The Seasteading Institute February 2009 Newsletter

0 views
Skip to first unread message

Patri Friedman

unread,
Mar 2, 2009, 8:18:38 PM3/2/09
to Seasteading Announcements
Welcome to TSI's February 2009 Newsletter! While January was mainly about releases like our ClubStead design, new front page, and the Wired Magazine article, this month we focused on longer-term planning, from scheduling Ephemerisle and the Seasteading09 conference to a 100-year timeline for seasteading.  Comment on this issue on the TSI blog here.

Community

  • Membership Program is almost complete, will be kicked off in the next few weeks.
  • $1000 Design Contest is running, and with two months to go, we are excited to already have 4 entries!
  • TSI GTGs
    • February Social at Red Rock Cafe was excellent, about 25 people and many new faces again. Moving the socials around the Bay Area seems to work well at bringing a variety of different people.
    • March Social - tentatively Saturday March 28th in the East Bay.
    • Seasteading Conference / Ephemerisle:
      • After some discussion and polling y'all, we decided against the proposed July 4th date. Instead, the conference will be Sep. 28-30 (Mo evening, full day Tuesday, Wed through dinner, location TBD), and Ephemerisle will be Fri Oct. 2 - Sun Oct 4 (in the Sacremento River Delta).
      • This date allows everyone (including us) a bit more prep time, doesn't interfere with holiday plans, is a year from seasteading08, is a good time in relation to Burning Man (long enough for people to have recovered, short enough for them to still have some post-festival glow), and is during the full moon.
      • The river delta location has a number of advantages, including that it is already used frequently for (smaller) boating parties, so our use will be uncontroversial. It is not a challenging environment (beyond being on water) as there are few waves, but we think that's fine for the first Ephemerisle. We will likely feature a prototype contest during the festival for models able to deal with higher-wave conditions than at the event. The hope is for these contest entrants of 2009 to become the standard platforms/vessels of 2010, which would then be in a tougher environment, and would again feature a contest for models to push the boundaries again, so we can incrementally make our way to an Ephemerisle in international waters over the course of 3-5 years.
      • A full press release with more details will follow when we have a conference site, festival location, and more details nailed down.
  • Community stats for February - January stats in (). We're very excited at the continued rapid growth of the mailing list and registered website users.
  • Website migrated to a new host which is faster and should be more reliable. Statistics:
    • Again, our 2nd best traffic month ever, beating January and only exceeded by last May's slashdot/gizmodo/etc.
    • Feb daily averages: 2400 visits (1900), 11k pages (10K), 102K hits (64K).
  • Interesting Blog Posts:
Volunteer Coordinator Report (from James)

  • Key Accomplishments

    • Justine Lam and Jessica Richman joined us at the BIL conference. They are planning an organizational outreach program for us, researching lists of think-tanks, schools, conferences, etc. we might be able to collaborate with and devising effective ways of reaching out to them.
    • Cheryl Cline came to one of our Bay Area meetups, and is now helping write material for the upcoming seasteading book and a seasteading article for expatriation website EscapeArtist.com.
    • Basia Montauk will be joining us shortly, helping with community relations and publicity among other things -- welcome, Basia!
    • Our ever-present sysadmin, Ben Lavender, got us moved over to a new hosting provider, which should make the site run much more smoothly.
    • Some much-needed help on our website development team -- thanks and welcome to Mike Norman and Sean Lynch, new website sysadmins, and Steve Kane and Andrea Fassina, new developers.
    • We're talking to a number of other cool, smart volunteer candidates as well. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has been offering their time.

  • Key Needs (complete list)

Technology

Wayne's Engineering Report
  • Web cast MI&T engineering meeting on 5Feb2009 (The webcast quality was awful; we will have to do much better.)
  • Solicited and answered questions concerning ClubStead
  • Dropped the Hawaii to SF loop from consideration.
  • Moved Seastead to be located off of Southern Calif. coast; Off San Francisco location has been dropped.
  • Increased payload from 6000 tons to 7000 tons to better match the estimated payload mass.
  • Wave information table for off San Diego is: 
    How Often     Wind Speed       Wave Height      Period
    (year)     m/sec    ft/sec      m        ft       sec
       1      16.04    52.62     7.00     22.97     12.5
      10      17.5     57.41     7.70     25.26     12.5
    


 100      18.9     62.01     8.30     27.23     12.5
  • Wave information for off Santa Monica is similar.
  • The updated design has somewhat thicker columns and slightly higher air gap.
  • Fly-by video for ClubStead is nearing completion
Patri's Engineering Updates:


Awareness

Administrative / Misc

  • Our timeline for seasteading, while still under development, is ready for review by the community. Please discuss it on the forums. We are hard at work on our 2009/2010 strategy as well.
  • We have started work on our 2008 Annual Report & Form 990 (tax return).
  • Still muddling through HR details like an employee handbook.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages