TSI Volunteering Announcements - March 2009

[Basia Montauk]

TSI Volunteering Announcements
March 2009


Hello Seasteaders!

A little change in this month's newsletter issue - James Hogan handed this newsletter edition to me so now TSI has a volunteer writing the volunteer newsletter, isn't that great? I'll also be taking on some publicity tasks to spread the word about TSI and now you can follow @Seasteading on Twitter!

Topics covered in this month's issue:

• Overview
• High Priority Roles
• New Roles

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Overview

These monthly newsletters generally cover volunteering opportunities at The Seasteading Institute that are either new or particularly high priority at the time.  Please take a moment to consider whether you would be interested in tackling any of there tasks or know anyone who might be interested in these, and pass the word on.  Finding us a qualified volunteer can make a huge difference.

Recently we've seen quite a spike in volunteer's interest. Probably thanks to the recent CNN article. This is great, and we couldn't be more happy to have so many people interested in helping us promote our mission: To establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.

If you are interested, please drop us a line at: volun...@seasteading.org.

Please include your resume and tell us a little bit about yourself and why you are interested in volunteering with us. We also ask you to be willing to commit for a few hours a week for at least a month. False starts can sometimes slow things down more than no start at all.

As always, a complete list of all of our open volunteer positions can be found here.

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HIGH PRIORITY ROLES


HIGH PRIORITY: GMU talk video producer

Our Executive Director Patri Friedman is doing a talk at George Mason University the first week of April 2009. This should be a very interesting talk and Q&A - GMU is a major libertarian school and may have some prominent libertarians in the audience.

We'd like to have a basic recording of this online and this is where we need your help. Volunteer role entails everything from coordination with GMU (permission, facilities etc) to filming, editing and uploading the video to YouTube. This would be perfect for someone interested in filmmaking.


HIGH PRIORITY: Drupal sysadmin

Our website is a centerpiece of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement -- our primary strategic focus in 2009. Sysadmin tasks include maintaining & troubleshooting our production and development environments, providing support to developers doing project work, maintaining our source code repository, and helping push new code to production.

Experience with Linux, Apache, Drupal, MySQL, Google Code/Subversion are all helpful. 


HIGH PRIORITY: Web developer

Our website is a centerpiece of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement -- our primary strategic focus in 2009. We need developers to help us implement new features to improve the usefulness and usability of the site.

Experience with Drupal development is a plus, but it's fine if you'd like to learn as you go.

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NEW ROLES


NEW: 2-D Graphic Designer for Conference and Ephemerisle
We're going to need quite a bit of design help for our Annual Conference and Ephemerisle coming up this year. Flyers, brochures, schwag, signs, publicity, and so on. Ideally someone with strong design skills and experience with design software (Photoshop, Illustrator etc.)

NEW: Website product/project manager

We've got a huge laundry list of little bugs and feature requests for the website. We need somebody who can help track and prioritize them in an issues database, hammer out detailed requirements form a high-level problem statement or request, and coordinate with other members of the development team (programmers, sysadmins, and TSI management) to get fixes up on the site.

NEW: TSI introductory video producer
We'd like to have a fancy, professional video introducing TSI that we can put on our website front page. We do have a volunteer filmmaker/director/editor with equipment, but we need someone to coordinate this project, select filming locations, prepare scripts, outline content, coordinate logistics etc.

NEW: Website Content Manager
The Seasteading website is crucial in getting our vision across to other people. We need someone who could help us keep it up to date and be responsible for all content on the website. This entails monitoring for pieces that are out of date, reparing broken links, keeping the content reflecting current strategy, events, iinitiatives, strategy, etc. as well as polishing, formatting and posting content written by other TSI staff.

NEW: Animation Producer

MI&T (the marine architects) are trying to create an HD movie for TSI which would be a computer animation of a flyby of the seastead they've designed. Unfortunately they are having some technical difficulties, so we are looking for someone who could string hhe raw images (which will be provided) into an actual movie.

Basic knowledge of editing software or iMovie needed.