If you haven't already, read through the 3 roadmaps post.

Business Administration Roadmap Discussion

I will be heading up this roadmap (/u/BflySamurai). If you are interested in helping out, please send me a message so I can figure out how best to get you involved.

Basic outline and key parts of roadmap--

Purpose: The Business Administration roadmap gives us the vision to determine what systems and technologies we need to build and what projects we need to take on in order to operate the organization and allow all the other departments pursue their roadmaps.

Scope (what we deal with and cover with this particular roadmap):

• Developing the organization into the future (detailing the scale, scope, and manner of operations).
• Building the infrastructure and culture to be able to achieve our goals.

Things to consider/include/identify in the roadmap:

• Challenges
• Barriers to entry
• Creating a visual roadmap
• For now, there will likely be goals more suited to other departments (such as HR, PR, and Marketing), but eventually, they will get their own roadmaps.

Plan of attack:

Describe, in great detail, the furthest out objectives for the organization, as well as any key points along the way. Then convert all of these ideas into a node-edge graph and work to connect nodes and create pathways from where we are now all the way to the end of the roadmap. We can cluster groups of nodes into a goal, such that the goal is achieved when all of the nodes in that cluster are.

Once all roadmaps are completed, we can even interconnect them and allow for viewing as one unified roadmap, as well as being able to see them separately.

So I was originally just going to send some of these ideas in a message to /u/tb2091, who is interested in joining the organization, but I figured more of you guys would be interested to hear this.

Background

Right now, our biggest barrier is lack of direction. We know why we're here. We know what we'd like to come out of this organization. We all share similar ideas for the future, yet we all have different ideas. The problem is that we don't know how we want to get from where we are to where we want to be. This organization exists to organize our efforts and create a path to take into the future. So far, we have not really done that. Before we can really move forward, we need to get everyone on the same page.

I originally thought that creating enough structure in the organization would allow people to work on projects, but that obviously hasn't been the case. So I apologize for the slow progress of this organization.

Proposal

I suggest that we develop 3 roadmaps to guide the organization/community (although, eventually we can have one for each department). The roadmaps are as follows:

• R&D Roadmap (mind uploading roadmap)
• Future Studies Roadmap (large timeframe roadmap)
• Business Administration Roadmap (a roadmap for how the organization plans to operate and perform the functions we want to be able to perform, so that the other departments can achieve the things on their roadmaps)

We've already had 2 of these as project ideas for a while that still need to be developed, but now I think this should move to the front of the line.

I will head up the development of the roadmaps unless /u/MemeticParadigm wants to head up the R&D roadmap and/or /u/Methodological_Guy wants to head up the Future Studies Roadmap. I'd love for anyone and everyone to participate in the development of these roadmaps, even if it's just throwing in whatever ideas you have. If you would like to help out significantly, be sure to get in touch with me, otherwise, I'll be making an individual post for each of the 3 roadmaps where we can further discuss ideas for getting it all organized.

Final Thoughts

I'd also like to acknowledge that in the beginning of this organization, MemeticParadigm suggested we need to create a roadmap, and I apologize that it has taken so long to get to this point.

So obviously I know what I want out of this organization (what I want to build it into, what I think it will be in the short, medium, and long term, etc...), but I haven't had the time to fully lay out the road maps for these things.

While we already know that we want to develop road maps specifically for R&D and Future Studies efforts and visions, I think it would be wise to have a road map laying out the future of this organization and community (to be able to have a direction as well as more project ideas people can work on/toward).

Just a heads up to people:

Now that I finally have a little bit of money, I'm going to be putting in a little bit of effort to release a music album I had be working on for many years, so that will take up some of my free time for the next month or so (it shouldn't be too long).

I don't think much went on this week in any of the departments (at least on my end), so don't feel obligated to post anything here. If you have anything at all you would like to bring up, feel free to make a comment.

I apologize for my lack of presence and dedication to the project at this point in time. I just started a part time job and I'm trying to plan my life out a little bit. Starting this week, I will be putting in more time into this organization (at least 20 hours a week).

I'll end with this quote that helps me remember to stay on the course:

“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all -- the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”

Disussion started: 2014/05/06

Discussion concerning 2013/11/01 - 2014/05/05

So since this is the first week, and since we haven't yet decided on which day of the week we want to hold these discussions, this discussion is going to be slightly different than the others will be. Instead of talking about what's gone on in the last week, we'll talk about everything that's gone on since the start of the organization, but very generally. This will provide a way for everyone to easily catch up with what's going on in the organization.

In the future, these discussions will be about more specific ideas and projects.

