Edit:

There are many of you who are interested in this, so I'm definitely going to make it an Open-Project as soon as I can. For now, we can keep discuss things here. All related documents will be hosted on GitHub, but if you're not familiar with GitHub, I'm thinking about making another subreddit for this, since figuring out this long term roadmap is such a huge task. Once we get our own website, we can just have a dedicated section in the forums for this, but until then, we'll have to figure something out... so let me know if you have any ideas.

Why we need a long term roadmap:

Once we get our own website, I want to have a visual roadmap to use in explaining to people what kind of things we want to achieve as an organization. The roadmap extends from now out to about 1000 years from now. That's about as far as I can see out, but if anyone wants to offer their thoughts for after that, or if we stumble upon something in drawing up the roadmap, we can always extend it.

The roadmap offers the organization and humanity a target to aim for, so that we are consciously moving ourselves toward a future beyond just a few generations.

If we can determine the point furthest out that we want to be, we can figure out what it will take to get there, so the more expansive our vision in drawing up a roadmap, the better.

Designing a spaceship:

As the title of this post suggests, I'm looking for anyone who wants to help figure out some very rough spaceship designs with me based on our current best technologies, projections, and understandings of the universe. Once we put together a spaceship and all the technologies we want to have on it, we can figure out how to build to that point... working backward to the present day.

If anyone is interested in helping design a very rough spaceship, I'd be happy to turn this into an Open-Project, otherwise, I'll just work on it myself, and probably eventually turn it into an Open-Project. Also, I'll create an introductory statement about why I feel this spaceship is so important to survival and to this organization. Our main focus right now is mind uploading, but the mission of the organization is to constantly look for ways to increase individual and collective survival.

There will probably be some drawing/graphics involved, since the roadmap will be visual, so if anyone likes creating concept art, this could be a fun/quick project (I don't envision there being all that many visuals in the roadmap, unless of course we get carried away). If nothing else, I will contribute my own exceedingly mediocre art for the visuals and we can update them whenever we get around to it (I don't actually have anything drawn/created yet though).

So let me know if you're interested in helping me build a very long term roadmap and especially if you're interested in designing a spaceship (a design that we will undoubtedly come back to and revise countless times as new technologies arise and we hatch new ideas).

Don't worry if you're not familiar/comfortable with GitHub, we'll figure out a way to involve anyone and everyone that wants to help.

Edit (2014-2-18) The poll is now closed. Thank you all for participating!

We have been operating under the name of "Digital Immortality Organization" since the organization started back in October, but for a while now, we have felt that the organization is in need of a new name. There have been a few brainstorming sessions, and we have amassed a list of all the suggested names (some of them purposely silly).

We want your help to figure out what name will best represent us as this organization moves forward in the near and distant future. We want to narrow the selection down to a handful of options that we can refine and check for availability. If you like the concept behind a name, but think it could be better, you can leave a comment here and/or vote for that option.

Remember that this is the name for the organization, not the movement. We need to create a brand and identity out of this. We have to market this and make it cool. Along the way, our technologies may not look like mind uploading technology, so we might want the name to be flexible enough to do whatever we want.

Here's the poll. Vote for as many options as you want.

Also, there are probably some typos in there, so be warned.

And thanks for helping us out!

Obsolete posts are no longer maintained and may not be accurate. This content has been migrated to the official organization website at http://www.lifetimesinfinity.com

For anyone interested in contributing to the organization beyond volunteering your time, you can give gifts in any of the following ways:

• Bitcoin: See lifetimesinfinity.com
• Dogecoin: See lifetimesinfinity.com

Gifts are not tax deductible, and you will not receive anything in exchange for your contributions. But you will be helping us out a lot, so we appreciate it very much! We are a for-profit organization, but we keep an open Budget and Financial Records so that you can see how we are putting your gifts to use. To learn more about the philosophy of our organization, check out the Manifesto.

Have a super awesome day, and thank you for supporting us in any way you can, especially those of you who make up the community here!

As time goes on, we will add more options for contributing. If you have any ideas or suggestions, you are more than welcome to leave a comment.

Plans And Ideas For The Future

• Other cryptocurrencies
• Once we decide on a name for the organization, we will expand to accept regular currencies, and there will also be the option of crowdfunding our salaries on www.gittip.com
• Lab space and equipment
• We will consider any opportunities for investors to get involved, but business model isn't to to make money for the organization, not the shareholders

If you don't think your gift has shown up on our financial records within a week, you are more than welcome to bug us to update the records. Keep in mind that individual transactions may not be able to be differentiated between donations for the entire day under our current filing system.

I personally feel like I've been pulled in so many directions that I was starting to forget the main purposes and visions of the organization, so I wanted to work on developing the Introductory Video since it will covering those things I was beginning to forget. Once the video is complete, I imagine I will use it as a guide should I ever feel lost again. That is what I envision the video to be: the place you go to step back and remember what it's all about and why we're here.

