Guaka! - open life

Something new is possible for the first time in thousands of years

Guaka — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 01:22:59 +0000

tag:

It always makes me happy to hear from Joe. He wrote something new: How mobile phones can replace a broken economy: The Mobile Manifesto:

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.

Some questions and answers

Guaka — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 11:37:25 +0000

tag:

> Hope you are doing fine... At the outset, I am V Kumara Swamy, a journalist > with The Telegraph, Calcutta, India... I am doing a story on the concept of > couch surfing and your friend Thomas Goorden recommended your name while > responding to my queries on the same. He said that since you are a fairly > frequent couchsurfer with some experience of India, you would be of great > help to me. > I thought an interaction with you would add immense value to my article. > I would be extremely grateful if you could take some time out and answer my > queries.. Hi Kumara, Ok. Great!

> Here's what i would like to know: > > 1) Please tell me a little bit about the journey of your couch surfing.org.. > How did you start..and which are the countries you have visited so far? How > many times have you come to India?

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.

> 2) Today, how many people are enrolled as couchsurfers. In which part of the > world is it more popular?

There are over 500.000 people involved in couchsurfing and other organizations. From my experience it's definitely more spread in Western countries. Even though there were no members in rural China when I hitchhiked there last year, I have found it possible to find hospitality in most countries I've visited since 2004.

> 3) Has the concept of couchsurfing helped you getting in touch with more > people from around the world and how many times have you couchsurfed > yourself??

Definitely, I have stayed in people's homes on 6 continents, and I haven't exactly counted the number of times I've stayed with people, but it must have been hundreds. As a hitchhiker you often can't plan ahead where you end up and many people that I merely met at gas stations while asking for a ride have offered me a place to sleep. Even though it's not the major reason for couchsurfing the aspect of free accommodation has also allowed me to keep on traveling for extended periods of time - especially in combination with the free transport of hitchhiking and my IT skills, that have allowed me to easily find volunteer work in countries such as Mali and Peru.

> 4) At the time when the world is facing economic meltdown..do think > couchsurfing is like a boon? Are more and more people taking advantage of > this concept?

In affluent countries there is still so much waste and under-allocation of resources (empty rooms, empty seats, food in dumpsters, and so on), I consider couchsurfing as a way to turn unused space into an occasion for people to share experiences and culture. The economy going down might lead people to more efficient ways of using resources (and my contributions to that are hitchwiki.org and trashwiki.org).

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).

> 5) Please tell me about a good experience you had via couch surfing..that > made you really feel good?

Recently I have hitchhiked from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, through Turkey, Syria and Jordan. For this trip I decided not to use couchsurfing, but I still experienced amazing hospitality. In Romania a woman I randomly met in a local bus invited me to stay at her home - after I had spent 36 hours on the road.

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.

> 6) Please tell me about your experiences as a couchsurfer in India? Where > all have been in India, and tell me a bit about your hosts and the > experiences. It would be really great if you could recount one interesting > couchsurfing experience in India.

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.

> 7) What do you do otherwise..please send me a few details..

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 ;)

> I would be extremely grateful if you could reply as early as possible as I > have a very short deadline....

Ok. Good luck! namaste,

Alta - Helsinki - Tallinn - Riga

Guaka — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:28:44 +0000

tag:

Sorry about all the detail. The last post has been a while now and I want to write it down while it's fresh. I can always rewrite it later when I'll work on my book. 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 E 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.

Amsterdam - Hamburg - Stockholm

Guaka — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:39:24 +0000

tag:

We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so. It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien's front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck. His Chrysler quickly accelerated to 220 km/h, and he was driving like a madman. 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, E is preparing pasta and we're planning on eating that and head North to Umea. bonus vid preview

Last.fm social music revolution

Guaka — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:59:39 +0000

tag:

I signed up at Last.fm in 2005. I never really used it a lot. Until recently, when I got slightly bored by soma.fm (still great though!). I found out Last.fm is streaming tons of music. A bit like pandora.com, but way better. And it seems they have everything, ranging from Aphex Twin, to the Beatles, your local punk band, Ravi Shankar, Stockhausen, anything. It can give you recommendations, or you listen to a tag radio (try gypsy, 303, amsterdam, whatever). You can click "love" if you like something and "ban" is even more useful. It's especially nice to tune into your friends' radios. Feel free to tune into mine. There's even a client for my Nokia N810. Now we just need free wireless everywhere...

moving

Guaka — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:25:31 +0000

tag:

Last week I realized that I couldn't remember when exactly I had not been going out at night. Amsterdam is great. So many people to meet and spend time with. Last Thursday I met up with Niels Fermont, whom I hadn't really seen the last 12 years or so and whom I found on Hyves a while back. It was great to bring back memories from primary school. We had a very tasty dinner. Unfortunately I suspect the forest mushroom pie to have ruined my digestive system up until today. So I wasn't able to head down to FOSDEM in Brussels. The up side was that I finally had some time to go through my drafts folder, where emails end up that I still have to write. Besides all that I am feeling mostly happy with my MacBook Pro. There are some issues, such as the lack of decent shortcuts but it's a relief to not be forced to keep on tweaking and twiddling settings. I hope some company will be able to create a similar experience based on Ubuntu. This week I'll be moving to an awesome apartment and tomorrow I'm expecting a friend I haven't seen for 1,5 years. And Hyves is moving to a new office.

