VolunteerList

Overview

Thanks for your interest in The Seasteading Institute's volunteer opportunities!

As you can see, there are many ways to help. This page contains two identical lists of our volunteer roles, organized by urgency and skillset.

If you're interested in helping out with any of the items described here, please drop us a line at volunteers@seasteading.org. Feel free to contact us as well if you have your own questions or ideas about how you can help besides what is listed. We also have a Volunteer Mailing List (please join, or read via RSS!) which we'll notify when there are urgent projects or major changes to the list below.

Note that we sometimes recruit for paid positions as well. Information on those is available here.

Volunteering with TSI

It almost goes without saying that the best volunteers are reliable, autonomous individuals who are passionate about TSI's mission: To establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems.

If you are considering volunteering in some way, thank you! If you're offering help for one of the projects listed on this page, we ask that you only do so if you believe you can commit to the time investment requested (and in the case of ongoing roles, for at least one month). False starts can sometimes slow things down more than no start at all.

That said, we understand that any donation of time is a generous gift, and that life priorities can fluctuate and require you to leave a volunteer task unfinished. You'll find us reasonable folks, and we'll appreciate your open and honest communication about these situations if they come up.

Also note that we've tried to break down the projects on this page to pretty granular levels, but they're flexible. If you want to do a portion of a project (or want to do more than one project!), drop us a line and we'll see what we can do.

Volunteer Opportunities, Listed by Urgency

High Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time
Drupal System Administrator	Our website is a centerpiece of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement -- our primary strategic focus in 2009. Sysadmin tasks include maintaining & troubleshooting our production and development environments, providing support to developers doing project work, maintaining our source code repository, and helping push new code to production.	Experience with Linux, Apache, Drupal, MySQL, Google Code/Subversion are all helpful	2-4 hours per week
Website Developer	Our website is a centerpiece of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement -- our primary strategic focus in 2009. We need developers to help us implement new features to improve the usefulness and usability of the site.	Experience with Drupal development is a plus, but it's fine if you'd like to learn as you go.	3-5 hours per week
GMU Talk Video Producer	Our Executive Director Patri Friedman is doing a talk at George Mason University the first week of April 2009. This should be a very interesting talk - GMU is a major libertarian school and may have some prominent libertarians. We'd like to have a basic recording of this online and this is where we need your help. Volunteer role entails everything from coordination with GMU (permission, facilities etc) to filming, editing and uploading the video to YouTube. This would be perfect for someone interested in filmmaking.	We need somebody who can produce and edit the video. You don't need to be a pro; strong amateur skills or interest in learning will be considered, too!	Varies. Project based.