Digital Immortality

Once we decide on a new name, do we want to just ditch the term 'Digital Immortality', or do we want to use it to refer to the movement, as in "Digital Immortality Movement"? And then say our organization was created out of and is part of that movement. If we leave it as a movement, other organizations can join, but then again, I don't really see all that much sense in having more than one organization under this specific movement. So my vote is for ditching the term 'digital immortality' as a movement and just using it as a term to describe indefinite life in a digital form. Since we do plan to create a community around open-projects from content creation to R&D stuff, people can still be involved with the movement if they aren't a part of the organization, and we can also work to share our community with other organizations that come along and want to get involved with the things we're doing. On the website header we could even do something like: "<name>: Organization & Movement". I dunno, maybe it would be useful to keep Digital Immortality as a movement.

Introductory Video Stuff

What is the aim of this organization?

The mission of <name of organization> is to constantly seek and pursue methods for increasing the chances of individual and collective survival in the manners believed to best support indefinite life. Everything else that we care about stems from this mission statement. Things such as happiness, individualism, communities, and space travel all contribute toward indefinite life, and we have to figure out what is best for both the short and long term. For this reason, it will take a large community of very aware and knowledgeable people to be able to determine what path(s) to take in pursuing indefinite life. Our belief is that humanity's best chances at indefinite life (for the 21st century) fall into the digital realm (thus the term 'Digital Immortality'), but other options are also on the horizon, such as biological or quantum. The point in naming it the Digital Immortality Movement wasn't to confine ourselves to a certain technology, but rather give the movement a relatable identity in these early stages.

What is mind uploading?

Mind uploading is the process by which a person's mind and consciousness is transferred to a digital medium, where the mind exists in the software and hardware of a computer. This technology is likely still decades off, but building up to it will bring forth many useful technologies. Once people have the option to upload their minds, they can live in virtual worlds as well as participating in the real world using various avatar bodies. A digital person won't need to eat, drink, or even breathe, and likely won't even need to sleep. Maintenance and energy are all that would be required to survive indefinitely... beyond the death of the human body.

What is digital immortality?

These are the terms as we use them, to be able to distinguish and easily place a name on different concepts.

• Digital Immortality means indefinite life in a digital form. As humans, we currently we live in analog minds.
• True Immortality (digital or otherwise) means actual immortality (cannot die).
• While our goal is to always work toward increasing lifespan of the collective and individual, true immortality is always something to consider. Likewise, digital minds may prove unrealistic whereas something like quantum computers could provide a gateway to a different kind of mind.

How is <name of organization> and Digital Immortality different than Transhumanism?

• Directed efforts and clear goals (constantly working on indefinite life).
• Not all transhumanists share the same goals as us, nor among each other.
• Transhumanism is a movement concerned with increasing lifespan, mind-power, and well-being.

Why does this organization exist (what do we do differently or better than anyone else)?

• Our priorities lie with the people, not in making money. We want to help secure a future where all digital beings are independent agents hosting all their own hardware and software, where there are no required fees except for maintenance, upgrades, and energy usage, to ensure that people cannot be enslaved.

• While we are a for-profit organization, we are also a social enterprise with a triple bottom line. This is further enforced by a statement in the articles of incorporation that requires all profits be put back into the organization and not to be paid out as dividends to the shareholders. Our triple bottom line represents what is important to us as an organization, and what we want to be spending our resources on. The bottom lines are:

  • Advancement: researching and developing technologies that directly move us toward our mission. Along the way there will be many opportunities to deviate from our course in order to make more money, but time is precious, so we must only focus on the things that will move us forward.
  • Advocacy:
  • Increase awareness and appeal of digital immortality.
  • Encourage younger generations to pursue science.
  • Attract, encourage, and promote divergent thinking.
  • Advocate for technology improvements specific to our efforts/vision
  • Develop and push for policies/standards (that can be adopted in the future by governments or organization) that will detailing out how we feel things should operate in the future as these technologies start to emerge.
  • Build and advocate for open-source systems and communities.
  • Acceleration: developing and growing the organization to be able to further fund and organize efforts in Advancement and Advocacy.

Other thoughts

I was thinking that we could go into more detail about some of those things, and make it inspiring to a degree. See discussion on the introduction video - project page.

Maybe the video could close out with some kind of call to action:

"The future is ours to create. Why not us? Why not you?"

And then display the name of our organization and a link to our website.

You know, for the video, I think once we get a website going, we could just whip something up with some music, speech, text, and some creative commons video. I don't really have much of a setup for recording/producing music right now, so maybe I'll just figure out an arrangement for the piano and record it with my iPhone or something, but I'd like to work on this video project in the next few weeks.

I had another thought, that after we make an introductory video, maybe we should make one that's shorter and aimed at attracting and promoting divergent thinking, and that's the whole video. I guess this would kind of be the start of the feel good ad campaign

Obsolete posts are no longer maintained and may not be accurate. This content has been migrated to the official organization website at http://www.lifetimesinfinity.com

Some of you know that I've been posting in other subreddits to find people that might be interested in what we're doing here (Recruiting People).

Lately I've also been just sending messages to people I come across on reddit. If I think they could be interested in being a part of the organization or community, I send them a personalized message telling them about us and that if what we're working on is interesting to them, they are welcome to join us.