First week in Amsterdam

Guaka — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:03:23 +0000

tag:

In the beginning of November Robin asked me if I'd somehow be interested in renting a place in Amsterdam. I had been thinking of moving to Amsterdam after Trento, but I considered his question a bit preposterous. Fortunately he rented the place himself and now we're room mates! During my years abroad I sometimes considered Amsterdam the only place left to live in the Netherlands. Going around here on foot and by bike I learn to appreciate my own country again. The bikes are amazing, transport is so efficient (if you don't go by car). There is so much freedom and still, it's not a mess. Friday I went to a hospitality exchange meeting, which I found kinda weird. People were sitting in their own corner and I hadn't seen anybody hug. So I started moving around, to talk to more people, ask them silly questions ("Do you like monkeys?") and even hug them. It was slightly better that way. Working for Hyves is exciting. The number of website hits is growing weekly and only Google is rating higher in the Netherlands. The complexity of the material is challenging and I'm part of a small team of very bright people. The office culture is more open, dynamic and agile than at IRST in Trento and my number of friends at hyves.nl doubled in no time.

Federating Social Networks in Amsterdam

Guaka — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:13:42 +0000

tag:

Last week Anu wrote me about a workshop in Amsterdam about federating social networks, when I completely did not expect to be in Amsterdam... The workshop was interesting. I didn't attend the entire day but I sensed that it could lead to interesting results. The workshop was the first stage towards a practical framework. A myriad of protocols related to anything social (e.g. XFN, FOAF, hCard, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) was discussed and the intention was spoken out to have a proof of concept and running code available for the conference on February 9th and 10th (SNES). There's definitely enough momentum. Twitter and Six Apart were present and are actively supporting the effort. Hyves, a Dutch social network that just celebrated their 5 million member party, was mentioned a lot. I have one constructive remark about organizing a workshop: Try to have some wiki space available before the workshop starts. This way you don't depend on people sending you their notes later on, and editing wikis in a social setting can lead to interesting (and blizzardly fast) results. Temporarily use another wiki, or even permanently, if there is an existing wiki which has goals that are similar enough. Of course, first ask permission from the community (if there is one) and try to get them involved in the workshop as well, during and after. I was happy to talk to James Burke again. I recognized some more familiar faces and while brainstorming about a name for the project (and checking out translations into African languages) we found out that we had met at What The Hack, an outside festival for hackers two years ago where I spoke about the Bambara Wikipedia. I'm totally enjoying Amsterdam...

Nokia N810

Guaka — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:15:08 +0000

tag:

I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It's running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn't traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit. But, silly enough I was more focused on working on the CouchSurfing code base once I finally bought a laptop (that is seriously broken now). I saw the announcements of the N810 a couple of weeks ago, and I was just in time to apply for Nokia's developer program, which gives developers the possibility to buy the device for 99 euros instead of the usual price. So I'm very happy to receive that they accepted my application ("I want to have many dictionaries and encyclopedias in my pocket"). Now I'm actually reading Nokia's entire announcement, and it's friggin great! The N800 already had a faster CPU, a webcam, much more memory and a normal SD card, but the N810 is totally awesome, it comes with GPS and a real mini-keyboard! And, it's great to see that Nokia has moved away from the proprietary Opera to a Mozilla based browser. Because of the GPS it could be interesting for Citizen Logistics, and I'm really looking forward to see if it's possible to get maps.hitchwiki.org on it!

Citizen Logistics

Guaka — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:35:45 +0000

tag:

Together, Joe Edelman and I were the dynamic duo of the CouchSurfing Collective in New Zealand. Joe came with fantastic ideas, that were unfortunately not realized in Nelson. Fortunately he also improved the infrastructure of CS in such a profound way that his work there is probably the main reason that the website is still up. It was great working with him and we had many magic moments, where we really thought were about to make stuff happen that would change the world in a profound way. When I saw a glimpse of James' headline, Swarming people to work, I had a faint hint that some of the most important of Joe's ideas were being realized by elsewhere. My online situation at the time is not great, so I sent Joe a text without even checking Joi Ito's post. The next time I came online I was happy to see that Joe accelerated. From CitizenLogistics.com:

Television and computer games provide expertly designed entertainment and fun… but when we have to deal with our real lives, we’re all alone. When will participating in the real world and dealing with real issues be just as adventurous, easy, collaborative, and fun? Very soon! We’re developing new game-like ways of working, volunteering, having a good time, and finding assistance. Anyone can play, and you get points for making other people’s dreams come true. Our software lets you find cool things to do, build teams, and connect people with jobs and resources, all via text messaging and geolocation in the real world.

My favorite part of the teaser website is about Open Life:

Our technology will transform everyday life by bringing a new opportunities for teamwork, community, and adventure to everyone involved. We offer a real-time, map-based interface for finding and mobilizing available people out in the world via their cell phones. For mobile users, we have a txt-based interface for declaring your availability and finding opportunities near wherever you are. Combining geolocation, text messaging, trust metrics, sophisticated permissions, and a structure for social incentives, we integrate with many other websites and platforms, and offer a web-wide API for aggregating real world availability and trust. Related reading:

Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely

Bruce Sterling, Maneki Neko