Welcome to The Seasteading Institute’s March Newsletter! We had a ton of press coverage this month, have lots of new volunteers, and a number of key projects are moving along.
[Community][]
- [Membership Program][] – This will launch on April 15th (TSI’s 1-year anniversary), along with our 2008 Annual Report. Expect a special mid-month mailing about these!
- Design Contest – Deadline is May 1st, and already several submissions so far. Lots of interest from the blogosphere.
Website / Social Networks
- [Community][] stats for March – Feb stats in (). We’re very excited at the massive growth in our mailing list, which more than doubled this month thanks to traffic from the CNN story.
- www.seasteading.org: 1639 registered users (1067)
- Mailing List: 828 (318)
- Facebook Group: 462 (330)
- LJ: 38 (36)
- Website migrated to a new host which is faster and more reliable. Statistics:
- Again, our 2nd best traffic month ever, beating Jan/Feb and only exceeded by last May’s slashdot/gizmodo/etc.
- March daily averages: 2900 visits (2400), 14k pages (11k), 180k hits (102K).
- Over 500 people a day found our website by googling for some variant of seasteading or seasteading institute, indicating that our many offline news stories are driving significant traffic.
- Blog(s)
:
- We are about to spin off our first “sister blog”, Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, for discussion of the political theory around seasteading and similar topics which increase the size and competition in the governing industry. We think that a separate blog, especially with a more general topic area, should be able to take on a life of its own and bring a wider audience to seasteading. Patri and Catallarchy founder Jonathan Wilde will be the initial authors, with Mike Gibson as the editor. Content will be going up this week.
- ResidenSea…stead: Ships Revisited – A long post analyzing condo cruise ships as a business model for early seasteads.
- Revising TSI’s Mission Statement – Comment/discuss here.
- Update on Poseidon Underwater Resort
- Trip thoughts, ideas, comments – A bunch of miscellaneous ideas based on discussions on Patri’s March trip.
- How Rich Countries Die – Political theory from Mancur Olson which is quite relevant to seasteading.
In-person GTGs
- Socials – in addition to the usual Bay Area, we had meetups in Manhattan and Boston as part of Patri’s traveling.
- March Bay Area social – ~25 people, talked about sailing club and ocean engineering study group.
- March NYC social – 25 people.
- March Boston social – 7 people.
- April Bay Area Social – We’ll probably do this one indoors, but May we will do something outside like Kayaking or Shoreline Lake.
- Conferences
- Second Annual Seasteading Conference – Planning continues. Mark your calendars for Sep. 28-30 (Mo evening, full day Tuesday, Wed through dinner, location TBD).
- First Ephemerisle Festival – Planning continues, we are building a website and researching the location. Mark your calendars for Fri Oct. 2 – Sun Oct 4 (in the Sacremento River Delta).
- Talks / Conferences, all are open to the public:
- March
- 2009/03/07 – New Hampshire Liberty Forum – 50 attendees.
- 2009/03/04 – Yale University – 30 attendees.
- April – As the list this month is so long, only date and city are noted, please go to the TSI Calendar of event webpage for exact location and other details. Note that the calendar is in PST time zone, but each event lists the local time in the details.
- London, UK, Tuesday March 31 6PM-8PM, Adam Smith Institute.
- Durham, UK, Wed. April 1 – Fri April 3. The State of Sovereignty: 20th anniversary conference. Attending, not speaking (probably not open to public).
- Hamburg, Germany, Saturday, April 4.
- Copenhagen, Denmark, Sunday April 5. 4PM local time, hosted by CEPOS.
- Washington DC, USA, April 7, noon. Cato Policy Forum Talk
- University of Virginia, USA, Tue April 7th, 7:30PM
- George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, April 8th 4PM.
- Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Thu April 9, 6PM.
- San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA, Monday April 13th, 4:30PM. Patri’s first local Bay Area talk since Convergence last November.
- Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) Northern California, Wed. April 15th. Not open to public.
- March
Basia: Press / Awareness Report
March has been quite a month here at The Seasteading Institute. We received a lot of press, started some new initiatives and we are happy we are getting more and more people interested in Seasteading.
Social Media & Community Relations
- Our Facebook supporters are growing in numbers. As of now we have 443 members in our FB group and 80 fans on our new Seasteading Facebook Page .
- We also started a new Twitter (@Seasteading ) feed to keep all of our supporters and followers up to date on current inititaitives here at Seasteading. In a very short time we already have 89 followers!
Press Coverage
CNN article . Great coverage. Many other media outlets picked up and ran this story too. Although they got the timeline wrong, as we clarified in our blog.- ABC radio (Australia), Life on the ocean wave, Antony Funnell interviews Patri Friedman.
- CNN radio podcast – this piece has been in the works for some time now and it’s finally out. Listen to Patri talking about Seasteading!
- “The Sunday Times” article “Welcome aboard a new country”. Very interesting piece and large circulation. We couldn’t be more happy for this coverage.
- Blogs (selected by audience size + post contentfulness):
- Even at Sea, No Water for Me! from the evangelical outpost.
- Seastead Design Competition from BLDG blog.