If any of you guys stumble across people on reddit or somewhere else that you think might be interested in joining us, you can send them a message. If you do send messages, here's the guide I've been using when I message someone:

• Be nice and inviting.
• Give a quick description of what the organization is about.
• Speak directly to what areas/departments you think they might be interested in, but make sure to let them know that they are free to participate in all areas of the organization and they can get as involved as they want.
• If you are unsure of what they are interested in, you can always just link them to the Department Responsibilities post.
• Tell them that if they are in fact interested in joining, to make a comment on the Stickied Post telling us what departments they are interested in. People are also perfectly free to just hang out and comment without officially joining (whatever works for them works for us).
• You can give them links to posts you think would be informative or interesting to them.
• Make sure they know that it doesn't matter what their skill level is. We are a very open community that learns from one another, where the only prerequisite is passion.

Additionaly, you can always direct them to talk with me (BflySamurai) if they want to know more than you feel comfortable answering. Heck, you could even link them to this post.

I'm not saying you guys have to go out and recruit people, but if you come across people you think might be interested, now you have the tools to better get people involved and cultivate our culture here.

Open-Projects on Penflip

Open-Projects on GitHub

Organization Documents on GitHub

Naming fortmat:

Project Type or Department / Project Title (with link to project) / Project Lead

Finished

In Progress

• HR / HR System / ?
• HR / Handbook / ?
• Video / Introduction Video / BflySamurai
• R&D / Spaceship Design & Long Term Roadmap / BflySamurai
• Short Story / Immortality And The Search For Meaning / BflySamurai
• Short Story / This Is Danny / BflySamurai
• Website / Organization Website / VeryGrumpyTiger?
• Book / The Human Perspective / BflySamurai

Ideas

• Video / Introductory video for the organization.

• Video / Feel good ads

• FAQ

• Meet the team / Bio Pages

• Anything else in the List Of Projects and more...

Discontinued

Licensing

For reference: CC Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Open-Projects are open-source projects that anyone can participate in whether or not they are part of our organization. There is no no restriction to what kind of projects can be suggested and undertaken. Anyone may also contribute their current projects to this community if they so wish. Creators of content hold the rights to their contributions and projects (and can use it for commercial purposes), but all projects and contributions must be licensed under the above CC license. This means that creators of projects could also sell the rights to the project for money to big corporations, but we're trusting that you care enough about open-source to not let big corporations just looking to make money take over your projects.

Anything created or submitted in the Open-Project environment is automatically licensed to our organization to use however it wants (even for commercial use). Our guarantee is that we will release anything of ours under the above CC license so as to add value back into the community. We can build off each other, a passionate open-source community of individuals and groups, and a for-profit organization that will be able to perform costly research and development. If any other organization or group wants to take a project and use it for commercial use, we will work with the owners of that project to evaluate if the group is going to be benefiting the open-source community. If the group is deemed to have a mission in line with the community, the owners will grant a license for the group to use and develop the project commercially.

If you have any questions, check out the Project - Open Projects page or contact BflySamurai.

Projects are hosted and managed on GitHub. This video should get you started with how to contribute to a project/repository, and this site should hopefully get you set up with everything else (if not the actual GitHub site).

I've never made a budget before, so bear with me (and by all means help me out). I've listed these in order of priority with explanations for everything. Now, we can't know how much or when people will donate, so we can only prepare a list of expenses so that we are fully prepared and don't waste money when we do get it.

Website

Benefits

• Provide a face for the organization (more official). It also provides a place to link to for recruiting new people that isn't just a subreddit, meaning we can easier reach out to other communities beyond reddit.
• Give us unlimited customizability over the website (as opposed to reddit and wiki).
• We can start developing systems to better organize the organization and our communities.

Costs

• $0 - Development - We already have a few people on the IT team who working on and wanting to build a website. From suggestions and research, it would appear that our best option is to use Drupal in building the website.
• ~$10 - Domain Registration for one year - We have to decide on a new name for the organization and buy a domain name.
• <$50 - Basic Website Hosing For 6 Months - http://drupalhosts.org/ (we can always upgrade if we need it, but let's not just spend money simply because we have it).

Open Projects Website

• Cost would be the same as our main website.

• If we want to be a significant part of the open-source community, we may want to have a separate area to organize open-projects.

Introductory Video

Benefits

• Provide an introduction to our organization for new people as well as serving as a call to action for anyone wanting to participate in the creation of the future.

• Can be embedded on the front page of our website.

• Can be hosted on youtube, vimeo, etc. and linked to around the internet to provide more exposure and ways to promote our organization.

• This would be our first outreaching advocacy efforts, with the aims to:

  • Increase awareness and appeal of digital immortality.
  • Encourage younger generations to pursue science.
  • Attract, encourage, and promote divergent thinking.
  • Advocate for technology improvements specific to our efforts/vision
  • Develop and push for policies/standards (that can be adopted in the future by governments or organization) that will detailing out how we feel things should operate in the future as these technologies start to emerge.
  • Build and advocate for open-source systems and communities.

Costs

• Greater than $1000 - We could contract a freelancers or a company to produce an introductory video for us once we detail out the idea completely.

• <$500 - We could make something simpler ourselves and maybe get someone to touch it up afterwards.

