VolunteerRoles
Contents
Draft state!
I anticipate taking the "Category" and column off this before migrating to the main volunteer page.
| Project/Role | Category | Urgency (1-3, 1=high, 3=some) | Description | Special qualifications | Estimated time | Target completion date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Website Sysadmin / Developer | A- | 1 | Address technical problems that come up Help establish a more mature development environment (source control, etc.) |
Experience with UNIX-based website administration Familiarity with Drupal/PHP (or a willingness to learn) |
2-6 hours per week | n/a (ongoing role) |
| Website Community Manager | A- | 2 | Moderate comments and forums | Community management experience is a plus | 2-4 hours per week | n/a (ongoing role) |
| Website Planner | A- | 2 | Work with Patri Friedman, TSI's Executive Director, to brainstorm and prioritize feature requests, and work with other volunteers to implement those plans | 2-4 hours per week | n/a (ongoing role) | |
| Website Volunteer Coordinator | A | 2 | Coordinate efforts of multiple volunteers who help with the website: - Track status and outstanding dependencies |
Project management experience a plus | 3-6 hours per week | n/a (ongoing role) |
| Webmaster | A+ | 1 | Ideally, we'd find one individual who was willing to take on multiple (or all) of the roles above. | See above | 7-14 hours per week | n/a (ongoing role) |
| Secret GIS project | B | 2 | This is a fun idea we'd like to keep secret, which would involve a moderate amount of GIS programming, in conjunction with an online store, and some visual displays (Google Maps, Google Earth KMZ output, etc.). It might produce some revenue (that you could share in) and publicity. You can use any platform you want for serving the data, but it will need to talk to our Drupal site for user information. We'd probably be willing to pay for this, since it is potentially revenue-generating and should be high-quality. | Professional development experience with real-time web applications | ??? | ??? |
| Little Drupal projects | B | 2 | Lots of ideas for small development projects -- more details coming soon. | Varies | Varies | |
| Pretty Front Page (content) | B | 3 | Pretty Front Page - We want to replace the current image & Mark Twain quote on the front page w/ a slowly-updating slideshow with a variety of quotes and images. Perhaps make a screensaver version as well. You'd be responsible for finding inspiring, royalty-free artwork relevant to us (ocean scenes, ships, oil platforms, wind turbines...) and appropriate quotes. Ideally, you'd also find good images for other sections of the site. Some minimal graphic design experience (2D photoshop work) desired, so you can combine quotes and images nicely. A different volunteer would write the code to actually rotate in the images you find. | 5-10 hours | Q4 2008 | |
| Pretty Front Page (development) | B | 3 | Work with the content volunteer to implement the front page improvements described above. It would be great to find one person who was interested in both of these roles! | Drupal development experience, or a willingness to learn | 5-10 hours | Q4 2008 |
| Book Beta Webpage software improvements | B | 1 | The Book Beta is generated using Scrivener and MultiMarkDown. The MMD outputs a single large XHTML file. Since it is XHTML, it is cleanly structured (book hierarchy is reflected in H1, H2... hierarchy), and should be easy to parse. We want it split into sections, with TOCs/headers/footers added, and forward/back/up/down links. Much like the Book Alpha, but going 1-2 levels deeper in splitting (sections, not just chapters). This script will become part of our pipeline for the "live" version of the book - it will continuously evolve in Scrivener, and periodically get exported to HTML and PDF for printing. | Software development skills (likely Perl or Python) | 20-50 hours | Q4 2008 |
| Website marketing consultant | B | 3 | Reading books like Made To Stick has made it clear that we have a long way to go in refining our vision and pitch to its bare essentials, so it will have the strongest appeal to the most people. We're looking for someone with experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing, preferably with small non-profits, to help us. Basically, work with Patri to make seasteading sound cool and awesome, rather than weird and scary :). And to appeal to a broad audience, not just crazy libertarians. There are a number of volunteer projects in this vein; this one targets website content. | 5-10 hours | Q4 2008 | |
| Migrate volunteer page to main site | B | 3 | At this point, this volunteer page would be better suited as part of the main website rather than on the wiki. Currently, however, it's all in WikiText markup, so it'll need to be ported over and made to look pretty in Drupal. | Drupal experience a plus | 5-10 hours | Q1 2009 |
| Project/Role | Category | Urgency (1-3, 1=high, 3=some) | Description | Special qualifications | Estimated time | Target completion date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 Conference volunteers | C | 2 | We could use more manpower to help next week's conference run smoothly! | During the conference | 10/9 - 10/11 | |
