I think floating is as good a place to start as any, Vince.

I know participants are encouraged to build and test their own designs, but will TSI have a design of their own present, to at least get the ball rolling and make sure there's at least 1-2 designs there for the big kick-off, no matter who else gives it a try?

Good information, though. I hope you get a nice turnout. You can probably expect the first year to be a bit bumpy but go in prepared and you'll get through it in one piece. Good luck!

I think if we make Ephemerisle awesome, and generate sufficient community excitement and commitment in the process, their enthusiasm will drive things forward. Look at all the engineering ingenuity and effort that Burning Man has spawned -- just by creating a space where people can have the time of their lives.

Prizes/contests might have a role at the festival too, I think (and we do have a grant program). But I think the primary driver for Ephemerisle will be community enthusiasm.

DM: TSI has a central platform that we are providing, so yes, we'll have a structure. It's unclear whether it will be Bay-worthy, but it's probably upgradable to be Bay-worthy for a future Ephemerisle.

James

I'm going to agree with Vince that Ephemerisle generally doesn't advance living on the ocean.  However I also agree with Vince that an exception would be model testing, but that will be pretty informal at best.  A floating platform that works in the delta probably has little bearing on something that would work on the open ocean.  Take a houseboat for example.  A houseboat that works reasonably well on lakes and calm rivers, fails in the ocean.  It actually fails before it gets to the ocean since it's swamped by the first significant wave.  Ships work in the ocean, but larger ones are better than smaller ones.  A sailboat works marginally well where storms aren't too energetic.

On a personal level, I view Ephermisle as a vacation.

On a practical level, Ephemerisle is a test to see who can get along, and who can not drown.  In other words it's an exercise in safety, common sense, and social skills.  If a sense of community can begin to emerge, then that could be a good outcome.  Whether such community is meaningful to seasteading or can meaningfully persist may be interesting questions.

It's really hard to drown in the desert, but people manage to die at Burning Man.  People drown in the Sacramento delta probably more often, usually related to alcohol and lack of safety precautions.  Drugs, darkness, water and lack of life vests is probably not a good combination.  I'm starting a separate wiki entry on personal safety equipment.

Incrementalism is an excellent concept, but the physical characteristics of protected waters like lakes, rivers, bays, etc., are so very different from open ocean waves that it's not clear how strongly it can apply between these fundamentally different cases.

Vince has an excellent idea, and it does seem to work with incrementalism.  I would suggest that people should not be allowed on them when they are at risk of destruction or large motions, i.e, when they are in or being moved to larger waves.  (In the U.S., you probably would not want the judges to be repsonsible for putting people's lives at risk.  There are way too many tort lawyers.  The situation may be better outside the U.S.)  The idea of seeing which ones survive longest and/or have smallest motions in similar waves is a very scientific way to approach things.  It's a differential test where the waves in principle are similar and the design varies.  Excellent idea.

I should say again that platforms designed for calm waters won't work in waves.  They'd need to be designed for waves, built in calm waters, then towed into the waves.

Jeff: "Incrementalism is an excellent concept, but the physical characteristics of protected waters like lakes, rivers, bays, etc., are so very different from open ocean waves that it's not clear how strongly it can apply between these fundamentally different cases."

There are plenty of differences between building a platform for shallow waters, and building one for the ocean. No disagreement there. But I do disagree about whether they can be linked through an incremental chain which preserves some value at each step of the way. That is, I think that building for the delta provides some learnings for the bay, and building for the bay will provide some learnings for a less-protected bay, and so forth. (For example, we could model that each year's designs will span a range from overengineered to underengineered, centered approximately on what is right for that year's conditions, and the overengineered ones provide the seed for the next step).

(One thing to remember is that we can locate Ephemerisle, even offshore, at a time and place where there is no likely storm, and cancel it if there is a storm. A temporary festival can plan for much smaller waves.)

This incremental chain has lots of wasted engineering work along the way - designs that work in one environment but not another. It is "inefficient" in that sense. But in another sense, the greatest challenge of seasteading is to connect the distant difficult future to the present through a series of small steps. A solution which spends a lot of time going sideways but keeps inching forward is really valuable. Especially given that building community and letting people w/ day jobs and lives recharge their energy and spreading the word and things like that do take many years.