When we talk about trouble with the economy, we’ve been overlooking an astounding opportunity. Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years. If you care about the planet, if you care about your kids, if you care about other people, this is something to pay attention to.

While we continue to argue about capitalism and socialism, for the first time a third option is really possible. We can build a more sophisticated, dynamic, distributed approach to organizing labor and resources than has ever been attempted before.

It’s bold and sensible. It has made sense for the past couple of years, when it became clear to me that the deeper ideas behind the sharing of free software and free information are applicable to the real world, the real economy. It was no wonder I met Joe 2 years ago at the CouchSurfing Collective in New Zealand; it was amazing experience to work with him.  His analysis of modern life is razor sharp and combined with his desire for change we could start seeing “actual people, in vicinity to one another, thinking about each others’ needs, and helping each other, in person and on the ground“.

Unlike existing networks based on short messaging (twitter, broadtexter, brightkite, etc), Groundcrew focuses on finding and coordinating like-minded strangers rather than friends. Groups form based on common beliefs, needs, and interests. Broad groups exist for those interested in good deeds, adventures, exchanges, and more.

Another differentiating factor is that Groundcrew aggregates information about members’ immediate availability for action, together with agents’ passions and dreams. This is opposed to other services (twitter, facebook) which work more generally with status updates and feeds.

Meanwhile, 4 hours driving from here hell broke loose.

In recent years I didn’t make an effort, but I used to boycott Israeli products. No Tivall fake meat, no products with bar codes that start with 729. (These days I actually don’t buy Tivall because they put egg in their food.) I did this because I didn’t want to support the economy of a country that is actively oppressing and practicing apartheid.  Now I can see that both Jews and Arabs are hit by a boycott, but I once I leave this country I will be more aware.  For now, I console with learning a lot here.  Not all is black and white.  Most people in the army seem to merely be hanging around, kept silly for 2 to 3 years.  Dressing up in a uniform to enjoy free bus rides - most “soldiers” of the Israeli army are not killing Palestinians at all. Some are put in confinement for breaking silly laws. The first weeks it’s a bit discomforting to see these kids walking around with automatic machine guns, but as anything, you get used to it.  I will never forget the sight of this friendly drunk guy with a gun on his back in a supermarket in Jerusalem.

Buses in Jerusalem are terrible. Bus stops only show which lines are going there, no time schedule, no route information. And then the routes seem to be changing as well, without any form of notice, from one day to the next. Fortunately it’s very well possible to hitchhike inside the city.  5 stars to hitchhiking in Israel. Even now that it’s a bit colder, it just feels like summer in Amsterdam - except for the almost non-existent rain. Even at night you can be sure to arrive anywhere you want.  Just don’t follow Israelis in their strategies. Somehow hitchhikers here seem to have a problem with using signs or showing a thumb. Signs in English are perfectly fine and so is creativity with your spots.  People are keen to pick up European looking foreigners and that brings me to the best part: I’ve met a lot of friendly people here and I’m happy here.

Hi Kumara,

Ok. Great!

I have started using another website for hospitality exchange in April 2004.  Since then I’ve traveled extensively, mostly by means of hitchhiking and staying with local people - in Europe, South America,
the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South East Asia, China and currently the Middle East.

I have traveled in India once, but that was in 2001, before online hospitality exchange was widely spread.  I had a completely different traveling experience, it was my first time out of Europe, so I was very unexperienced.  I spent 9 weeks in India though and I had contact with the local population, but I exclusively stayed in guest houses. However, I spent 2 weeks in Udaipur to learn sitar and the teaching space was inside the teacher’s home - so I had food there and was even invited for a Hindu marriage ceremony.

For the short periods of time that I have had a more sedentary lifestyle - renting an apartment and working a day job - my guests were free to use anything they could find in my fridge (which is usually chockfull).

The trucker who took me to Istanbul from the Turkish border helped me find my way in the city, when he left other random strangers continued helping me find my way and (since I hadn’t acquired any Turkish money
yet) pay my bus tickets right up to the front door of a friend with whom I was going to stay.  He was not home and his Kurdish neighbors who barely spoke English invited me to wait in their home, offered me
food,  and I fell asleep on their couch and I woke up there the next morning. Muslim hospitality can be overwhelming.

