Couchsurfing

One of the best decisions I've made over the last decade is to participate in Couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is generically letting travelers stay in your home for free, just for the experience of meeting people.  Couchsurfing is also specifically the corporation that runs the couchsurfing.com website and its associated app.  There are other websites that facilitate traveler hosting, such as Warm Showers.

Key to the couchsurfing.com implementation of the idea is a rating/reviewing system and the idea of preserving one's reputation.  The backpackers comment on the places they've stayed.  The hosts comment on the people that have stayed with them.  A reputation is built up, and, hopefully, safety and civility for hosts and guests is ensured by the online reputation system.  To be honest, it all works quite well.  I've had only one bad experience out of the three dozen groups that have stayed with me.

But there absolutely have been tragic events associated with couchsurfing: theft, sexual assault, and a couple of murders have occurred, as well as a not insignificant amount of douchebaggery that surrounds creepy guys interacting with single women.  But for experienced guests and hosts, I would wager that the safety and security is much greater than other interactions that one has with strangers.

Thinking about all of the current discussions that swirl about about power dynamics, sexual assault, the gig economy, toxic masculinity, and tech, I have put some thought into why couchsurfing.com hasn't degenerated into a complete nightmare like most online communities tend to do.  My conclusion is that power dynamics are weak.  I, as a host, don't particularly fear couchsurfing.com the website.  If they are rude to me, I'll just quit.  If putting up people in my home became inconvenient, I would just quit.  The people that stay with me, if they didn't like me, there are tens of thousands of hotel rooms in the city they could go to.  There is so little gain or loss to be had by participating.  The idea requires, at least on the part of the host, a sense of altruism.

But then again, participating in free software and open source also requires a sense of altruism on the part of the volunteers, yet it doesn't always achieve the same community spirit.

One thing I like about backpacker communities vs free software communities is that there is greater freedom of religion in backpacker communities.  When I head off to mass on Sunday, my guests never ridicule me.  They are there for intercultural exchange, so when someone does something out of the world urban normal, it is odd and interesting.  I have never confessed to be a church-goer in a free software context.  I fear the consequences.

(On couchsurfing.com, they claim there are 70,000 hosts in Los Angeles.  This is a lie.  There are about 300 active hosts and they are hammered with requests daily.)

10/11/2017

One of my favorite pastimes is imagining and planning to write new coding projects: researching technologies, checking out libraries I might use, making GUI mockups, downloading similar projects.

I was thinking the other day that it might be fun to create a desktop-based editor that had an HTTP server embedded.  The HTTP server would serve up only one document, which is the document being currently edited, and it would show a live representation of the screen as being show the person editing the document.

I was thinking it might be fun to re-implement the old HyperCard system.

I was thinking that it might be fun to make a real-time chat client/server, like the old talkd daemon did on consoles back in the day.  The client would show every character being typed, in real time, instead of line by line.

I was thinking it might be fun to make a collaboratively editable mosaic: a million tiles across by a million tiles wide, where each tile is 16 pixels square.  Anyone could make new tiles and could place them anywhere on the grid.

I was thinking that it might be fun to make a webpage whose primary purpose was to annoy the server operator.  The webpage would have buttons to make silly noises on the server machine, and the webcam on the server machine would capture pictures of the operator being annoyed and place them on the webpage.

I was thinking it would be fun to make a Twitter bot, that automatically searches for and retweets controversial statements, but, changing key words to make them more benign and playful.

I was thinking that it might be fun to make a Christian devotional app that keeps the list of the ~600 New Testament commandments and chooses one at random for someone to follow on any given day.  Also it could chime for Matins, Sext, Vespers, and Compline.

I was thinking it might be good to make an app for depressed and despairing people. Upon logging in, you could write about your struggle, and after submitting, you'd receive an anonymized note that someone else had written about their struggle.