photo courtesy of Anthony Ling
This series will feature guest blog posts from think tank leaders around the world. This month, we’ll learn about the work and experiences of the Seasteading Institute, written by Patri Friedman. This week we follow the Seasteading Institute as they prepare for their upcoming conference, and put together their 5-year business plan. Check out past Think Tank Diary entries here.
Wow, it’s been a busy week! Crunch time for the Seasteading Conference and Ephemerisle, both of which have had various last-minute issues requiring significant attention. No matter how much you plan, you have to be ready to roll with the punches.
Monday…was too long ago, I’ve forgotten. Last Tuesday night was the second test presentation of “The Seasteading Institute: Past, Present, and Future” to get feedback before the conference. I gave it along with James Hogan, my right-hand man, to a small mixed audience of staff, volunteers, friends, and another ED. The ED gave us awesome feedback about how terrible my visual design was – wasting half of every slide with repetitive logos and titles. “It looks like you have some nice images, but I can’t really see them when they are so small”, she said politely.
This presentation has been a lot of work because we aren’t just writing a presentation – we’re crafting our plan for the next 5 years at the same time, in order to present a rough version at the conference for feedback from our community. We got some good ideas at the session on how to make the plan simpler and more appealing.
Wednesday I spent the morning ripping through the presentation transforming it into a feat for the eyes, letting huge pictures of medical ships and the winners of our Seastead Design Contest shine (see one photo above). Wow, it looks so much better! During the afternoon, I brainstormed for my opening keynote, listing ideas of points to hit and trying to find common themes.
Thursday was more exciting than I might have wished. For background, our office space is donated by a Palo Alto startup that our Chairman co-founded. We’re in their new building, which is still under development. Good news is we have a big building in a prime location all to ourselves right now. Bad news is, it doesn’t always work right. We were on a tense conference call with our lawyers (one of those last-minute issues), during which James plugged his MacBook into the ethernet jack in the conference room. 15 seconds later, it abruptly shut down. So I plugged my MacBook in. The same thing happened. We finished the call, and tried to boot our computers. His booted – but the ethernet no longer worked. And mine was now dead. I didn’t know that ethernet ports could do that – and wow, was this ever not the time for this to happen!
Fortunately with the help of the local Apple Store and a friend who works there, I was able to transplant my hard drive into a new laptop that evening, and didn’t lose any work, but it was a very stressful occurrence. The rest of the evening was better – with my wife Shannon, son Tovar, and a Stanford film student doing a documentary on us along for the ride, I went to the airport. There (while being filmed), we picked up Eelco is going to do some engineering volunteer work for TSI. As he’s a volunteer, we’re putting him up in our house.
Friday and the weekend went by in a blur of talk revision and practicing, packing for the conference, and tying up a variety of loose ends. Now it’s Sunday night and almost time to execute on all this great work we’ve done preparing! Tomorrow our usual 3-5 staff + volunteers will be augmented in the office by at least a dozen volunteers, speakers and conference attendees hanging out for the day and helping finish the prep (and polish their own talks!). We’re using the opportunity of having our board in town (most of whom are speaking at our conference) for a board meeting. In the evening we’ll all head to San Francisco for the opening reception. I’ll let you know how it went next week!
Best of luck on the conference! If any of you have suggestions or share similar experiences, please share them in the comments! Join us next Monday for the next installment of the Seasteading Institute’s Diary. If you are interested in becoming the next Think Tank Diarist please contact Cindy Cerquitella.
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This is an interesting narrative. Had wish you success in your five years plan.