A guest post from TSI co-founder Wayne Gramlich about his vision for the evolution of seastead communities:

My model for a seastead community is that it will grow and evolve along the same lines of Venice, Italy. Venice started off as 118 small shallow islands off the coast of Italy. In the beginning, passage between the islands was via small boats. Over time these islands became fully populated and interconnected via bridges. I expect a seastead community to follow a similar evolutionary path.

While it would be wonderful to have a fully interconnected seastead city at the outset, basic economics dictate that an initial seastead community will start off as a heterogeneous collection of individual seasteads. These seasteads will range from sailboats, old converted cargo ships, ocean going yachts, and purpose built seasteads. The purpose built seasteads will range from small to medium and eventually to quite large. The small seasteads will be short and squat and relatively low to the ocean surface. The more expensive and comfortable seasteads will extend upwards from the sea surface to reduce interaction with large waves. Eventually, large elevated surfaces along the lines of Mini-Float, Float, Inc., or VersaBuoy will become available. The larger structures will be either be bolted together or interconnected via bridges.

Our first annual conference will be Friday, October 10th, at Embassy Suites in Burlingame, CA.  There will also be a reception Thursday evening (10/9), and an informal breakfast Saturday morning (10/11).

I have just enabled a feed for all comments on the site.  Most importantly, this will include all replies to forum messages, so you can keep track of all the forums with a single feed.  I'm not sure if it also contains initial forum posts, but if not, you can get them with this feed.

 With my injured shoulder, work has been slow this month.

• Community
  • Publicity
    • Political Animals radio/podcast interview (libertarian-oriented interview w/ Patri)
    • Rude Awakening radio show (short and not very favorable.  Can't win 'em all.)
    • Yachting Magazine
  • Conference - We have tentatively settled on Friday October 10th, at Embassy Suites by SFO (with some Thu evening / Sat morning stuff).  The cost will probably be in the $100-$175 range (with meals, not counting hotel room).  It will be "unconference" style, with a few keynotes and the main focus being on brainstorming, researching, networking, etc.  You can semi-mark your calendars, but we will make a more formal announcement when we have signed a contract and made a deposit.
  • Volunteers - Thanks for all the additions to the Volunteer List Wiki page!  We will be contacting volunteers over the coming weeks.
  • Seastead socials - We're thinking about having get-togethers in the Bay Area every 4-6 weeks, just general brainstorming/networking/keeping the enthusiasm going over drinks sort of thing.  We'll announce that here when it gets going.
• Engineering
  • We are hiring a local offshore engineering firm to do high-level structure conceptual design, and perhaps numerical modeling, simulation, and wave tank testing of some promising designs.
• Research - Nada

Vince Cate has written an excellent wiki page on Migration:

Imagine each seastead uses a kite and sea anchor to move in a big circle around the Sargasso Sea once each year. The currents are almost fast enough to do this, so even a slow seastead can probably make it. I am thinking Anguilla, Bermuda, Azores, back to Anguilla. We could time it so that we were in the North-Eastern half of this loop to avoid the hurricane season in the South-West and then in the South-Western half of the loop to avoid the cold stormy season in the North-Atlantic. With computers controlling the kites and sea anchors I think we can move at the right speed to make this happen. I think if we checked historical information that doing this you would never have had to face even a 30 foot wave in the last 100+ years. Designing/building for 30 foot waves is much easier than designing/building for 100 foot waves, so this type of migration could make the seasteads much more affordable.

 This question is common enough that it is in our FAQ (although buying land and taking over an entire country are answered together - should fix that).  Adam from the Floatingman Island project, recently said:

While the anarchist author Hakim Bey's visions are different from our own in many ways, there are strong similarities as well.  For example, Wikipedia says:

The concept of TAZ was first put into practice on a large scale by the Cacophony Society in what they called Trips to the Zone, or Zone Trips. One of their Zone Trips gave birth to Black Rock City, AKA the Burning Man Festival, an annual TAZ that many believe maintained its defining autonomy for about seven years, at which time it ceased being functional anarchy, and became a "do-ocracy" run by BMorg, a corporation. 

Since Burning Man is one of our influences, Hakim Bey and his TAZs thus represent part of our ideological ancestry.  While he is best known for his writings about Temporary Autonomous Zones, in this piece he shares a few thoughts on Permanent TAZs.

We think one of the most promising initial business models for a seastead is as an offshore resort: "Las Vegas on the ocean, but with less rules" is the sound bite.  (Of course, there will be many other differences, such as radical self-government and experimentation with new ways of getting along - this is just about the business model).  One natural concern people have is whether such a business can give rise to a diverse economy and a full city, with schools, doctors, libraries, etc.  This is also related to the "Would you really want to live in a wretched hive of scum and villainy?" question we sometimes get.

Las Vegas shows that such a path is quite realistic, since it started as a gambling outpost, and became the fasting-growing city in America.  Sure, the tourists were transient, but the successful resort industry created construction and service jobs.  Those jobs brought in a local population that wanted all the diverse goods and services that are standard in our economy, which meant lots of other jobs.  Also, over time the resort industry led to a population of retirees, who were there for a permanent vacation.

Those retirees who like the glitzy Strip (and can afford it) go there, while others go to cheaper locals dives.  And while the resorts may be built on gambling, the neighborhoods look much like those in any other city.  We will seek to similarly parlay seastead tourism and retirement into a flourishing local economy.

Just because a city thrives on low regulation and "sin industries" doesn't mean it won't be a nice place to live.

Sorry for the lack of new content lately, I'm still recovering from my injury.  To make sure you don't forget about us, check out Seasteading: engineering the long tail of nations, an Ars Technica piece on us from earlier this week.

My right arm got overly excited by this whole microstate concept earlier today, and seceded from its socket.  While it has been forcibly reunited with its fatherland, it was weakened by the attempted rebellion, and as a result I'm going to be a one handed typist for a week or three.  Obviously this means you should expect less blogging and not much in the way of replying to emails.  I may pass off some projects to other people in the interim, we'll see.  Hopefully I can find some good typing-less work to do, like catching up on some background reading.  

 Main areas this week - pictures, conference, volunteers, wiki.

As I was falling asleep and visualizing breakwaters (design, manufacture, and deployment thereof), I thought about how my favored breakwater design works by making the waves pile up and break (as opposed to being a wall that breaks the waves).  And suddenly I realized that, if it was deployed in a circle to protect a seastead colony...it would be a never-ending surf break!

Check out Topsider Homes, builder of Hurricane-Proof homes in the southeastern US:

They are trying to solve a similar problem, and came up with a similar solution to us, which is good to see.

I got the link via Vince Cate's great wavebreak page.  Vince has been testing floating breakwater designs in Anguilla, and I'm pretty sure he's done the most hands-on work so far, so good for him!  One of the tricky things about breakwaters is that it isn't always clear how their behavior scales, as discussed on the forums.  We're going to start talking to / hiring professional consultants in the coming weeks to flesh out our designs, so perhaps we can learn more about model testing from them.