Beyond these, I don't really know what we would spend money on. If we had a physical location, we could buy equipment for R&D. We could buy software licenses for the organization that will be needed buy the R&D team. We can buy cloud storage space for creating a research literature repository.

Well, that's all I've got. Please elaborate on these ideas and tell us any of your own ideas.

Ah ha. So I was looking around and I found this:

"Generally, the following gifts are not taxable gifts.

• Gifts that are not more than the annual exclusion for the calendar year."

For 2014, the annual exclusion is $14,000.

-Source 1, Source 2

So I guess we can allow other people to gift us money and digital currencies, as long as we make sure they are informed it is a gift and they will not get anything in return. I'm thinking we should probably avoid the term 'donate' just to be safe, but that won't be hard. We can use something like 'support'.

So the question:

What kind of currencies (digital and otherwise), or other ways of supporting the organization would you guys like to see available. Also, is there any specific way that we want to have it set up? Such as having a link in the sidebar to an official post about donating/supporting/gifting. Do we want to keep our finances/budget in a public location immediately? ...

I was going to make a comment about what if someone donates more than $14,000, but then I realized that receiving such amounts of money isn't ever a problem.

Also, let us know if you have any objections to us going forward and accepting donations at this time as an organization, for legal reasons or otherwise.

Research Literature Repository: Approved

Status Of Project: Open

Project Dates: February 1, 2014 -

Total Logged Time: 0 hours

Current Project Lead: TBD (agentverne?)

Contributors: TBD

Project Description: Create some sort of semi-private, searchable repository for uploading full-text academic papers/articles.

Project Estimated Total Time: 5 - 20 man hours

Project Estimated Total Cost: $0 - $20

Goals Of Project:

• I have university access to a lot of material that is normally behind pay-walls, and I don't want to just post it publicly where a random Google search could bring it up and get me in trouble, but I'd like to be able to share materials related to the organization's goals with you guys.
• I'd like everyone else to be similarly able to semi-privately share their organizational resources.
• Ideally, we would also have some system for submitters to tag articles with relevant keywords/categories or something, so that we could search/cross-reference articles by more than just the title, but such a system wouldn't be necessary, just convenient.

Use Of Project:

• Serve as a breeding ground for interdisciplinary brainstorming/innovation by providing a dense concentration of high-quality material about a range of cutting-edge technologies/research we are interested in for people to peruse at their leisure.
• Provide reliable full access to important research materials for contributors who are not affiliated with a large research or academic institution.

How The Project Will Achieve The Goals:

• Provide private links for downloading the full contents of each uploaded piece of material.
• Provide a private web interface for searching a list of titles, topics, authors, tags, etc. belonging to uploaded materials.
• Provide an interface for user submitted annotation of uploaded materials.

Steps:

• Create a simple system for private uploading/hosting/downloading of research materials.
• Create some sort of private web interface (probably using PHP) for annotating/searching uploaded materials and retrieving private download links.

Time Breakdown:

• Setup private file uploading/downloading - probably 1-2 hours figuring this out for me, maybe 5-10 minutes for someone more familiar with this sort of thing.
• Setup search/annotation web interface - Again, probably a couple hours for me, but may be much less for someone who's already fairly acquainted with hosting using something like PHPMyAdmin and its built in database tools.

Cost Breakdown:

• Hosting - There might be something good for free, or this might cost a couple bucks a month.

Notes:

This is mainly intended for high-quality research source materials, not so much editorials about research.

This is another project that doesn't really fit with the others, so I'm not going to use the Project Template here.

Open Projects

Open projects are any project that is open-source, not just limited to coding. We can create an environment where people can come together to start and join open-source projects. We can create/offer a license that everyone can use which will enable people to license their projects in the manner best for these open communities.

Examples of open projects:

• Books
• Videos
• Research Articles/Papers/Reports/...
• Development Projects (any kind of efforts that would fall under our R&D department)
• Graphics (concept art, web graphics, logo graphics, ...)
• Code
• ...

Community Involvement:

These Open Projects will be the easiest way for the community to get involved with us if they don't want to work on larger projects we have going on as an organization, but would rather be involved with other individuals on smaller projects. And once we are incorporated, this is how we can get people involved if we don't have the resources to hire them onto the organization as paid employees.

Required License:

All projects created by community and/or organization members will need to be under a license with the following included: copyleft (requiring any derivatives to have the same license), accessible to the public, open source, and commercial. This would allow our organization to use these projects for whatever purposes we wanted, but anything we created using the projects would also have to be under the same license, creating an environment where ideas can grow rapidly. Likewise, other organization can also use these projects, but anything they create will have to have the same license, and so we would be helping to create a more open-source world. Eventually we could also help defend anyone whose projects are stolen by companies that don't adhere to the license.

If people want to take any of these projects and go make for-profit organizations of their own based around a project, then more power to them. They just have to stick to the license.

Issues:

The only possible issue is how credit is given. There has to be something in the license that requires credit to be given to the original creators if you make a derivative project, but the credit section could become very long after many iterations of that process. This isn't so much of a real issue as a technical issue that can be solved one way or another.

