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 three identical lists of our volunteer roles, organized by urgency, skillset, and strategic area.

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	Estimated time
Ephemerisle Research	Ephemerisle is a floating festival TSI is considering organizing in Summer 2009 in the San Francisco Bay. Ephemerisle could serve as a proof of concept, and create awareness for, many of TSI's goals, including floating communities and experimentation with different systems of government. To make Ephemerisle happen, we need some people who can help spearhead preliminary research in two areas: - Legal research, focusing on questions of what activities are legal, and who will be liable for injuries or property damage at the event. We're interested in the letter of the law, and also very interested in practical applications, e.g. things that are not illegal but might generate concern and involvement from the Coast Guard. We have a friendly contact at the Coast Guard to help with this. - Infrastructural research, focusing on an engineering analysis of building a floating community center for the festival, including: Requirements definition (size, transportability, comfort, etc.), design options, cost analysis, etc.	10+ hours
2009 Conference Organizers	We need some organizers for our 2009 annual conference, to be held this June in San Francisco. Our 2008 conference included 50 participants from 8 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.	100-200 hours (to be split among multiple people)
Volunteer Coordination Help	This is an important role because it's highly leveraged -- more volunteer coordination help means more effective volunteer man-hours, and that can help all aspects of TSI's vision. We have lots of people who are interested in volunteering with TSI, but it's a good chunk of work to recruit them and make sure we've got productive tasks ready to go. We could use many levels of help here, from assistants who could help manage things like this wiki page, to experienced managers who could help recruit for and manage large projects.	3 hours per week

Moderate Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time
Website Drupal/PHP Developer	There are lots of small Drupal/PHP development projects that could benefit the website. Forum upgrades, Installing feedburner, configuring our upload module to allow users to upload images and other files, a digg/reddit-style voting system for forum posts, etc. Sharp programmers who can't know Drupal can generally pick it up without much of a problem.	Drupal and PHP development experience is a plus	5-20 hours
Website System Administrator	We've got one great volunteer sysadmin. Having a second would give us more overall bandwidth for projects, faster turnaround time when our developers need help, and backup for when someone is unavailable for a while.	Experience with Linux, Apache, Drupal, MySQL is helpful.	2-4 hours per week
Video Producer	We'd like to create a short introductory video for seasteading and TSI. For many people, nothing gets the message across like a short, simple video. This will go on the front page of our website and also be included in our press kit and other promotional materials. Most of the content will probably consist of Patri, our Executive Director, speaking. We need somebody who can produce and edit the video. You don't need to be a pro; strong amateur skills will be considered, too!	Simple video production experience	4+ hours
Website Publicity Associate	Assist TSI's Development Director with various publicity tasks. These could include helping manage our website's blogroll, getting reciprocal links from other sites, growing blog/website traffic by posting blog entries to relevant places (forums, link-sharing sites) and emailing them to prominent bloggers (when appropriate), analyzing our search traffic to figure out how we could get more, etc.	SEO, blogging, and promotion experience is a plus.	Varies
Organizational Outreach	There is tremendous potential for TSI to grow the seasteading movement by collaborating with other organizations -- conferences, think-tanks, universities, and so on. Establishing relationships, giving talks, and attending conferences are vital steps to help us build the support network we need to make this movement realize its potential. There's a lot of research legwork needed to make this happen. We need people who can look around on the web for organizations that are likely to be sympathetic to our cause, and draft letters (probably customized form letters) introducing ourselves and helping them understand why our cause is relevant to them and why they should be excited about it.		5-10 hours per person
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	We occasionally have a need for flyers, brochures, or website content. We use these at our socials, conferences, on our website, for our conference DVD, our future press kit, etc.	Experience with graphics software (Photoshop, etc.) Ability & willingness to write good content is a plus!	Varies (project based)
San Francisco Bay Area Chapter Coordinator	TSI chapter coordinators organize events for the local seasteading community. These are generally fun, informal, face-to-face meetups used for building the seasteading community, discussion of seasteading ideas, disseminating TSI news, general networking, finding volunteers, etc. Chapter coordinators are 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. Good organization and communication skills.	2-3 hours/week
Website Community Manager	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. This role entails community management on the TSI website, and on various social networking sites (Facebook, Tribe, Livejournal, etc.)	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 our Executive Director with administrative tasks -- responding to general e-mails sent to info@seasteading.org, for example, or maintaining a list of TSI contacts. We'd like to get his time freed up to focus on more strategic things. This work could be done remotely.		2-3 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

Some Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time
Monthly Research Topic Moderators	Our Monthly Research Program uses our web forums to organize seasteading community members to do effective research on seasteading-related topics. Each week, a volunteer moderator selects a research topic (we have a list of several, or you can come up with your own), facilitates a discussion, and does a wiki writeup of the results. You can sign up to be a moderator in the "Proposed" section of the program's wiki page.		2-8 hours each week
Presentation 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 give feedback on how they could be made more compelling.	Experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing, preferably with small non-profits.	2-5 hours
Media Coaching	As TSI gains momentum, we're getting lots of media exposure, which means lots of interviews for print, radio, and television. We'd like somebody who could review transcripts and recordings of our media interactions and suggest techniques for being maximally effective and compelling in these contexts.	Professional media coaching experience	2-4 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
Sunnyvale-area Workshop Space	We need a workshop to construct seasteading technology prototypes, including small platforms. The space needs to be not very far from Sunnyvale, CA, be around 250 square feet or more (that's about a two-car garage), have power and lighting, and have vehicle access. An accessible toilet and sink within a block or so are needed as well. Phone and internet are plusses. An indoor space would be most effective since it would provide shelter from weather, but an outdoor space could work as well if there's a shed to store tools and such, and if there aren't concerns about damage to grass.
Constitutional/Legal Systems For Seasteads	How might new governments on seastead communities function? What rights will individuals have, and how far will powers of new governments extend? These questions will ultimately only be answered by new communities as they form, but exploring and documenting the implications of various systems might help some of those communities get off on the right foot. It can also increase public awareness now of what this new world will have to offer. We're looking for individuals who want to self-organize into researching and documenting this in a more formal manner.		Varies
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
Bay Area Seasteading Social Hosts	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 for limited coordination, and to attend the social itself
Regional Associates	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 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.