TSI Volunteering Announcements: December 2008

[James]

TSI Volunteering Announcements
December 2008

Hello, seasteaders!

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TOPICS COVERED IN THIS MONTH'S ISSUE

- Overview
- Volunteer Coordination help
- Website Developers and System Administrators
- San Francisco Bay Area Chapter Coordinator

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-- OVERVIEW

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

Interested parties can inquire further by e-mailing
volun...@seasteading.org.

As always, a complete list of all of our open volunteer positions can
be found <a href="http://wiki.seasteading.org/index.php/
VolunteerList">here</a>.

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-- VOLUNTEER COORDINATION HELP

This is an important role because it's highly leveraged -- more
volunteer coordination help means more effective volunteer man-hours,
and that will help all aspects of TSI's vision.

We have lots of people who are interested in volunteering with TSI,
but it's a good chunk of work to recruit them and make sure we've got
productive tasks ready to go.

We could use many levels of help here, from assistants who could help
manage things like our this newsletter and our "list of volunteer
roles" wiki, to experienced managers who could help recruit for and
manage large projects.

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-- WEBSITE DEVELOPERS AND SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS

Our volunteer website development team is off and running, but could
use more help!

We've got one sysadmin already, which is a lot better than none. But
having a second sysadmin would give us more overall bandwidth for
projects, faster turnaround time when our developers need help, and
backup for when someone is unavailable.

On the development side, we've got a lot of great community-building
features we'd like to build -- forum upgrades, UI improvements, photo
feeds, digg-style ratings for blog and forum posts, donation
functionality, and lots more. The bottleneck is manpower. Drupal
experience is a huge plus, but enthusiasm and a willingness to learn
is all that's required!

Thanks to Ben Lavender and Michael Dent, our inaugural website
volunteers, who have been doing a great job so far.

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-- SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA CHAPTER COORDINATOR

Those of you who have been to our socials in the Bay Area know that
they're a great, fun way to connect with other members of the
seasteading community and stay up-to-date about what's happening with
the movement. Having a volunteer to organize these would be extremely
helpful, as it would free us up to focus on other high-priority
tasks.

The coordinator would be responsible for finding hosts/venues for Bay
Area events, handling publicity, driving attendance, arranging for
refreshments, coordinating with TSI colleagues to organize agendas,
etc.

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Thanks for reading; see you next month!


--
James Hogan, Volunteer Coordinator
The Seasteading Institute
www.seasteading.org