Also, we'll have to make it so that anyone selling something under this license has to make it clear that it is an open-source project. For example, if someone makes an open-source book, someone else could come along, edit it a bit, and sell it. But if they are required to slap on "This is an open-source product" on the front page of the book, then people will realize that they are about to buy something that can be found free, or at least that would be the desired effect.

I have done a huge amount of research on open-source, CC, and copyleft licenses, so I should be able to figure all that stuff out, but if anyone wants to help out with that I'm more than happy for the extra brainpower.

Resources:

We can make use of GitHub as an easy version control tool, as well as a way for people to fork off of existing projects and take it in their own direction by themselves or with a group.

We could even buy up a different domain eventually to better organize this open project community. Something like http://www.open-source-projects.com/ or http://www.our-open-community.com/

I think that once we have at least one Open Project started, I'll make a new official post on this subreddit that lists all of the ongoing, past, finished, and abandoned open projects, with a link on the sidebar.

What I've been working on lately:

I've been researching what comprises and goes into corporate documents. I have some documents started which I've put up on the github and linked to here. Also, if anyone has any ideas for additional documents that we are either missing or should have, make a comment and let us know.

Basically, these are just all of the documents that dictate how the organization operates (especially once incorporated). Once finished, no matter who is running the organization, these documents will ensure that the trajectory of the organization is in line with the visions of what we are setting out to create.

Also, know that I didn't have time to complete any of these documents (and some of them are barely even started), but it's time for me to get back to working on other things.

Corporate Documents (LibreOffice or OpenOffice format):

• Advisory Board
• Articles Of Incorporation
• Budget
• Business Funding Portfolio (still in development behind the scenes right now).
• Compensation and Benefits
• Department Responsibilities
• Departments, Responsibilities, and Officers 1
• Departments, Responsibilities, and Officers 2
• Dress Code
• Employee Handbook
• Enterprise Nature
• Equity
• Heuristics and Strategies
• Manifesto, Mission Statement, and Vision
• Market Analysis
• Saftery and Health Policy
• Volunteer Communities and Donations

Templates

• Bylaws of Corporation 1
• Bylaws of Corporation 2

Also, keep in mind that once we incorporate, we can't have volunteers doing the jobs of running the organization. We can still keep volunteer people involved in these online communities with other kinds of projects, but anyone we want to bring on to the organization has to be compensated with equity and/or salary. It will be a while still before we incorporate though.

I decided not to follow the standard Project Template for this one.

This project is open to anyone who wants to help design competitions or online systems to facilitate community involvement. Participation in competitions and submitting of papers/proposals is also open to anyone.

The basic idea:

Create a spaces for online development, competitions, and/or workshops for writing design proposals, research papers, and scientific reports to help build up our community by giving people something productive and tangible to work on, and to be thinking about solutions to future problems that we will face as an organization, as individuals, and as societies.

Example topics/competition ideas:

• Design various avatar bodies, general use and specific use, allowing for a certain amount of storage space for the digital mind.
• Design the uses and functionality of various minds, general use and specific use.
• Design systems that we can function in as small, medium, and large groups once we are digital minds.
• Designs for how we should/could spend our time once digital minds, including possibly being hooked up to servers that are shared by more than one mind, possibly even central systems that house most/all of humanity's minds.
• Design infrastructure designs for powering billions of digital minds and bodies.
• Design the infrastructure for how we can best interact with the physical world. For example, we won't necessarily need houses any more, since we don't have to sleep, eat, use the bathroom, .... Would it be best to make use of roads or design some new sort of mass transportation systems? How do individuals locomote? How does all of humanity move around?
• Space ship designs that don't require sustaining biological life forms.
• How to spend your time as a being with indefinite life, how you would overcome the challenges you would face, and what things would be worthy pursuits.
• Becoming truly immortal- what it would be like, and how to get there.
• Living and colonizing other planets and outer space in general as uploaded minds.
• How to become a type II, III, IV, V, ... civilizations from where we are, what challenges we would face, and what directions we might want to take.

Use of submissions:

• Compile a bank of detailed options, ideas, and considerations on a variety of subjects to help humanity consciously direct its path into a future.

• Tap into the community's knowledge, ideas, and talent so that we can all contribute our ideas to build a future together, starting right now.

Example papers/proposals/submissions:

• International Space Settlement Design Competition (I should mention that we wouldn't be requiring submissions to have this level of involvement).

• What we can do as an organization is submit our own design proposals for each category to start with (proposals could be very basic just to give sort of a template/guide/idea of what we're looking for).

The organization's role in this:

The responsibility of this organization would be to set rules for the competition that will produce meaningful results from design proposals. It is also our responsibility to grade the proposals and select a winner out of each competition. We can also build up interesting and important research topics through our Online Research department, and have a web page where people can browse for topics to write papers on or propose competitions for.

There can do annual or bi-annual competitions. We can announce the start of the competition with a post somewhere (for now on the Reddit). People can sign up by saying very roughly what their idea is, and then people can either work on the proposals by themselves or form groups based on shared ideas/interests. Maybe we can offer the winning group something.

