I think I'm going to depart LJ; I could use one less website to incessantly check. :-)

See y'all on FB or in person.

patrissimo & I are looking to hire a combo personal assistant (for us) and administrative assistant (for The Seasteading Institute). The job listing is up on craigslist:

Full-time personal assistant needed to help us change the world! (mountain view)

If you know anyone who might be a good fit, please point them our way!

Ephemerisle 2010 tickets are now on sale! Get 'em before they run out...

I'm going to Fusion for the first time in a few weeks. Fusion is a personal development/goal-setting retreat which a couple of friends put on one weekend every year.

Part of the prep for Fusion is to fill out a pretty extensive personal profile about your background and goals. I just finished mine. If any of y'all happen to be interested in a really detailed snapshot into where my mind's at these days, here it is.

TSI has a new intern, Tony (Facebook profile) who's coming to work with us at the beginning of June. He's going to be in the Bay Area for a couple of months and is looking for a cheap room (or sofa) to rent. He's a man of simple needs, mainly needs a space to crash. Somewhere near Sunnyvale, or near a CalTrain stop.

We have only met via videoconference, but he seems really cool and everyone on the TSI team who talked with him clicked well.

If you know of any opportunities, please drop him a Facebook note and let him know!

Danielle and I are heading up to Tahoe NEXT Friday night (3/26). Anyone have a 4WD vehicle they'd be willing to trade with me for the weekend? I have a convertible Mustang you can use! And am happy to pay some standard rate for mileage on the Tahoe trip.

What is a website that attempts to provide balanced, bullet-point summaries of the different sides of controversial issues? I want a quick way to come up to speed on the state of debates I am unfamiliar with. Something like this must exist...

Very cool. :-)

link

I really held out against getting cable internet for a while, because speeds weren't guaranteed, and also because Comcast has such a fucking horrible reputation.

But... just got it installed. Speed tests are literally over 10x faster for downloads. Over 15x for uploads.

We'll see how volatile that is over time, but... wow. It's a very different experience.

(Other Ephemerisle coverage here: link)

Random stream-of-consciousness thoughts, crasch-style, on Ephemerisle...

Amazing experience. I thought it would be good, and worth the effort, but it was much more so than I thought it would be.

Loved the sense of community. It was so strong. The platform was kind of a clusterfuck for 2/3 of the event, relative to our plan -- but people adapted, and solving problems became a key part of the experience instead of something to detract from it. Danger said it felt like the early years of Burning Man -- that was great to hear. A very promising sign.

If the platform had gone much longer without getting finished, it probably would not have worked. It came together just in time to avoid really crippling the event, I think.

Next year, Patri and I are talking about doing the conference one weekend (Fri-Sun), Monday off, Tue-Wed as Eph build days, and Thu-Sunday as event days. We're also talking about doing it further west in the Delta (as opposed to the Bay), in a section wide enough where we could get permission to anchor away from shore. We came to these conclusions independently over the weekend and it seems to be what everyone else wants as well...

More attendee projects (boats, platforms, art) than I'd expected. Even a couple I didn't know about beforehand. So cool.

Ephemerisle can be bigger than Burning Man... at least in terms of world impact. In terms of raw size, it is hard to say. If we ever succeed in getting out into international waters, the cost of attendance will be so high, it's hard to imagine getting 50,000 people. But I could imagine several Ephemerisle festivals spread throughout the world, many thousands of people each, spreading the idea of seasteading and creating people who are passionate about contributing to the movement in one way or another.

People who are affected by Burning Man always say, "it's a shame the real world isn't more like that." With Ephemerisle, there is an existing movement dedicated to making the world "more like that"! You don't just have to lament about leaving the magic of the event behind, you can contribute to a cause that has a plausible (if challenging) plan for actually disseminating that through human society. This isn't to say that the long-term vision for seasteading is a giant Ephemerisle festival; a festival is a short time window for celebration and consumption, whereas a sustainable society needs to also focus on production and long-term concerns. But some of the magic can be brought into the default world in terms of increased freedom.

Working with Chicken has been crazy. Natalie said before connecting us that "one can't manage Chicken," and there is a lot of truth to that. Our styles are very different, I like to do lots of planning and make things predictable and he is all about improvisation. And is strong-willed. And yells (usually nicely) a lot. Pretty amazing to see in action, though, he has a very different leadership style than I've been exposed to before (adapted to a type of work which I am not usually involved in), and I think I learned a lot from watching him...

They just got the last platform out of the water this evening. That's like a week of labor for teardown. Those guys really poured a lot of work into things.

