CouchSurfing

CouchSurfing is the free alternative of hostels and hotels. A person can offer his "couch" (a place to sleep) for free to other people and other people can find it and send requests for sleeping.

To build trust between the members:

• every person has a profile with a picture, personal description, interests and so.
• when two people meet they can leave references for each other - was the CouchSurfing experience positive, neutral or negative? Describe it.

This information is public for everyone and in this way even before deciding to host somebody or not, you can much more information about their personality. Most trusted are people who have well written profiles and at least few positive references.

Coverage

In almost every country and every middle or big city there are CouchSurfers.

Search Keywords

You can search for people by specific keywords in their profiles. In connection to the Open Source Economy appropriate keywords would be:

• "open source", sustainability, entrepreneur / entrepreneurship, open hardware, open design, renewable energies/renewable energy, economy, ökonomie, gemeinwohl, permaculture, ecology, environment, organic, farming, mathematics, physics, engineering, engineer, maschinenbau, linux

Old URLs

• Create event: http://www.couchsurfing.org/meetings.html?new=1
• CouchSearch: www.couchsurfing.com/mapsurf.html

Open Source Alternative to CouchSurfing

CouchSurfing was a non-profil, but then the founders made a corporation, accepting millions of outside investments. This turnedd off some core community members and most CouchSurfers are not happy with this.

There is still not good open source alternative to CouchSurfing. BeWelcome is the most popular alternative (see trac). It has very basic functions and is not developing quickly. An Open Source alternative to CouchSurfing is needed! If well done, we can engage a lot of people to switch to it.