April 2009 Newsletter

April Highlights:

Birthday, Annual Report and New Membership Program.

On April 15th, 2009 was a big day here at TSI. The Seasteading Institute has released its Annual Report and announced a new and improved Membership Program.

• The Annual Report is an examination of the past year and a peek into our future, along with information on our financial status from an independent accounting firm. We hope you will find it interesting and informative.
• The Membership Program gives you all a chance to get involved in seasteading, become a part of our movement and spread the idea of seasteading around the world. Your contributions and your participation in the seasteading community are what keep this a vital, growing movement. Thank you all for your support and helping us make Seasteading reality! Our thanks also go out to Steve Kane for helping integrate this into our website.

Official TSI strategy has been published!

In addition to our new membership program, The Seasteading Institute has released its Organizational Strategy Document. The strategy document is a more detailed examination of our specific plans and strategies. It outlines TSIs strategic vision and provides you with an inside look at how we will work towards a seasteading future. It is our goal to maintain this as living document, growing with the organization. We hope that you will help us develop and improve our strategy – you can discuss it on this forum thread.

TSI is hiring: Director of Engineering and Event Project Manager!

We are excited to announce that we are looking to fill two key positions at TSI.

• Director of Engineering: This person will provide vision and management for all of TSI’s technology initiatives, such as seastead designs and prototypes, and have some involvement with hands-on execution. This is a paid, full-time position on TSI’s Executive Staff, reporting to the Executive Director.
• Project Manager: In-the-trenches project management work for our upcoming Annual Conference and Ephemerisle events. This is a paid, half-time position from now through mid-October.

Design Contest Gallery is live. Cast your votes now!

Submissions for our design contest completed on May 1st, 2009. We received many great submissions (41!). Also, on the press side, National Geographic News wants to publish the winners’ designs, and we’ll be looking into more media opportunities for our winners, as well.

The

(https://seasteading.org/node/789) with submitted designs and public poll are now live. There are some really great ones in there. Go vote for your favorite and check back to see the winners May 15.

Awareness and Community

Website/Social media stats:

We are very excited that our Seasteading Community is growing so quickly. As of now we have:

• 1942 registered users on www.seasteading.org, up from 1639.
• 947 mailing list members, up from 828.
• 546 members in our Facebook group, up from 462.
• 138 fans on our Facebook page.
• 182 Twitter followers.
• 40 LiveJournal subscribers

Press/Awareness:

• Patri’s lead essay in the April edition of Cato Unbound sparked quite a few conversations around the web and was followed by several response articles by Peter Thiel, Jason Sorens, Brian Doherty and Patri himself. You can find all the articles here.
• A video of Patri’s talk “Seasteading: Homesteading High Seas for Liberty” at Cato is available online at the Cato Institute website .
• Interview Podcast from the Cato Policy Forum, “Voting Yourself Off The Island” is available online.
• GreenUpgrader featured a long article about Seasteading.

Blogs:

Sister blog: “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom”

We launched a new sister blog, “Let a Thousand Nations Bloom” for discussion of the political theory around seasteading and similar topics which increase the size and competition in the governing industry. We think that a separate blog, especially with a more general topic area, should be able to take on a life of its own and bring a wider audience to seasteading. Patri and Catallarchy founder Jonathan Wilde will be the initial authors, with Mike Gibson as the editor. We have already attracted some great guest posts:

• Vinay Gupta on Free Guptastan
• Michael Strong, author of Be The Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All The World’s Problems, on Free Zones as an Additional Option for the Cambrian Explosion in Government

Events:

April was a busy month for seasteading. Patri gave 10 talks in 4 countries to a total of 450 people, including the Adam Smith Institute in London, CEPOS in Denmark, the Cato Institute in DC, University of Virginia, George Mason University and San Jose State. Also, several people attended our April Social in San Francisco. Thank you all for coming!

Conferences:

• Second Annual Seasteading Conference – Planning continues. Mark your calendars for Sep. 28-30 (Monday evening, full day Tuesday, Wednesday through dinner, location TBD).
• First Ephemerisle Festival – Planning continues, we are building a website and researching the location. Mark your calendars for Fri Oct. 2 – Sun Oct 4 (in the Sacremento River Delta).

Socials:

We had a very interesting get together in San Francisco this month. Thanks to Tyler Willis for organizing this. In May, a documenty team from Canada will be attending our social to film the event and talk to seasteading supporters. Come out and represent seasteading!

Maker Faire:

The Seasteading Institute is participating in the upcoming Maker Faire – the world’s largest DIY festival – in San Mateo on May 30th & 31st. Please come join us, build aquarium-sized seasteads, talk about seasteading and have fun.

Seasteading Businesses

There is not much new to report right now, but building on our strategy work, we’re developing some exciting ideas about how we can jump-start the commercial seasteading sector. We hope to have more to announce next month.

Engineering

• We finally have a higher resolution Clubstead design flyby hd video available on our website.
• We also have ClubStead cost estimates and the numbers look very promising – lower than most of Bay Area median home prices! Details available on our blog.
• Final ClubStead reports are finished and will be posted on the website soon!
• We are actively working on how to approach our next design — something that will be a much more incremental step than ClubStead, most likely a single-family seastead. We also want to formally engage the community in our engineering processes to a greater degree than we have in the past. More info on this will be coming in May.

Legal

Jorge Schmidt is a lawyer with maritime law experience who has been managing our legal research project for us. Other volunteer lawyers Solomon Bahsi, Chely Mina Amor, and Joe Denison have been assisting with research. We hope to release a whitepaper summarizing some initial findings in May.

Administrative

As mentioned in the highlights section we released our Annual Report and launched new Membership Program.

TSI is growing – in April we hired Eric Jacobus as our Administrative Assistant, and we are currently looking a Director of Engineering and an Event Project Manager. Detailed job descriptions and information on how to apply are available on our website.