Loved seeing Holley playing the cello, people using Matt's achievement lounge, seasteaders mixing with burners and other artists...

Actually spent most of Thursday - Saturday pretty goddamn stressed, about either (a) law enforcement shutting us down, or (b) someone seriously hurting themselves, e.g. due to a structure failure. If the sheriff, say, shut us down early Saturday, the event probably would have died -- it would have been a flop, TSI's reputation crippled, and community reception to any re-attempt very lukewarm, if it happened at all. That was all on my shoulders, and though I was doing all that I could to reduce those risks, there was only so much I could do. They were much higher than I would have liked for this first year. Was constantly worried about that.

One of the biggest challenges for next year is how to make the event safe. People just don't understand the ways in which water is dangerous; we saw this over and over. I don't mean to suggest that I understand all the ways; I learned a little bit, largely what I don't know. If we did next year the same as this year, we will have structures built by people who don't understand the water, being used by people who don't understand the water. Something may fail, and if it does, people without lifejackets who aren't comfortable swimming will find themselves in the water. Maybe this happens while someone is sleeping. Scary.

I would like to have a way of just helping inform people of the risks, and then they can decide what level of risk they want to take on. It's their own life. Unfortunately, as long as we are doing this in a society which doesn't recognize this sort of self-responsibility, we will probably need to enforce additional safety restrictions to successfully handle the liability and law relationship issues.

A bit of clarification is good. I think the odds of anyone dying at Ephemerisle were quite low. But if they were 1%, for example, that's way too high, especially for an event with about 100 people.

It was great to have Rebecca and Mikolaj helping with the safety watch. They were both extremely competent and gave me a sense of ease... allowed me to get some sleep. You guys were awesome.

We had about 125 attendees or so this year. This was with starting promotion very late, and very disorganized. Had we had another 3-4 months of building this up, I think we could have gotten 300-500 people easy. For 2010, we'll have not only lots of promotion time, but a track record of a very successful first year, with a passionate community spurring things on. I don't think it's a stretch to recruit 1000 attendees next year. I also think that's too much growth in one year to keep things safe and fun. It might strain the community bonds too if we grow too fast. We will need to pick a target number, and adjust our pricing and promotion strategies to hit that. Maybe 400-500?

It seemed like everyone pitched in. Really, everyone. And often in non-trivial ways -- "sure, I'll spend five hours going back to the marina and buliding a bridge Friday night." It wasn't hard to find volunteers for that.

Paul was awesome. Two houseboats, full-time ferry service... Christine nominated him for the community service award of the year. Hell yeah!

So cool to see so many seasteaders I knew. I'd been chatting with a great deal of attendees, even briefly over e-mail, in the weeks leading up to the event, so I was putting faces with names everywhere I turned. My only disappointment was that I didn't get to meet more of them.

Apocaisle -- man you guys went all out. I'm sure you learned a lot about how to build a project like this. I really admire the passion and gusto with which y'all dived into this. Don't forget to figure out how you're going to get the thing from shore to the event next time. :-)

My strong suit is in organization and leadership, it was great to be able to contribute to a creative event in this capacity. I kinda suck with building stuff and tapping my creativity, so I haven't done much in this regard with past BM projects. I would really like to start exploring that this next year for BM. for Eph, my contribution will probably continue to be organizational / leadership, and I think I'm OK with that.

When I left PayPal, I spent a very long time (2 years?) trying to find a job I liked. I had all these criteria, like "huge positive world impact," "working with people I like," " very flexible schedule," "opportunity to lead larger and larger groups", and "lots of visceral, creative fun." I thought of endless ideas that fit some subset of those categories... but suddenly after this past weekend have realized that I've found(/created?) a job that has all of them. We are a small startup, with (longshot but) huge, huge growth and impact potential, a plausible plan for really making shit happen, I'm an early leader in the company, AND a big part of my job now involves creating a fucking floating art festival. How the hell did that happen?

I tried to volunteer at the BM LLC after PayPal and was disappointed that I never found an in. Now I am creating a new event, only one that has an even bolder vision and purpose behind it, and I'm getting paid (sorta :-) for it. Really?... shiny.

Really great seeing so many good friends there having a really wonderful time. I really didn't expect so many friends to go. I thought it would be a much more niche seasteading / art community thing the first year. 6 weeks ago, we were hoping for 50+ people so that it wouldn't be a flop.

I haven't talked about the conference much, but that was awesome too, and I liked the pairing of theoretical conference followed by a festival of action and celebration. It is a lot to do in one week, but is totally doable with sufficient advance planning -- which we will definitely do next year.

Now we just need to go raise some money.