[P2P-F] couchsurfing becoming for-profit

Thu Sep 1 22:48:09 CEST 2011

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 7:53 PM, robin <robokow at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
>> thanks Robin ...
>>
>> in theory, a B Corporation is not such a bad thing, no, as it is and remains
>> dedicated to a social good?
>>
>
> I don't know. I haven't researched much into this B-corp thing.

Though there is something interesting here in my opinion, which is
that CS will be employee-owned. But how this will relate to
voting-power we don't know yet.

The employees will have more voting power than the two investors, but
how the division will be and how much they can vote for (if it is only
the board or example) is publicly unkown.

And we don't know either how the shares are distributed among the
employees (equally among employees or not, etc).

As always has been the case with Couchsurfing, there is more we don't
know than what we do know :s

> In the
> end though, it is still a corp. and this is why many CS-members
> currently are pissed off. For many (not everyone), it goes against the
> culture that CS stands for. The culture is about sharing, not profit.
>
> I wrote a little comment here explaining that culture:
> http://shareable.net/blog/the-rise-of-the-not-just-for-profit#comments
>
> It's a shame that Casey never was really serious about non-profit and
> developing community-models of doing it together. He just did whatever
> felt easiest, listening to advisers who were closest to him, and
> unfortunately they were not really what you may call post-capitalists.
>
> But that's o.k. I think it is good that CS finally has become more
> explicit about what they really are about. So we can move on now and
> they can have their game.
>
> Robin.
>
>
> --
> Life happens at the level of events, not of words
>