Blog

Dominique Roddier’s presentation on Clubstead Engineering from the second annual Seasteading Conference is now available online:

Eelco Hoogendoorn’s talk entitled “Seastead Engineering Overview” is now available:

## The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter ##

>_We ought to avail ourselves of the sea, building floating cities on it so that we can move southward or northward according to the time of year….

We’ve completed our analysis of the responses to our community strategy survey, [originally posted here](http://www.seasteading.org/interact/forums/community/feedback-tsi/survey-feedback-wanted-accelerated-strategy-options). Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond!

A friend of mine from college, a mechanical engineer (and one of the most brilliant engineers I know), has been researching ocean wind energy systems. We’ve been discussing his ideas, and some of his thoughts on the industry are worth sharing (emphasis added):

> At the DC offshore renewable energy (electricity from waves, tides and currents) conference, I found that only a COUPLE outfits (namely OpenHydro and Pelamis) were actaully getting anywhere besides just talking and burning up grant money. They had real hardware being demonstrated and ordered by utilities.

Here at TSI, we’ve been thinking a lot about how to improve our strategy. We recently published a [strategy document](http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dck5q6sr_12cqrdxrf2) and a [vision timeline](http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dck5q6sr_11fcftn966), but these are only the beginning, covering things at a very high level.

We also want results sooner. Our current timeline & strategy describe modest achievements — a prototype seastead built, a successful ocean-based business operating — by the end of 2010. We’ve been thinking in recent weeks that we can, and want to, do better.

#### Reports

The [ClubStead](http://www.seasteading.org/strategic-areas/engineering/clubstead) page has been significantly expanded as the executive summary has been replaced by a series of 7 reports covering a variety of engineering topics.

Alexia sent us a text document with answers to all 19 of the questions from the February YayBoo list. I have added it to the [ClubStead engineering hub](http://www.seasteading.org/strategic-areas/engineering/clubstead#QnA), to which I also added a table of contents, as it is getting quite long.

As a reminder, we also posted [the webcast video](http://www.justin.tv/seasteading/all). It is quite boring and the sound is not good, so I really can’t recommend trying to watch it.

With the release of all the engineering documents on our [ClubStead page](http://www.seasteading.org/strategic-areas/engineering/clubstead), lots of questions have come up. For example, some people have pointed out that the topside weight and platform load are incompatible, and that there are negative airgaps in some of the big wave scenarios.

We believe strongly in the virtues of transparency, which is why we released the engineering information as soon as we could – right after the patent was filed – even though it isn’t complete.