Unfortunately I don’t have any experiences as a couchsurfer in India. I am looking forward to go back to India some day though.  And though I’ve successfully hitchhiked almost anywhere I am a bit worried about
the possibilities of hitchhiking in India.

I hold an MSc in mathematics and work as an internet consultant (here and there, now and then), but most of my online time goes into non-profit wikis and other forms of social use of the internet (though I recently started two wikis with which I want to make some money: visawiki.org and cashwiki.org).  The internet offers new modes of sharing, both online and in real life. CouchSurfing is one way.  (I’ve volunteered for the couchsurfing organization for 9 months, but I’m not very happy with the direction chosen by the couchsurfing leadership.)  I think we will see much more of this in the coming years, online systems for coordination that allow people to live their lives in more pleasant ways (check e.g. groundcrew.us).  Besides that I love learning languages and the restriction of only 10 languages on couchsurfing profiles is a bit annoying

Ok.  Good luck!

namaste,
Kasper

My signs were “Arnhem A12 oost” on one side and “Belgrado Istanbul” on the other side.  For an hour or so I received a lot of smiles, especially when I told them my actual final destination.  I had been smiling and walking around to find a ride onto the A12, in vain. Talked to a guy who would be willing to go out of his way a little bit.  Walked back, and then, for the first time in my hitchhike career I was asked to leave the premises (of a gas station at least, some shitty motel manager sent me and amylin away, in the New Zealand rain of 2006).  “Company policy”, the manager said.  “Never experienced this company policy before”, I said smilingly.  When walking to the Rijkswaterstaat property the guy I talked to waved at me and I was back on track. Arnhem with a trucker, Cologne with a Polish businessman, Frankfurt with a Dutch couple picking up a special bicycle with their bio-diesel minibus.

Before Regensburg I was aiming at a HU car when an elderly guy stopped.  “Well”, I thought, “never refuse a perfectly good ride”.  In his seventies, he was still working, driving a big car and, most importantly, picking up hitchhikers at night.  Only one gas station further I wrote down “Budapest” and a couple waved at me.  Their doglets were not too friendly at first, but in Hungary they were quietly sleeping on my lap and my feet.

Romanians must love (second-hand) German cars.  The 1500 km or so from Regensburg to Pitesti was crowded with German numberplates with a little red date mark on the right.  Driven by inexhaustible Romanians, but which language to approach them?  At the gas station in Budapest there was almost no activity and I spent a couple of hours under a plastic sheet.  Since I hadn’t been able to find a ride towards Szeged for a while I decided to take my chances and head to Romania.

Three drivers, many hours on hair rising Romanian roads later it was dark again.  And I got into a local bus, to an unknown destination. In the bus, the first angel of this voyage.  I was dog-tired and sat down.  She asked a question I’ve forgotten and said “d’accord” at some point.  So we switched to French.  We went to check a hotel where the rooms appeared to cost more than 60 euro per night.  A mix of curiosity and suspicion.  I showed her all my papers, my luggage, almost anything I was carrying.  Great to see I wasn’t dragging around too much after 36 hours on the road. A cold shower, a nice room, some food and big eyes. Started walking in the early morning.  Had some local competition/colleague.  In Bucuresti it was not clear.  People were giving me different indications, but I managed to find a truck stop popular with Turks - right next to one of the country’s major continuous traffic jams.

Ahmet was happy to take me to Istanbul.  Fortunately my passive-smoking capacity had been greatly increased.  Bulgaria was not far away.  Nor were the baksheesh hungry Bulgarian border officials. Fortunately (both for me and for them) they didn’t bother me.  Within Bulgaria we took a break at a truck stop and Ahmet and people around him explained to me in Turkish, Bulgarian, Russian and German that the police were checking a lot.  The Turks had decided it was better to drive at night.

We reached the Bulgarian Turkish border at around 3 am.  And we got into Turkey when I made a big mistake.  Never leave your backpack in the vehicle when you are walking slightly further than 50 meter away.

