Thank you for your interest in the Humanity+ Student Network
Ben Hyink
Thank you for expressing interest in the Humanity+ Student Network.
I've taken the liberty of adding all your addresses to the "To" field
of this E-mail to share some basic information before responding to
your individual E-mails. I will forward this message to additional
people who contact me based on today's newsletter (which I haven't
seen - I just subscribed to it).
The H+SN was originated roughly a year ago as a project under
Humanity+ to revive the Transhumanist Student Network (TSN), which
operated from 2003 to 2008 and at its peak had ten affiliated clubs
and over 2,000 members of a facebook group. I recall that of the
500-750 respondents to a comprehensive survey of the World
Transhumanist Association (the name of the parent organization before
Humanity+) conducted by James Hughes in the mid-2000s approximately
10% identified as being affiliated with the TSN. The TSN fell apart
soon after attempting to split off from the WTA as a separate
organization - a strategy we would do well not to repeat as it proved
impossible to sustain stable TSN leadership for long. We plan to model
the new H+SN on the Center for Inquiiry's very successful
"CFI-OnCampus" program (a program with over 100 campus chapters; see:
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/oncampus/groups/ ), which makes
student outreach a program of the parent organization rather than the
work of a separately governed organization and primarily emphasizes
providing excellent support for student organizing and peer educating
at the campus level as opposed to more the more insular work of
infrastructure building. That said, we certainly could use help in
building up the resources we can offer student organizers and
advocates and we will try to incorporate the work of volunteer teams
as well as decentralized contributions through "open source"
approaches and peer to peer (P2P) tools for sharing resources like
flyer designs. We will try to keep you in the loop as our program
matures and opportunities arise to contribute, including enhancing the
H+SN website and linked resources.
While I am advising and assisting as I can, the new Humanity+ Student
Outreach Coordinator is Curt Tigges, who is assisted by Josh Call.
Curt and Josh were planning to establish an International Futurist
Society to help organize students when they learned of the H+SN
program plan and volunteered to serve in a coordinative capacity so as
not to duplicate efforts.
Edward Miller has just begun to develop the H+SN website. A team
including Natasha Vita-More, Bryan Bishop and me have almost completed
a H+SN Student Advocate Guide that provides many useful strategies and
tips for organizing campus groups as well as serving as an advocate if
one cannot manage to establish a campus group (after exhausting our
strategies). The guide will provide more comprehensive advice than we
could offer through individual E-mails alone and will save us to some
degree the trouble of constantly repeating ourselves.
We encourage those who are willing to put in the intellectual effort
to run one to try to establish an academic working group (as the
Stanford Transhumanist Association was in its existence) instead of a
traditional club, though a traditional club can be valuable as well,
especially in bringing transhumanist and futurist speakers to campus,
which can serve as a perfect outreach tool for clubs for attracting
more members. Campus groups spread transhumanist and futurist ideas to
impressionable people who would not stumble upon them themselves,
provide face-to-face communities for individuals with similar
interests, and in the case of academic working groups, can potentially
help advance transhumanist and futurist thought with faculty
involvement.
Again, thank you for your interest, we will try to keep you informed
as resources become available and we create volunteer teams, and I
will personally reply to your messages when I have time.
Yours,
Ben Hyink