| Bay Area Seasteading Socials Coordinator | A- | 2 | Organize our monthly socials around the Bay Area. These are used for pitching seasteading, updating the community, networking, finding volunteers, etc. This coordinator would be responsible for finding hosts/venues, handling publicity, driving attendance, arranging for refreshments, coordinating with TSI colleagues to organize agendas, etc. | Local to the San Francisco Bay Area and able to attend most/all of our socials. | 2-4 hours/week | n/a (ongoing role) |
| Bay Area Seasteading Social Hosts | B | 2 | We're looking for people to who might be willing to host our monthly socials. These are used for pitching seasteading, updating the community, networking, finding volunteers, etc. | A venue that can accomodate 30+ people | 5 hours total to assist with planning and attend the social itself | December 2008 |
| Ephemerisle | C | 3 | Ephemerisle is a sort of Burning Man-like festival to be held in international waters. We're thinking about July 4th, 2009, off San Diego / LA for the first one. We'll need lots of volunteers! We'll do initial planning in a session at our first annual conference, so if you are interested, please come. | Varies | July 4, 2009 |
| Project/Role | Category | Urgency (1-3, 1=high, 3=some) | Description | Special qualifications | Estimated time | Target completion date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Site Publicity Associate | A | 1 | You would manage our blogroll, try to get reciprocal links, and try to grow blog/website traffic by posting blog entries to relevant places (forums, link-sharing sites) and emailing them to prominent bloggers (when appropriate). One part of this could be to start a blog of your own to help drive traffic to us, as described in the "Supporting Blogger" role below. You'd also analyze our search traffic, figure out how we were getting it and how we could get more, that sort of thing. This could be sliced into multiple projects if you only want to take on part of it. | SEO, blogging, and promotion experience is a plus. | 2-4 hours per week | n/a (ongoing) |
| Supporting Blogger | C | 3 | One way to try to drive web traffic to The Seasteading Institute is for other blogs to link to us. If you have a blog, or would be interested in starting one, that covers seasteading-relevant issues or technologies (e.g. Blue Economy), you can help. The idea here is to try to grow your readership independently, and link back to TSI's main site when you can. | Varies | n/a (ongoing) | |
| Presentation Coaching | B | 2 | Reading books like Made To Stick has made it clear that we have a long way to go in refining our vision and pitch to its bare essentials, so it will have the strongest appeal to the most people. We're looking for someone with experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing, preferably with small non-profits, to help us. Basically, work with Patri to make seasteading sound cool and awesome, rather than weird and scary :). And to appeal to a broad audience, not just crazy libertarians. There are a number of volunteer projects in this vein; this one targets our live presentation material. | 2-5 hours | Q4 2008 | |
| Media Coaching | B | 2 | As TSI gains momentum, we're getting lots of media exposure, which means lots of interviews for print, radio, and television. It would be great to have someone who can help coach us on professional techniques for being maximally effective and compelling in these contexts. | Professional media coaching experience | 2-4 hours | Q4 2008 |
| Project/Role | Category | Urgency (1-3, 1=high, 3=some) | Description | Special qualifications | Estimated time | Target completion date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Membership Program Administrator | A | 2 | We'd like to start a membership program where people pay annual dues in return for schwag, recognition, and other perks. You'd help us define, operate, and grow the program. | Experience designing/running such things is a plus. (If not, we have a book you can learn from). | 15-30 hours for setup; 3-6 hours/week for operation | Q4 2008 for setup |
| Schwag Master | B | 3 | Handle seastead-themed merchandise. Work with volunteer designers to make designs, sell them in online stores, etc. | 2-4 hours/week | Q4 2008 | |
| Schwagster | B | 3 | Create graphic designs that can be used for seastead-themed merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) | Varies | Q4 2008 | |
| Regional Associates | C | 3 | These are unofficial roles where you agree to help out with a particular country. We might direct press inquiries from that country to contact you for a quote or interview, ask you to translate or summarize local articles, or for a couch to crash on if we come visit :). There's not currently any projects to be done here, but we are gathering a list of interested names so that we have them when things come up. |