Moderate Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time
Website Development Manager	The TSI website is a cornerstone of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement over the next several years. It is one of our primary ways of communicating our message to people unfamiliar with seasteading, and it serves as a community hub for enthusiasts active in the seasteading movement. There's a lot of software development and maintenance involved in making it the most effective community-building tool possible. We're looking for a volunteer to manage our website development team. Our team currently consists of 8 (and growing!) volunteer developers, product managers, and sysadmins distributed across the globe. The role would entail delivering software projects, helping manage site bugs and operational issues, and maximizing site uptime. In addition, it would cover personnel-related areas such as recruiting (we have volunteer recruiters to assist), retention, and generally making sure volunteers' needs are met. Interested individuals should send a resume to volunteers@seasteading.org.	A qualified candidate will likely have previous experience leading software development projects (open-source or volunteer projects is a plus) and feel passionate about making a difference in the seasteading movement. Geographical location is flexible, as work can be done entirely remotely.	8 hours per week
Website Product/Project Manager	We've got a huge laundry list of little bugs and feature requests for the website. We need somebody who can help track and prioritize them in an issues database, hammer out detailed requirements form a high-level problem statement or request, and coordinate with other members of the development team (programmers, sysadmins, and TSI management) to get fixes up on the site.		3-4 hours per week
Program Manager	Work with TSI's Director of Operations to provide program management support for all TSI efforts. A primary focus is monitoring, risk assessment/mitigation, and reporting of TSI's progress against their overall organizational strategy. Other responsibilities include summary reporting of all in-flight TSI projects, and in-the-trenches project management work where necessary. It's critical that this individual be the type of project/program manager that teams are thrilled to work with, both on a personal level, and because their lives are made easier by the support being provided.		5-10 hours a week
TSI introductory video producer	We'd like to have a fancy, professional video introducing TSI that we can put on our website front page. We do have a volunteer filmmaker/director/editor with equipment, but we need someone to coordinate this project, select filming locations, prepare scripts, outline content, coordinate logistics etc.		Varies.
Website Content Manager	The seasteading website is crucial in getting our vision across to other people. We need someone who could help us keep it up to date and be responsible for all content on the website. This entails monitoring for pieces that are out of date, repairing broken links, keeping the content reflecting current strategy, events, initiatives, strategy, etc. as well as polishing, formatting and posting content written by other TSI staff.		3-5 hours per week
2009 Conference Volunteers	We'll need some volunteers to help with prep and execution of our 2009 annual conference, to be held this June in San Francisco. Our 2008 conference included ~50 participants from 6 countries around the globe. Attendees learned about our vision, formed new relationships, and participated in strategy workshops which are informing our approach going forward. We expect our 2009 conference to be significantly larger.		At least a few hours
Talks Coordinator	Patri (our Executive Director) does a lot of talks around the world. We could really use some help with the logistics around these. This would entail arranging talks, publicizing them, helping with travel arrangements, finding relevant meetup groups in the region to connect with, etc.	Strong English communication skills	Varies depending on speaking schedule
Help Find A Book Publisher	Our seasteading book is one of the main ways we're going to generate greater awareness and discussion of our research so far. We need to find a publisher! If you've got experience or contacts in the publishing industry, you can help. Referrals, help writing pitch/proposal letters, and general advice from someone who has done this before would all be welcome.	Prior experience with the publishing world	Varies
2-D Graphic Designers: Conference/Ephemerisle	We're going to need quite a bit of design help for our Annual Conference and Ephemerisle coming up this year. Flyers, brochures, schwag, signs, publicity, and so on.	Strong design skills and experience with design software (Photoshop, etc.)	Varies (project-based)
Community Relations	Moderate comments and forums. Aggregate community feedback and questions for TSI executives. Help answer questions and keep the forum community informed in a more day-to-day manner than management is able to directly. Respond to general e-mails sent to info@seasteading.org. Manage TSI presence on various social networking sites (Facebook, Livejournal, etc.) Help represent TSI in various online communities directly or indirectly related to seasteading.	Experience with community management and the above social networking sites is a plus	2-4 hours per week
Administrative Assistant	It would be great to have somebody who can assist TSI Executive Staff with administrative tasks -- this frees up more of our time to focus on more strategic things. This work could be done remotely.		4 hours/week
Grant Research	Help do research, under our guidance, to find grants which TSI might be good candidates for.	Prior experience writing grant applications would be a bonus.	3-5 hours
Animation Producer	MI&T (the marine architects) are trying to create an HD movie for TSI which would be a computer animation of a flyby of the seastead they've designed. Unfortunately they are having some technical difficulties, so we are looking for someone who could string the raw images (which will be provided) into an actual movie.	Prior experience with image/film editing software and iMovie useful.

Some Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time
Presentation/Media Coaching	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 want to make seasteading sound cool and awesome, rather than weird and scary -- and to appeal to a broad audience, not just hardcore libertarians. We'd like somebody who could review videos of presentations & talks that we've done, and media appearances that we've made, and give feedback on how they could be made more compelling.	Experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing and/or or experience with professional media coaching	2-5 hours
Wikipedia Maintainer	The Wikipedia articles on seasteading and TSI are very sparse and contain out-of-date information. They needs to be updated, and ideally maintained by the same person. Obviously we want somebody who is knowledgeable enough about seasteading and TSI to make sure that a decent picture is being portrayed, while still maintaining an ethical and unbiased stance while writing content.		5-10 hours initially, 2 hours/month thereafter
Second Life Seasteading Socials Organizer	We've started to do occasional meetups in Second Life. We could use somebody who's familiar with the Second Life world and technology to organize things for us -- get meeting places set up, provide newbie-friendly instructions and support to those interested in attending, and so on. These socials would be similar to the current face-to-face Bay Area socials, and would be used for pitching seasteading, updating the community, networking, finding volunteers, etc.	Experience with Second Life	5 hours/month
Regional Associates	These are roles where you agree to help us out in a particular city. We might ask you for help selecting local venues to host socials, drumming up publicity, establishing connections with existing meetup groups, arranging talks, and so on. If you live in a non-English speaking area, we might be able to use your help translating or summarizing local articles. There are 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.

Volunteer Opportunities, Listed By Skillset

Administrative

Website Development Manager
2009 Conference Volunteers
Second Life Seasteading Socials Organizer
Administrative Assistant
Website Content Manager

Website technology

Drupal System Administrator
Website Developer

Product/Project Management

Website Product Manager
Program Manager

2-D Art / Design

2-D Graphic Designers: Conference/Ephemerisle

3-D Design / Graphics

We use a Google Groups mailing list to distribute small 3-D design/graphics projects.

Video Production

GMU Talk Video Producer
TSI introductory video producer
Animation Producer

Marketing & PR

Presentation Coaching
Wikipedia Maintainer

Publishing Help

Help Find A Book Publisher

Anybody

Talks Coordinator
Grant Research
Regional Associates
Community Relations
GMU Video Talk Producer
TSI introductory video producer