Rocking on!

Hey everybody. We haven’t been keeping up with this blog. Things are going really well, though.

* for general updates about collective doings: http://www.couchsurfing.com/groups/CSC_New_Zealand_2006-2007/81492

* most of us are on the tech team: http://wiki.couchsurfing.com/en/Tech_status

Much love,

Joe

The Beta user – me, or how to make bubbles.

So much to do! We haven’t posted much lately.  In French we say ‘pas de nouvelles, bonnes nouvelles’, but really I feel that we should keep every member of the community informed of what is going on.

Some of you might have seen a video taken a few weeks ago by Leo: me breaking my own bubble, spinning, free, spinning, tumbling, falling and smiling, ready to spin again.

There are different kinds of bubbles. The ones we don’t chose: family, traditions, cultural values. The ones we don’t see: the day to day routine most travellers escape. Those that we create for ourselves: our dressing code, the people we surround ourselves with, our goals in life.

At the Collective we try to break free from all that we’ve been jailed in before. It’s liberating, and for a few weeks we worked as if there were no consequences. Our motto was ‘i do it because i can’.

Now I realize that this new way of working cast us out from the rest of the ‘real’ world. We created our own bubble. And we’ll have to break away from it eventually.

We’re working night and day (ok, not in the early mornings usually) because we believe in the CouchSurfing Project. What does it mean? That we believe that what we are doing here at the Collective is going to improve the life of every user. All of them. It also means that there is no hierarchy: everyone should, in theory, be able to come and help if they wanted to. We are serving an idea, everyone of us can bring their specificity to improve that idea. We need people to enrich the community by their individuality.

And yet… Working here with all this diversity and all those options, I still feel trapped. There is an organization on CS (look at the Org structure), but when someone has an idea, there is no one to back them up and say ‘yes, you can do it, it’s a positive improvement for the community’, or, ‘no, you can’t do that in CouchSurfing’s name’. It allows a wide range of liberty, but people might be discouraged and refuse to spend all their time and energy in projects that don’t necessarily have definite goals and that might never be accomplished because someone randomly decided to oppose it and that no agreement was reached beforehand.

I called some people today -French CS friends- that are willing to spend all their free time organizing the next CS Collective. However, who knows if it will happen or not? No one backs them up, and no one is entitled to back them up in the CS structure as I see it.

What is CS? An association where people vote and make decisions? Or is it an organization with one head? Maybe it’s an oligarchy, the power belongs to the few.

And I, the beta user who uses CS to break my bubbles and is willing to give my whole time and energy to the community, am trapped in another bubble, waiting for orders that don’t come and observing a system that refuses to work itself out.

I don’t know the answers. No one does. Feedback from beta users (all of us!) would be refreshing though, to help us break our new bubble.