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I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder ther
by sh1mmer 18y ago
I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might mean taking a break.
If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.
- GavinB 18y agoI would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing (though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).
- chmac 18y agoCouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a charity. Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed. I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to backups, failure planning, and so on.