CouchSurfing

= a site where travellers can find 'free couches' to sleep, offered by volunteer participants worldwide.

URL = http://www.couchsurfing.com/

CouchSurfing is a worldwide network for making connections between travelers and the local communities they visit.

Description

Dorris de Heij:

"The website was founded in 2004 by four guys interested in traveling and meeting new people and cultures. Nowadays the Couchsurfing community contains 725,731 members, of which 73.5 % is between 18 and 29 years old. The site represents couches in 231 countries.

Couchsurfing is a non profit organisation based primalrely on volunteers and donations. It is really a site for people who want to meet new people and travel cheap. The site only works because there are non oppurtunistic people on there, everybody hosts and travels. The mission of the project that is on the website is as follows: "CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding. As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal. CouchSurfing is not about the furniture, not just about finding free accommodations around the world; it's about making connections worldwide. We make the world a better place by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world! "

One girl from Prague has multiple people over EACH day! She must be a filantropist because couchsurfing is not about moneymaking. It is helping out strangers, offer them your bed and show them your city. Reciprocity is very important in this lifestyle. If you host people you will get good reviews and those reviews help you to get a couch if you go travel yourself. The fact that this is a major issue assures you, I think, that only (or at least mostly) wellwilling, peaceloving world improvers will use this website. You can see most are caring for the environment, they have rules like: if you stay here you have to recycle.. And they have philosophies on their profile like: "Helping others is my pesonal choice, I cannot expect, that they will help me, but i always hope." This makes me very happy, to see all these warm, no worries, loving people together on one website. It is more than just a website to score a free bed when you're on holidays, it's a meeting place, a community for people with like minded points of view of this world." (http://dorrisnewmedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/analysis-of-couchsurfingcom.html)

Discussion

Couchsurfing vs. Open Couchsurfing volunteers conflict

According to a group of volunteer developers, in the beginning of 2007 Casey Fenton, the network's founder, put a strong hold on the transition towards a peer-to-peer model of functioning. Guaka and several other core people stopped volunteering for the organization. See also OpenCouchSurfing.

The incident is described in our entry on the Couchsurfing Conflict

For the full source material see the entry Couchsurfing is Dead]

More Information

Read their about/faq pages for detailed info on how it works, at http://www.couchsurfing.com/help.html

Part of the Hospitality Exchange Networks and a P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects

See also their Center of Adventure Economics

Crash At Mine has been set up as an open source alternative.

Another good alternative is BeWelcome, founded by former Hospitality Club volunteers.