Now I’m left alone in a hostel in Damascus.  A Japanese guy reading, a Chilean couple watching a movie.  The fan whirling back time.  The streets are full of friendliness, excitement.  People genuinely want to meet you here.  I don’t think I’ve been able to explain what hitchhiking is to a single Syrian.  Confusion plenty, but 30 hours in the Axis of Evil I’ve mostly encountered unexpecting and unconditional friendliness.

Bijar came all the way from Utrecht.  Or rather, from Kurdish Iraq. He was on his way to buy equipment for a business he’s developing in the lands of his origin.  He signaled his taxi driver to stop for me right before the border.  He did almost all the talking (and paying) and we wished eachother good luck in Aleppo.

to be continued…

After that I decided I needed some money.  Or cash.  So Cashwiki is a wiki about money. So far it’s just me, and I copied a lot of GFDL and public domain stuff from other places.

All this got me to playing with OpenID on MediaWiki, which I also set up on my favorite hitchhiking website.

Next…

• Last week I contacted Salman of digihitch.com and we can probably show a nicely integrated Hitchwiki on there!
• More syndication, especially maps.hitchwiki.org to other places and vice versa
• More info in other languages besides English
• Most important: continue the do-ocratic conviviality!

We tried leaving Alta for Tromso, but after 2,5 hours of a lot of cars and none stopping we decided to just head south.  It took another 1,5 hour before someone stopped. For the shortest ride of our trip, 2 km only, but it was encouraging, especially thanks to the strawberries we got from the young woman who picked us up. From the bus stop we were dropped at we didn’t have to wait that long again to get a ride to Kautokeino, in a huge Chevrolet, driven by a guy attending a Christian meet-up.  He only talked a little bit about Christ and the gospels his friend had made were actually a good way to learn some more Norwegian.   After walking and waiting a bit a guy stopped. A friendly dog in the trunk.  He was on his way to Rovaniemi, which meant we could go along for quite a while.

We found out he was actually going for a weekend of hunting. Nice to find out for two (mostly) vegans. Well, at least killing the animals you eat is more sincere than having a huge machinery do it for you. We were dropped in an abandoned tiny village and decided to continue a bit more, even though it was 22:30 or so.  Of course it was still light, we hadn’t seen more darkness than the blinders would give us in 5 days. Surprisingly, a couple stopped, and then I had made a mistake. I left the bluetooth GPS device given to me by Marcus on my bag. So I lost it there. It was much faster in getting a satelite fix than my N810 so I slightly miss it these days.

Then after 25 minutes driving we were really dropped in the middle of nowhere and killing mosquitos decided to set up our tent.  In the morning we heard “nok nok” and some Russian but we didn’t feel like inviting the millions of mosquitos in our cozy tent. Later we got a ride from a Norwegian on his way to buy a fridge. At the crossroads two friendly Finnish women picked us up. They were totally into fishing. We were dropped at a city at the Northern coast of Finland where it took us not too much time to get a ride to Oulu.

I had sent a bunch of texts to our potential host in Oulu but hadn’t received anything back.  I decided to give her a call when we were 50 minutes away from Oulu.  Apparently none of my messages had come through.  The same thing happened in Denmark, where my messages never made it to the recipient. I will have to file a complaint with Vodaphone, especially if they still dare to charge some ridiculous amount of money for sending less than 160 bytes.  She was actually on her way to a festival close to the spot where we found our ride to Oulu.

In the meanwhile, our driver told us he was driving all the way to Lahti, 90 km from Helsinki.  Since our back-up plans in Oulu were not working out either we decided to head to Lahti and see if we could still hitch to Helsinki from there. Our driver had to drop off his trailer at his summer house, which freaked out Erga a little bit since it was not even on my GPS map.  We got there around midnight.  There was a gas station and a big mall.  And lots of mall rats. With scooters.  And “no picknick”. We had some food anyway, thanks to the supermarkt guard. Then we tried a bit of hitching. No luck. So we pitched our tent in a little bush next to the highway.  Next morning, oh well, a bit later, we started hitching. I guess it took 2 hours (not looking at the time) before a car stopped.  Not going south.  We decided to take the ride anyway and the friendly old man showed us how pretty the little village used to be.  We wereropped and started walking in the direction back to the highway (but more south).  Again we were picked up by a friendly old guy and then we had to walk even more.