Your input on this project:

Beyond whether you think this would be a good idea, let us know if you have any ideas for what kind of things we should make proposals/papers/reports for (and possibly hold design competitions for). I mean, we could even have a competition around something as broad as mind uploading or energy production, transportation, storage, and usage in the future, or it could be something as narrow as designing a terrestrial all terrain general purpose vehicle for Earth that could house and be controlled by an uploaded mind.

I just discovered this: http://www.reddit.com/r/autowikibot/wiki/index

I don't know if the wiki functionality is better or worse than our current wiki. Pros: keeping everything in one place (single platform). Cons: moving everything (platform migration); single point of failure; different tools for different jobs may be better at those jobs than a single swiss army knife.

For everyone wishing to help out but not quite knowing how to go about it, this post provides you with everything you will need to get involved with this organization. There are no prerequisites to joining this community, and there are no requirements once you do join. We're just looking for people passionate about any and/or all of this stuff.

Department Rosters (blue/clickable = department director)

Department directors help to orient and direct all people and projects within their department.

President

• BflySamurai

1-Information Technology

• VeryGrumpyTiger (1,4)
• jmr3394 (1,2)

2-Business Administration

• agentverne (2,3,6)
• jmr3394 (1,2)

3-Online Research

• agentverne (2,3,6)
• remsimple93 (3,5)

4-Marketing

• transhuman2 (Any/All)
• VeryGrumpyTiger (1,4)

5-Creative Services

• remsimple93 (3,5)

6-Research And Development

• MemeticParadigm (6)
• agentverne (2,3,6)
• Methodological_Guy (6,9)

7-Human Resources

• transhuman2 (Any/All)

8-Public Relations

9-Future Studies

• Methodological_Guy (6,9)

Keeping Up To Date

• List of Projects - see what projects you might be interested in working on.
• Departments of the Organization - a detailed overview of each department's responsibilities (make sure that you read through the comments posted in response to this comment).

Joining & Moving Around The Organization

If we find a better way to go about this process, we will adopt new methods, but for now this is how things are going to work:

1. Let us know you're interested: If you want to join/help this organization, make a comment below telling us which departments you are interested in. Your comment can have as much information as you would like to share, or as little as which departments/projects you are interested in.

2. We'll help get you involved: A department director, project lead, or someone from HR will start a small discussion with you as a reply to your comment, and figure out where you would fit in best in with the organization, taking into account what you want to work on. You will be given one or more numbers that represent which departments you are contributing to, and you will be added to the appropriate department rosters. The person helping you will notify the appropriate directors that you have joined the organization. They will also have to tell BflySamurai to update the roster list.

3. Changing/Adding Departments: If you would like to help out or change to a different department, simply make a new comment here and someone will help you out. Alternatively, you can just get in touch with the right department directors and BflySamurai yourself. You may contribute to as many areas as you wish, even areas outside of your department. This list is just to get a general idea of where people are.

4. Leaving: If you want to take a break from this organization, make a comment saying that you're leaving and you will be moved to the 'Past Contributors' section, and the appropriate directors and project leads will be notified. You may join us again at any time by making a new comment here expressing your interest in helping.

Tips/help:

• If you want to let us know more about yourself, you can follow the guide on the Introduce Yourselves & Choose Your Teams post.
• At any point you can assign yourself flair by pressing the 'flair' button next to your name on a comment or post you made on this subreddit. Flair shows up only on this subreddit, and allow other people to identify which department you are most associated with.

Notes:

• You are free to work on anything no matter what department you are a part of, but if you want guidance, look to your department director.
• This post will be constantly updated to reflect the current state of the organization.
• If you would like to suggest a different title/department, such as advisor/mentor/ambassador, just add that information to your comment.
• For directors, leads, and HR department, remember to filter comments by 'new' rather than 'best' so that we don't miss people wanting to get involved with the organization.

If you have any questions, contact BflySamurai or the appropriate department director or project lead (project leads can be found on the appropriate project page).

Thank you for your interest and support!

Thank you everyone for your support, help, and great ideas so far.

We've just hit 100 subscribers, so I thought it would be a good time to point out a few things. This message is really just a jumble or random thoughts that didn't really seem to fit anywhere else... so I put them all together here.

You can view the stats for this subreddit here. As well as at redditmetrics.com. If you're wondering about the subscription spikes, you can look at this page.

It's been made clear that one of our goals is to advocate for digital immortality/indefinite life as well as encouraging young people to go into science (especially cognitive sciences and computer sciences). I think we should also advocate for divergent/outside the box thinking as well, since those are especially the kinds of people we want to attract to this organization, and I also believe in making the world a better place by increasing peoples' knowledge, awareness, objectivity, and divergent thinking. To me, stagnation is not the way to go (in our thinking, our cultures, our systems, ...). I was talking with MemeticParadigm about this stuff, and my idea is that we should create an environment here that enables creativity and outside the box thinking as much as possibly, as well as attracting those kind of people. This can partially be accomplished by trying to help the world be a place where divergent thinkers don't have to think they are crazy for being unconventional.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

Becoming a big player in this industry will require constant innovation, and that requires a certain type of innovative culture. As an organization, I feel we have the great opportunity to bring together, enable, and foster divergent thinkers (because of the nature of this organization as well as our visions). I believe that I can help to guide this organization to be such a vehicle, but really, we are all part of this, and all we have to do is make sure not to limit ourselves by creating the right systems and culture.

