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	Special qualifications	Estimated time	Target completion date
Volunteer Coordination Help	We have lots of people who are interested in volunteering with TSI, but we need to find them and make sure we've got productive tasks ready to go for people who are willing to help out. We could use many levels of help here, from assistants who could help manage things like this wiki page and volunteer postings, to experienced managers who could help recruit for and manage large projects.		3 hours per week
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.	2-5 hours/week	n/a (ongoing role)
Website Product Manager	Work with Patri Friedman, TSI's Executive Director, to brainstorm and prioritize feature requests, come up with more detailed written requirements, and work with other volunteers to implement those plans		3-5 hours per week	n/a (ongoing role)
Website Volunteer Coordinator	Coordinate efforts of multiple volunteers who help with the website: - Track status and outstanding dependencies - Make sure all necessary communication is happening between volunteers - Help recruit volunteers	Project management experience a plus	3-6 hours per week	n/a (ongoing role)

Moderate Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time	Target completion date
Website Publicity Associate	You would manage our website's 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)
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	n/a (ongoing role)
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	Q4 2008
2009 Conference Volunteers	We need some organizers for our 2009 annual conference! 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 (could be split among multiple people)	June 2009
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)
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. Basically, this entails working with Patri Friedman 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.	Experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing, preferably with small non-profits.	2-5 hours	Jan 2009
Media Coaching	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	Jan/Feb 2009
Build Press Kit	We want to create a digital press kit containing softcopies of general TSI information, press releases, past news articles, high resolution images, and so on.		3-5 hours	Q4 2008
Small Drupal Projects	There are lots of small Drupal development projects that could benefit the website. 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.		5-20 hours	Jan/Feb 2009
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.	Community management experience is a plus	2-4 hours per week	n/a (ongoing role)
Establish Scientific Advisory Board	Our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) will consist of subject matter experts from a variety of scientific fields related to seasteading. We want someone to help us define the size/scope/function of the SAB, identify and recruit members, and act as the liaison.	Not quite sure what types of experience would be most relevant (besides having done the same thing before). Some experience with academia, nonprofits, volunteer-based organizations.	10-30 hours	Jan/Feb 2009
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	n/a (ongoing)
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.			Jan/Feb 2009
Recruit A Volunteer	Find a friend who can help with one of our volunteer tasks! There's obviously a wide variety of expertise that we need, and many projects have small time commitments. If you think you know someone who might be able to help, please speak to them and ask!
Grant Research	Help do research, under our guidance, to find grants which TSI might be good candidates for.		3-5 hours	Jan/Feb 2009
Grant Applications	Work with us to help draft grant applications for TSI.	Prior experience applying for grants is helpful.	5-10 hours	Jan/Feb 2009
Academic Outreach	We'd like to establish relationships with members of academia who are interested in our cause. This project entails finding (via online research, for example) professors or other individuals who might fit the bill. It could also involve helping contact them to encourage their own involvement, the involvement of their classes, or just to create awareness.		5-10 hours per person	In full swing by Jan/Feb 2009

Some Urgency

Project/Role	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time	Target completion date
Weekly Research Topic Moderators	Our Weekly 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
Website Marketing Consultant	The website content could use some revisions to make the idea of seasteading seem more understandable and appealing, particularly to a broader audience. A pretty good assessment is here. There are a number of volunteer projects in this vein; this one targets website content.	Experience designing inspiring/sticky marketing, preferably with small non-profits.	5-10 hours	Q1 2009
Small GIS projects	We have some small GIS projects for the website as well. For example: A Google Maps mashup showing where our registered users are from.	GIS development experience	10-30 hours	Q1 2009
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	2009
Supporting Blogger	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)
Second Life Seasteading Socials Organizer	We're considering doing 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 a meeting place 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	5-10 hours to help organize the first social, plus attend the social itself	December 2008
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 to assist with planning and attend the social itself	January 2009
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.
Schwag Master	Handle seastead-themed merchandise. Work with volunteer designers to make designs, sell them in online stores, etc.		2-4 hours/week
Schwagster	Create graphic designs that can be used for seastead-themed merchandise (t-shirts, etc.)		Varies

Lower Urgency

Project/Role	Urgency (1-3, 1=high, 3=some)	Description	Special qualifications	Estimated time	Target completion date
Your Own Idea	Have an idea how you could help that's not on this list? Drop us a line at volunteers@seasteading.org with your ideas and relevant experience.
Top 10 Reasons To Live On A Seastead	Add clever/funny suggestions to our list of Top 10 Reasons To Live On A Seastead, and vote on existing suggestions. We are printing a t-shirt based on this list, and will revise the t-shirt as the list changes.