Phone Network

From the CouchSurfing Wiki, an informal workspace which anyone can edit.

The CS Phone Network is an idea for making CouchSurfing functionality (and more) available over the telephone system.

Contents 1 Note 2 In Progress 3 Code 4 TODO 5 Motivation 6 Documents 7 Support 8 See also

Note

• If this doesn't work well, we will fix it or turn it off.
• Participation in the Phone network will be entirely optional. No one will call you or see your telephone number unless you have checked some box somewhere saying you want them to. You will not receive email/SMS alerts of nearby CouchSurfers unless you really want them.

In Progress

• Currently travelers search for hosts. We are (DEC-2006) redoing search so that it is also possible for hosts to search for travelers.

• We are also familiarizing a few developers with the RAGI Asterisk server interface (see [1]) which will be necessary for them to work on the call center.

Code

There is a test version written in Ruby. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. And the Subversion repository is publicly accessible (try svn checkout https://repo.couchsurfing.com:1337/phones/trunk and accept the server certificate.)

It is known to work on Debian GNU/Linux and Mac OS X.

Required gems: mongrel , radi. Start the server with mongrel_rails start

TODO

1. add support for optionally showing your telephone number on your profile to e.g. nearby travelers/hosts, to friends, or to whatever group you are okay having your phone number.
2. support some kind of optional alert system for hosts who want to know about travelers which are coming to their area.
3. add some support for ambassador contact via telephone, for interested ambassadors. We can even do this without releasing the actual phone numbers of ambassadors, by using a kind of telephone forwarding.
4. create an international telephone network with numbers around the world which anyone can call and update their location and information about their schedule. Nearby hosts interested in receiving alerts will then be updated about these travellers. Travellers will also be able to call the number and check their couchsurfing email, find out about nearby meetings, etc.
5. more cool stuff.

Motivation

Why do you want to do this?

• We can connect lost or desperate CouchSurfers with on-call locals
• We can allow surfers to update their locations without logging in
  • and send SMS alerts to interested surfers they are suddenly near
• we can call out to 20 people at a time, connecting them in an impromptu conference call
• we could make an online booking system to lure in corporates, but then they get called back by *real people*
• we could send an SMS to notify of a response to a Couch Request
• we could use a speech to text engine to listen to a user name, or real name, and then send that user a message requesting that they send you their contact number, with the response arriving via a message gateway, and passing it along to the user with an SMS or a call back and then a generated response.

Documents

• Telephone Surfing/Mock up

Support

• add your name if you support this change
• JoeEdelman
• Guaka^TalkCS
• phauly^TalkCS
• Tiara

See also

See also Funambol, mobile open source. Funambol provides push email, PIM synchronization, and device management for mobile devices, with all the advantages of open source software. We are the de facto standard implementation of SyncML, giving you greater strategic freedom and lower costs. We're also: The world’s most popular mobile open source software project, Compatible with over 75% of the mobile phones shipping today, In production use on 5 continents Their code is released entirely under GPL! It would be great for receiving SMS from CouchSurfing while on the road. Or maybe it is an overkill... I don't know. I just attended a seminar today by their CEO, that is Italian ;-) --Phauly 10:48, 8 February 2007 (EST)

Actually even better, the licence is the Honest Public License, basically a GPL with the addition that "distributing this software as a service is distributing", this means the GPL clause triggers not only when distributing the software (something that Google does not for instance) but also when providing the software as (web) service. See the diff between GPL and HPL and the announcement. I think HPL should be the licence we chose for any Web related software, otherwise with GPL ver2 people can simply take the code, made changes, use the software as basis for a web service (such as a community site) and never contribute back the code. (feel free to move this 2 points in the talk page or somewhere else) --Phauly 15:54, 10 February 2007 (EST)

See also the suggestions made in the oekonux.org mailing list at http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg03716.html and http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg03717.html --Phauly 03:56, 21 February 2007 (EST)

The suggestions are

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob I'ts an app developped by a MIT student to make SMS mailing lists for mobile phones. Using SMS in this way you can reach people that can't access to the web through a computer.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~tad/htm/speakeasy.html http://www.3-way.org/ I fo got to say that the developper of TxtMob, Tad Hirsch, also developped a freesoftware app based on Asterisk, perhaps quite similar to yours, called Speakeasy

csbug:255