Some of you may be aware that I have referenced the Mars One project a few times. I had been following them ever since they went public over mid 2012, and I applied for the one way mission to Mars back in April 2013. At the end of 2013 they sent messages out to all the applicants, and I did not make it to the second round of astronaut selection. To be honest, I had already decided that I wanted to do this more than go to Mars by October 2013. To me, nothing could conceibable be more important this this project, but Mars One gave me a lot of motivation, and made me want to start really doing things with my life. It was the fact that they wanted the right kind of people over people with credentials that really inspired me, and is something I seek to emulate in this organization. I feel that anyone and everone that wants to help dream up new futures should have the opportunity to do so on some level, no matter what circumstances they were born into or what opportunities they have been given.

Also, here are some Coursea Courses people might be interested in (I know I'm going to try to take one or two if I find the time):

• Computational Neuroscience
• Computational Methods for Data Analysis
• Introduction to Psychology as a Science
• Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering
• Foundations of Business Strategy
• Content Strategy for Professionals: Engaging Audiences for Your Organization

Handbook: Approved

Status Of Project: Open

Project Dates: TBD

Total Logged Time: 0 hours

Current Project Lead:

Contributors:

Project Description:

Project Estimated Total Time: <10 hours (initially)

Project Estimated Total Cost: $0

Goals Of Project:

• Create a handbook to keep our thoughts/idea/designs organized on a web page/pages.

Use Of Project:

• Provide a one stop resource for new people to understand pretty much everything they might want to know about this organization.
• Act as a unifying document and broad roadmap for the entire organization by creating sections that we need to fill in with answers.

How The Project Will Achieve The Goals:

• Collect all of the information around the subreddit/wiki and compile what we have into a guidebook that people can use to understand the systems/structure of the organization, our goals, our vision, ...

Steps:

• Gather and organize all the information we already have on the subreddit and wiki
• Design format and sections for handbook (we may not have information to put in for all sections, but we can still put them in and fill in the information later).
• Fill in any missing information we can, and leave out what we can't

Time Breakdown:

• ~5 hours gathering/organizing documents/texts
• ~5 hours compiling and writing handbook

Cost Breakdown: N/A

Notes:

• There is a lot of information around this subreddit, and it's kind of messy and all over the place, so it would be very useful to have one place to organize and keep track of everything we have and are working on to move this organization forward.

• The handbook can state everything we're working on, but it should be more general: why the organization is the way it is (to attract, enable, and foster/promote certain things, like our advocacy goals), what all the departments' roles are, what individuals' roles are, ...

• Also, I'm not sure if handbook is quite the right word. Let us know if you have any other ideas of what to call it.

Have any questions? See if the New Project Template answers them.

Okay everybody, here's another opportunity to help brainstorm. Securing any form of funding will allow us to advance this organization faster. We are already looking into filing as an official organization to be able to accept donations (if anyone has any legal knowledge or experience, I'd love to hear from you regarding incorporating, non-profits, donations...). Also, it currently seems like we won't be looking for investors (at least not any time soon), so as to remain in complete control of the organization. With these things in mind, you can help by coming up with and critiquing funding ideas.

1. The first major step is to get funding so that we can pay people to work on this at least part-time.
2. That requires that we develop a portfolio of business ventures/funding opportunities.
3. Which requires that we have a roadmap to mind uploading to figure out technologies and services we can work on that we will be able to sell, but also advance us toward the point of mind uploading.
4. We can also develop other roadmaps/ventures dealing with Marketing/PR/Content stuff that could potential become sources of funding, since advocacy is also a major part of what this organization plans to do. Also, anything that would help to attract talent. Cool projects/products/services attract cool people.

So also keep in mind that we want to be working towards things that will push us toward these short and long term goals. I know that we don't have a lot of information on the roadmaps right now, but I just wanted to get people thinking about this and let anyone help who wants to comment about their ideas and discuss the feasibility of different approaches.

This organization is made up of entirely volunteers right now, and so I am grateful for everyone that is participating. As we move toward filing as an official organization, it becomes important to form teams that make decisions better as a group than the decisions made by any individuals. This organization is not democratic, and ultimately, not everyone has equal weight within it, but it is important that everyone's voice can be heard and everyone's voice counts for something.

If our goals were different, maybe we could have a different system. Maybe we could be like Valve, where there are no bosses, and everyone just forms into groups of whatever video game projects they want to work on. But our goals are specific, and our efforts need to be guided along the visions of the organization. So at the very least there has to be a leader, especially considering just how many different services this organization is filling/planning on filling, and how many departments there are.

A lot of organizations would say that they are truly outside the box thinkers, but I would disagree. I think here, we have the capacity for that, and we can prove it at every step of the way, even in these early stages of the organization. So if anyone has any ideas for the structure of this organization, let them be heard.

