CouchSurfing Explained
What Is CouchSurfing?
Imagine belonging to a team of adventurers from around the world.... As a member of this team, you could travel to virtually any spot on the globe and always have a local friend to give you a free place to sleep and to show you around. Or you could meet other adventurers from many far-away countries without every leaving home. CouchSurfing International gives you all this and much more. We are a 100% free network of tens of thousands of adventurers in hundreds of countries worldwide who are dedicated to sharing our diversity of cultures and our spirit of hospitality. We are a non-profit, donation supported, and completely member built and controlled peace organization.
How Does It Work?
It's easy to start your adventure today. Just create a profile on CouchSurfing.com that explains where you live and who you'd like to meet. Then wait for them to arrive! We call this "hosting". Or select any place on the planet you wish to go, browse through the profiles, and write to any local member asking for a free place to sleep. We call this "surfing". You can choose to participate as a host or as a surfer, or both. You are always 100% in control of who you stay with or who you invite into your home. Our members choose to share their cultures and their hospitality for free to help make the world better, one couch at a time.
Is It Safe?
How can you just show up at the home of someone you've never met? Actually, CouchSurfing is not a radically new or unproven idea. In fact, hospitality networks have existed for decades. But the internet has allowed for a larger and more diverse membership and a much more reliable method of evaluating the potential trustworthiness of other members before meeting them. Our website, CouchSurfing.com, lets you see exactly how each member connects into a web of trust that began from the founders of CouchSurfing and spread person to person through the network, one couch at a time. The profiles of members also reveal the strength of their friendship with other members who they have met in person, as well as specific positive or negative references other members have given them. For an added level of trust, members can also optionally allow CouchSurfing International to verify their identity and address. However, none of this is required to begin surfing or hosting.
It's Not About the Furniture:
Participating in CouchSurfing allows you to bypass the economic barriers that often separate people. Traditional tourism presents the traveler with a commodified and stereotyped filter of local cultures. Often this viewpoint has been manufactured by outsiders, and local community sometimes see little of the wealth generated by this type of tourism. In contrast, CouchSurfing allows you to experience local communities as never before possible by connecting you with natives. Your local hosts will provide one-of-a-kind insight, knowledge, and perspective of the place they call home. We also help locals like you to see tourists not as invaders or as dollar signs, but as fellow humans who can share in your unique experience of life. CouchSurfing allows all our members to leap the barriers of class and stereotype, which often results in lasting friendships.
Decide for Yourself!
You don't even need to become a member of CouchSurfing International to start browsing our member profiles. You can read for yourself what any of our members have to say about this unique community. But if you do decide to join the adventure it will cost you nothing, and you will never be charged for surfing or hosting. We are committed to the completely free and transparent nature of our services. As a non-profit peace organization, our mission is to increase awareness and tolerance of the many diverse cultures and lifestyles that make up the world we all share. We are here to make real world connections and to create adventures. We hope you will join us!
|
Explaining the Explanation
What Is CouchSurfing?
I feel strongly that the first thing I need to tell people about CS is the activity of surfing couches itself. Before CS is a non-profit or a charity or any of the many other great things it is, CS is about surfing and hosting. Therefore, sentence two explains surfing, and sentence three explains hosting. However, I specifically avoided using the words "surf" or "host" in this paragraph because they don't mean the same thing to someone who is not initiated as they do to us.
I continue introducing CS concepts in order of importance. Sentence five says a.) CS is free, b.) it's a very big network, and c.) we share cultures. The last sentence fits in the other concepts that are an important part of our identity. I think the word "peace" may be somewhat controversial, but I see it as part of our identity.
My hope is that this paragraph says it all. If someone stops listening at this point, I've done my best. By the way, this explanation is 116 words and can be spoken in about 40 seconds. But of course there's much more to say.
How Does It Work?
This paragraph gives the reader the nuts and bolts of the process and introduces our special CS vocabulary such as "profile", "surfer", and "host". It explains that we can use CS however we want to, and expands on why we would want to by introducing the CS mission statement. Now it's time to answer the question that is surely simmering in the reader's mind. The first question everyone asks me:
Is It Safe?
I begin by disarming the suspicious reader by letting them know CS isn't a new idea (in fact it's as old as human culture). Next is a pretty straight-forward description of our safety features. I end by disarming the reader again saying, Yeah we've got safety measures, but that's not even what's important.
Now I just have one last thing I feel I need to tell everyone about CS. The next paragraph attempts to explain what we mean by our mission statement - i.e. *how* we make the world better and *why* we do it for free:
It's Not About the Furniture:
This paragraph is a bit weightier that the first three. I think many of our members don't think on exactly these terms. But for me it's a necessary thing to explain. My deeper involvement in this organization certainly flows out of this. Exchange of money between two people instantly dominates all other aspects of the relationship. This is why you don't mix business with pleasure.
Now I've basically told my reader everything I need to. I've left out one meme we use a lot, which is "it's not dating service". For me that's redundant at this point. So it's time to wrap it up:
Decide for Yourself!
This is mainly recapping that fact that we're free and open for inspection. It repeats the idea we started with: that CS is all about adding to the adventure of life. It expands on the idea of a "peace organization." It puts the reader in charge and gives them a call to action.
|
