Opencouchsurfing.org scares me

Writing by Doogie on Monday, 4 of February , 2008 at 8:29 pm

Deze moet ik in het Engels schrijven:

This post, I will write in my beloved Flenglish.

People who know me and followed this blog know that I am not scared that easily. In my adventures I have done things and have been in places where you only go if you have lots of guts, are crazy or have nothing to lose. In my case I have a little bit of all of the above. I think I pushed the limits and the most crazy stories are even not on this blog otherwise my dear mom would never close an eye at night and even some of my less closer friends would not understand my behaviour.
I have been really scared only twice so far, once when I was facing a pack of raging street dogs in the middle of the night and the other time when Chris and me got lost hiking in Nepal and we needed to use our socks and underwear as torches to see the path on the ridge of the mountain. Not much of our male ego left there :p

but last night I didn’t sleep because of opencouchsurfing.org.

What is opencouchsurfing.org:

on opencouchsurfing.org homepage: “We believe in the spirit of CouchSurfing, of creating a better world through understanding. We believe this purpose is best served by a truly Open Organisation, one that is representative of the CouchSurfing community as a whole. We believe information should flow freely through an Open Organisation.

We have realized that this Freedom will not come from within the Couchsurfing core itself.”

 

So, these people love couchsurfing and they want to know what happens with the money from their donations and dont want their beloved site go down because of mismanagement etc. Because a 3rd party organisation that has an eye on a non profit organisation is a good thing and because one of the most fabulous couchsurfers I know told me about this site and also supports it I took my time to see what it was all about.
On my first visit I saw that subjectiveness, boredom and ignorance where rampant on that site. It exhausted blind destructive negativity towards the couchsurfing team based mostly on misinformation, twisted logic on incomplete knowledge of whats going on or just plain stupidity or jealousy. Well, haha, no that was NOT what I was thinking the first time I was on the site Although I felt the site was extremely negative it did raise some serious questions on my side. So I,at that time innocent and unknowing, had lots of questions with only one main question in my mind: “IS OPENCOUCHSURFING RIGHT?”.

Couchsurfing changed my life and I was about to donate 3 months of my life for it so for me it was very personal and serious.

So in the first week in Phuket(yes choosing Phuket for the collective was a mistake and a waste of money, glad I was there in time to vote for Pai :p) I casually drop some of the questions/my concernes in a casual way to see how they would react. And I think asking annoying questions and be the devils advocate with a dash of innocence is one of my talents But to my own disappointment, every-time, and I hope you spying guys on opencouchsurfing read this one very well, EVERYTIME, they just gave me a complete answer on the how, the when, the why and the amount of money. They told me EVERYTING! No hiding, no lies, no far fetched excuses for mistakes that had been made in the past. So no fun for me, the devils advocate

So what happened? What scared me so much?

Yesterday my brother in law asked me about the statistics of my blog. For the first time since I travel I check them and I noticed that there was a site linking to my blog: Opencouchsurfing! W.T.F. I think. I check it out and see there is yet another negative(duh) post about CS. It talks about the crash we had and what we where doing. And then. I see a guy named Paul posting my name, my job description and you will not believe that. Parts out of my blog(that’s written in Flemish) translated, I think using a crappy online translator, posted on that site. I didn’t know what to do: laughing or being scared, well I was having both.

So this guy, Sneaky Paul, is just another guy on openCS who is spending his time looking around for dirt about cs. He put on his virtual Sherlock Holmes hat and starts investigating all the profiles from the people of the collective and stumbles on my blog. I imagine him on one of his loveless lonely nights trying to decipher my blog written in that crazy Flemisch language. Parsing the text through a online translator and suddenly “aaaahah, I got you guys. I see you are having FUN and yes… GIRLS too! Two! God damn you Doegie, you and your fellow team members, you will pay for this because you are using CS money for this”. Posting this new found information on opencouchsurfing and going to sleep thinking he made (t)his world a little bit better.

So this is the funny part. I was laughing because he used posted “Pai is just too great, I have to much work and to much fun to write something in my blog” quote and there was something about my amazingly fun first night the day before Christmas, where I got a very warm welcome from the team. So tell me… Whats wrong in having loads of fun and working very hard at the same time? Whats wrong about receiving a warm welcome from the people I will live with for the next 3 months?

What we do during our christmass holiday, in the weekends and at night we spend our own money and is not really CS bussiness but mostely it IS NONE OF YOUR BUSSINESS!

And I see posts like that all the time on openCS. Someone finds a picture, draws quick conclusions and adds that to the pile of dirt. Or someon else hears numbers and with incomplete knowledge fills in the gaps with his imagination is very happy adding this to the ever growing pile of shit as well.
It is also funny because by letting anonymous people add their frustrations doing that opencouchsurfing.org becomes a very subjective and dirty site. And, wel, sometimes there are some strong and valid arguments by people a bit more mature who are just engulfed by the pile of mud posted by their users

But… thats exactly what have me a sleepless night. My blog is for my friends and family. There is incomplete and extremely subjective information in here. Its also personal information that is public to the world but taken out of its context information like that can be twisted as hard as the mind of the people who want to abuse it. Doing that makes it personal most of all WHERE WILL YOU STOP? Yes you, hidden behind the pseudonyme Paul and your little friends? It is goddamn scary because he is not the only one on that site!

So now I know people as I am writing this are reading my blog with the only purpose of finding “something” they could use against the company behind couchsurfing.

I saw that subjectiveness, boredom and ignorance where rampant on opencs.org and negative people who are bored or have to much time at their hands can be funny, annoying and sometimes even dangerous.

I’m sure that if the people behind openCS would visit us for only 1 day they would be so amazed by the work we are doing right now they would close down their site. I know I would.

The thai collective rocks!

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