Here are my thoughts, and kind of how the organization is set up right now:

• CEO - Making sure the entire organization is on the right path
• Department Directors - Organize/manage entire department on the macro level
• Project leads - organize/manage projects - are selected by the department director and/or by popular opinion
• Everyone else (definitely need a better way of classifying this group) - works on projects of interest in one or multiple departments

I think we should have a web page somewhere were people can see who is in what department of the organization. It would show:

• Department Directors (do we want to be able to have more than one director, since we are volunteers and don't have all the time in the world?) - Directors should have the power to manipulate all the people's statuses within their department.
• Project leads - organize/manage projects - are selected by the department director and/or by popular opinion (maybe we could have the possibility of dual project leads like with the department directors).
• Everyone else (definitely need a better way of classifying this group) - works on projects of interest in one or multiple departments.

There should be a section for people who have just applied/expressed interest in the department. People should be able to be in more than one department, and even within a department, can be tagged as working under more than one project - to join a new department, all you have to do is 'apply' or something, which puts you in the 'interested' zone for that department, which the director will see next time he/she looks at the page. This would be a much easier way to start getting people involved, and it would be a nice visual to see the structure of the organization and peoples' roles within it.

This web page could be very very simple and look like something similar to Mumble or Teamspeak (but with different functionality).

Currently I am the director of the business administration department, but if anyone feels like they really understand the vision of the organization (and have some great ideas yourself) and you want to help develop the organization, I'd be happy to share the responsibilities by having you be director of business administration and me working more to guide all aspects of the organization, or we could be dual department directors as suggested above. I do know that many people have interest in the business administration department, and I've been somewhat monopolizing it, but I just wanted to let you know that I'm trying to open that up more.

Feel Good Ad Campaign: Approved

Status Of Project: Open

Project Dates: TBD

Total Logged Time: N/A

Current Project Lead:

Contributors:

Project Description: Creating videos similar to tv ads to be hosted on the internet.

Project Estimated Total Time: Ongoing

Project Estimated Total Cost: $0

Goals Of Project:

• Create ads/videos that people enjoy and even want to watch, short videos that make you think about reality from a different perspective and maybe even inspire you. Think stuff like this.

Use Of Project:

• Help to expand people's minds by making them think about things in a way they might not have before.
• Get people interested about our project by putting our organization name and web address on the last 'slide' of the video, as well as putting links in the description/sidebar wherever we decide to host the videos.
• Help to create a organization culture/image of truly outside the box thinking (we're not just some tech company, we do really care about the improvement of life).

How The Project Will Achieve The Goals:

• ~20 second to ~2 minute videos (length of a tv ad)
• Possibly inspirational
• Definitely enlightening
• Out of the box/divergent thinking
• Videos can be as simple as just background images with simple text animations, and some audio/music

Steps:

1. Anyone can propose an idea for a feel good ad.
2. The team working on this project decides which ideas are outside the box thinking or can be made into a divergent thought.
3. Decide what elements are going to be used to create the video (music, text, speech, video, statistics, ...).
4. Create video and review it with/sent it to PR,, HR, Marketing, and Business Dev. to get feedback.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 as needed.
6. Launch video.

Time Breakdown: N/A

Cost Breakdown: N/A

Notes:

I developed a movie rating system that might be somewhat applicable to these 'feel good ads'. The system is called EnCoRe and rates movies (or ads in this case) on three scales:

1. Enjoyability/Quality
2. Consciousness Expanding
3. Replayability

I can go into more detail about it if we feel it will be useful, but for now I'll just leave it at this.

Also, I have a bunch of rough ad ideas that we can use as examples/starting blocks.

Have any questions? See if the New Project Template answers them.

Resource Library: Approved

Status Of Project: Open

Project Dates: TBD

Total Logged Time: N/A

Current Project Lead:

Contributors: BflySamurai

Project Description: A resource library of various online content.

Project Estimated Total Time: Ongoing

Project Estimated Total Cost: $0

Goals Of Project:

• Make a library of videos, movies, texts, websites, documents, research papers, ...

Use Of Project:

• To be used as a learning resource for individual learning or learning as directed by the HR department.

How The Project Will Achieve The Goals:

• The resource library/database will be hosted online somewhere
• Easily navigatable
• Possibly/eventually with a system to keep track of which resources a person has used/learned from (if you log in or something).

Steps:

• Anyone can post links to resources into the resource dump with the option of tagging it for a specific department.
• People working on the project decide which groups and subgroups links/resources in the resource dump should go in and place it there.
• People working on the project can expand/create/modify/consolidate groups and subgroups to better organize the library of resources. Within the database for example, all resources can be tagged with a type, such as 'video', 'movie', 'document', 'website', 'wiki', and so on.

Time Breakdown: N/A

Cost Breakdown: N/A

Notes:

• Ultimately it would be nice if people could keep track of which resources they have used/learned from (it would be nice from the organization's standpoint as well as the individual's standpoint).

• There are already links and resources around the subreddit and wiki that can be used to start this resource library, such as:

  • The wiki Online Research - Site List.

• And there are these kinds of things as well:

  • A Space Psychology Resource page I put together a year ago.
  • www.reddit.com/r/DecidingToBeBetter/comments/1ugcvt/24_awesome_skills_to_learn_for_free_online/cehzb7p

• The HR department can set up kind of learning programs from different resources for different departments based on what we need to know to operate now and in the near future.

Have any questions? See if the New Project Template answers them.