After hours of walking and thumbing we were getting slightly desperate, less than 80 km away from Helsinki. Then finally an angel stopped.  She was a very friendly nurse who had been looking for berries in the forest. We hugged goodbye at a metro station in Helsinki.

We finally were able to take a shower and clean Anu’s fridge.  We quite a few days in Helsinki, first at Anu’s, then at Laura’s.  Dumpster dove quite a bit and made delish food, vegan soup, pancakes.  I finished the garam masala and bought some new.

The ferry to Tallinn was a forebode for the internet situation in Estonia.  You can find (unprotected wireless) internet in almost every street corner and apartment. Apart from Andros’ place. I had to plug a cable into my newly bought Acer Aspire One. We cleaned out his junk room so we had a very comfy place to sleep. He also had a car and loved to drive around people all over town. Yesterday morning he took us to a good spot to hitch out of Tallinn.

The first driver was an IT/artist guy who drove us to Parnu. When we got there we had some baked goods and it started pouring down.  We were almost tempted to take a bus.  It appeared to cost more than 10 euros per person though, and the rain, well, hitchhiking in the rain is good for character building and practicing bad Russian.

We found a local bus eastward and when I thought I saw a gas station we got off.  To find out that we could have gone 4 more stops. But we saw a lot of trucks coming our way and started walking there, almost drowing in the rain.  We decided to ask at a gas station and my bad Russian appeared to be very useful. We found a ride to the border with a friendly Latvian Russian guy.  The radio was all about the war in Georgia.  In Russian though, but we had already been drowned with news about the war in Tallinn.  People are very concerned here. I’m glad Marian didn’t take the plane to volunteer and report the mayhem.

At the border we tried hitching. I asked 2 truck drivers, but they didn’t want to take two people.  I did see 4 very similar trucks and decided to try and ask them if they could take us. We where dropped next to a highway because they didn’t go all the way to Riga and through my GPS found out that we were at Salaspils. Walked a lot. Missed the last train.  Walked even more. Found a microbus for 1 lat (1,50 EUR) to the city. Happy. In Riga we were warmly welcomed with Leffe, food (but not veggy) by Inga, her roommates and two tiny black tom kittens who where very happy with the food.

Now we’re sitting in the Old Town hostel that was the focal point of the Riga Winter Camp 2,5 years ago.  There’s free wireless and I’ve done some Drupal hacking on my 1 kg laptop.

We were dropped in a little village not too far and found a nice spot. After an hour or so it started to rain. And thunder, and pour down. It was the first (and so far only) real test of our tent. It held out perfectly fine. It was a little moist on the sides, but next time I’ll put the plastic ground sheet underneath the tent so that the water can disappear easily.

Time is different here. It’s 23:55 and it’s completely light out. Apart from the dark clouds. We made it all the way up to Alta, which is only 237 km from Nordkapp and 3000 km from where we started in Amsterdam a week and a half ago. When we woke up in the little village we tried hitchhiking, but there was almost no traffic and the few cars that passed us, well, they passed us. After a while we found a gas station and there was a guy with his daughter who we asked about the situation. He was so nice to go out of his way to drop us at the highway entrance.

Unfortunately there was not much traffic either, and well, it didn’t stop either. When we saw big dark clouds appear we decided to start walking. On the highway. A lot of traffic passed us, but as always, there is this one great person who decides to stop. We were dropped at the best gas station ever. We met two hitchhiking girls with amazing arm pit hair and we spent some time in swimming in the lake. It was beautiful. But then we had to find our ride to Umea, where we had two places to stay, and many people at the gas station gave us “the face”, not even an answer, just an empty gaze.

We tried walking out of there, but the next gas station according to the map software on my N810 was just a bunch of trees. So we had to walk back. And waited more. While I went to the toilet a car finally stopped, heading for Sundsvall. Again a non-Swedish driver. This one from the North of Iraq. He spoke many languages, but not English. So I had another great chance to practice my Swedish. He dropped us of at an amazing spot for long-distance hitchhiking.

