Greetings from the Laundry Room

A fairly typical day in my Collective life, hugely subjective but for once trying to capture the full spectrum of daily existence over here (not just computers, bugs and the groupies (Brainstormers & Cockroaches) for ONCE! (NOTE: wanna shout out shorter lines in the future but this should give some idea of what’s life all about out here)

Waking up to wander into the living room where I’m greeted with some gruntings over my dish-duties last night (which are later resolved in a fair & equal way and we all learn a bit about in-house communications!). Breakfast of champions, in my case tea, cheese&tomato sandwiches. Backing off to my “office” at the laundry room with determined intent to get back on top of my emails & TODO items in CS code after a few days of (well-deserved!) chillout & movie-watching when having a flu. Pointing Callum towards our past efforts to get blogs on the site & shouting out to get Bill started with the design team.

As the collective approaches the end, it’s about time I start my personal preparations towards becoming a respectable even if temporary citizen of New Zealand by hitching a ride to town with Bridget, Kristen and Hannah to obtain my tax number (IRD). We go shopping a whopping mount of food to last us all for a whole week (to make sure: we only get the most basic stuff and are very price-concious, and Bridget makes sure we stay that way! . I decide to treat my housemates with some cheap-ass cookies (as I’ve not felt I’ve been a really good housemate lately)

Back at the house I get back to my tech duties: answering some people approaching me on the pages I “own” on the site (ownership simply meaning I’m the one who has worked on that particular page for the most over the past few weeks / months – check it up on the right-down corner of each CS page!), check up on meetings code changes made by our new developer POISONS, fix some things on ambassador’s home page and write up minutes of the Tech Team meeting last week. Bigger code changes shall have to wait until I feel a bit better…

As it is customary for the CSC, work-time and recreation are often interrelated, so at sunset I find myself doing the last bits of yoga session by our certified instructor Joshua (who’s the least Texan Texan I know . Finding my inbox with a well-suited job notification Looking forward to a dinner by Kristen and some chatting with my fellow CSC members.

Anu

Figureing out a new thing…

So in my lack of computer knowledge I am finally figuring out how to make blog. What do you think? I couldn’t find the way to post from my personal blog to here. SO I have made a new one for hear just to see if I am doing this anywhere near to right.

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.

It’s all about learning

To me, this Collective is all about learning. We are all learning something, in fact, that is what we have all set out do whether we realize it or not. Some people are reading about the Collective to learn more about what it really is. Everyone at the Collective is learning something, and I believe we all are actively trying. I think we are hoping to learn what we can offer the world to help it grow and prosper. Some of us are learning about how we interact with each other and how to share that information with more people so that we all begin to communicate more effectively. Others are learning about what people need and how to meet those needs and wondering what outcomes are possible once needs are met. I feel like I am constantly learning. Whether it is something I am actively trying to learn like the guitar (I learned two whole chords), or something that just happens from listening to conversations, I feel like I am learning a lot every day. I am going to try and share something I learn each day with everyone who reads this blog. We can learn together. Increase our collective consciousness. Please share what you learn too. We can all learn from each other.