I don’t know if I would be able to do so myself.
5) It’s not because you’re a “non-profit” organisation that you can’t get payment. Look at all the non-profit organisations around (Red Cross, Greenpeace,…). It’s great if you don’t need the money and can spend all of your time on free-volunteering but that’s not true for most of us.

Anyhow, just a few of my own opinions.

]]> By: Ex-volunteer https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17/comment-page-1#comment-122703 Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:14:06 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/couchsurfing-emerging-as-a-case-study-in-company-community-foul-up/2007/10/17#comment-122703 There\’s another twist to this: Couchsurfing is not just another web company, but states the following on the footer of each page
© 1999-2007 CouchSurfingSM International a Non-Profit Organization

So me and others volunteered considerable amounts of time and effort for free under this assumption, and most of us – without speaking for the rest – probably would not have done so for a company such as (insert your favorite social web service here). The difference might not be a big deal for Americans, but is definitely and issue for anyone not from the US where capitalistic mindset is at least a bit less common. More information of the most recent events on the blog.

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