There we met Josephine, a 17 year old barefoot first-time hitchhiker. She was on her way to some hippie festival relatively close to Sundsvall and missed the last bus (at 16:00 or so). She asked us if she could join us. Well, fine. I started “priming” on a little corner so that people could see me from afar and Erga and Josephine stood close to the bags at a good place for stopping.

After an unspecifed amount of time (I don’t really check the time anymore) a Norwegian car stopped. I told Josephine to talk to the driver and he was heading to Umea! We all got in the car and started driving, towards the town of the festival. Josephine appeared to be in a circus high school and had travelled to Egypt. It was great fun talking to her. Tomas, the driver, was a bit more quiet. Josephine was dropped and I moved to the front seat, talked a little bit and found out he was driving all the way to the North.

We decided to go for it! We dropped by at a big supermarket to spend our last Swedish Kronor on food, contacted our host in Umea. Jonas is probably the coolest truck driver I ever met. His fridge is vegan and his computer runs Ubuntu. Unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of time to chat. The next morning he had to leave to work early and we were picked up at 9:00 sharp by Tomas for our long ride North.

We met up with Linnea for a short lunch at the beach in Lulea. I had met her in Lima and it was nice to see her in her home town. We continued through endless forests, lakes and mosquito storms.

Today I’ve done a tiny bit of work on my favorite Wikipedias and as it happened Tonita has an acquaintance from Mali in Tromso. I spoke to him on the phone and we’re heading there after Nordkapp. He’s doing a PhD in anthropology and I guess he might be interested in WIkipedia in Bambara and/or Peul.

I also had the defend the existence of the latter (and several others). Someone proposed the deletion of a whole bunch of Wikipedias. I still think that wikis are a viable mode of development for Africa, and that Bèrto ëd Sèra overlooked the fact that free software and wikis are a radically different mode of production, a third way, that somehow blends in perfectly well with capitalism. And that native speakers set the rules on Wikipedias, not corporate white America. In my experience you only need 3 active contributers to make a Wikipedia blossom and I’m very willing to spend a couple of hours now and then until we find those contributors for Bambara and Peul.

Besides these serious issues we enjoyed the Alta Museum, the light, the hospitality of our host and merely being alive!

and maybe some more kaltura

Unfortunately it was not convenient enough to blog with maemowordpy on my N810. So I’m writing this in Stockholm. Or well, in a really nice Summer house that is currently inhabited all the time in the Southern suburbs of Stockholm. It’s close to a beautiful lake. It’s actually not really suburbs here. There’s not even regular water. The pump broke and now we have to help ourselves with bottles and buckets.  It’s a great lesson on how not to waste water.

Hamburg was great. Despite the heavy rain. We met up with Matthias and Lena (who was at the CouchSerfing Collective New Zealand) and met some new friends.  We stayed with Julien, who is simply hilarious. A lot of parties and vegan pancakes. Again we left Hamburg a bit later. We quickly had a ride - before the rain came down, into sunnier weather. The couple (in their fifties) who picked us up told us they hitchhiked themselves in Norway, with their children.  At the gas station we immediately had eye contact with a woman and then it appears that she (Swedish), her husband (from Belgium) and children (bilingual) were heading to Denmark and they were happy to take us there. In the car we talked a lot. Then I found out that her husband was making a living through Drupal and that he had too many requests and he’s willing to pass on some work to a starting Drupalist!

At the lines before the ferry I walked around to find a ride towards Copenhagen.  I found a group of German kids (16, 17, 18 and 19 y/o) with big kanos on a huge Mercedes van.  They were happy to take us and then we found out that they were actually going to the North of Sweden. So we skipped Copenhagen. I wanted to see Sigurdas and Stockholm though.  We spent the night in our tent in the South of Sweden, which was quite comfy, woke up and continued with the German kids. They dropped us at a gas station where there was only one potential friendly car driver, who also took us to Stockholm.

Now it’s 14:00, Erga is preparing pasta and we’re planning on eating that and head North to Umea.

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