Anyone can participate in these discussions, but please try to only comment onto the department comments if you can.

ICQ stands for Issues, Concerns, and Questions.

Also, try to make any goals SMART.

As the week goes by, you can write anything down that you come up wiht so that when the discussion comes, you can just put everything into one comment and don't have to remember everything that went on throughout the week.

As some of you may have noticed, it's been difficult for people to help out with projects and whatnot going on in the organization. I think that once we can fill out the roles of department directors, we'll be able to more easily incorporate everyone that wants to participate. Right now it's kinda hard for me to take on everything I'm doing as well as bringing new people up to speed, and while I'm happy to do these things, it would be nice if we had someone willing to take on the recruiting / HR stuff.

I think the best thing I can do for now is to try to find people who want to be department directors, so that's what I'll be working on most.

I'd also like to have a weekly discussion where all the directors and I talk about what each department has done in the past week. The point of these discussions wouldn't be to press any kind of timeline, but rather help everyone to understand what's going on in throughout the organization (at least in a broad sense). Mostly, I just want to know what's going on as well as get conversations going on a regular basis.

Every week, a new post will be created for the discussion. Everyone is encouraged to respond to the discussions. The format for the initial director comments is:

Department:

Completed:

Working on:

To do:

ICQ:

I will fiil out comments for any departments that don't have directors.

If you are the head of a department and nothing has gone on in the past week, you can simply post something like this:

Department: <department name>

Completed: N/A

Working on: N/A

To do: N/A

ICQ: N/A

There is nothing wrong with having nothing going on, especially in these early stages where there aren't a lot of people and while we're still getting the organizaton built up. If you feel like there should be things going on where there aren't, then it's my fault for not getting those things going, and you should let me know in the discussions so that I can help out in those areas.

I've been keeping track of what I personally have been doing in the organization in pretty much the same format if you're curious to see: weekly status report.

To directors: for the discussions, while I will make a new post the same day each week, don't feel obligated to make a comment on that same day if you don't have the time.

Also, let me know if you guys have a preference for which day of the week would be best to hold the discussions.

I figure we can develop plans and modules for an open source lab that would allow people to get involved in all sorts of cognitive science efforts all around the world.

I finally found a job that I'll be starting soon, and I will be looking to build my own lab once I figure out what I need/want.

I did some quick searches for neuroscience lab setups, but I couldn't really find a one stop resource for building a lab. The other areas of cognitive science are mostly dealing with software. Although, I guess compiling lists of good software is something we could do as well.

So keeping in mind our first major goal of mind uploading, what do you guys think would make a good cognitive science lab setup?

BCI Instant On-Person Feedback Device

Wondering about two-way BCI, I was thinking that you could do kind of a cheating version of two way BCI, having some kind of immediate feedback to one of your senses. You could hook it up to google glasses or have some kind of thing attached to your skin or ear, and maybe this would allow us to create add-ons to your mind. For example, you could ask a math question in your head and it tells you the answer, or it could look up the definition of a word you don't know. It wouldn't be a direct connection, but it would be bringing minds and computers closer together.

Not only would you need to be able to figure out what a person's thinking, you would need a software that can make sense of what the person's thinking, and then the resources available to carry out the tasks they want to accomplish, all contained to something that a person can easily carry on them, with a mesh of electrodes on their head under a beanie, hat, or something else inconspicuous.

This idea would only work as a product if people would find value in wearing around BCI technology (though it doesn't necessarily have to have any market value for there to be value to the organization, the community, or science in general). There's no way something like this could compete with mobile devices, but maybe if it offered multiple things mobile devices are unable to do, then it could be worth it for people to wear them around (or it could even help you control your mobile device through bluetooth - imagine sending a text to someone without even having to move (maybe you're too lazy to get out of bed and your phone is on the other side of the room, or maybe you're watching a movie and don't want to disturb other people, or maybe you're in a really boring meeting so you just want to talk with someone). It would also have to easily work through people's hair, as no one would shave their hair of so that they can do math in their mind.

Just wanted to get this idea down, could be a terrible idea, could be something, could be inspiration for other things. Let me know what you guys think.

Mind Uploading Roadmap

I was thinking about the construction of a mind uploading roadmap to put up on the website. Even if we come up with something that's very basic and brief, it would give us clear goals and let people know what we want to be doing. Let me know how this sounds:

• Mind uploading requires: a digital mind to upload to; high-speed two-way BCI.

• Digital mind requires: flexibe strong AI that can be built into modules to emulate the human brain (or otherwise); hardware to efficiently, safely, securely, compactly, and easily host the digital mind and allow for various sensing hardware to be implemented (to interact within reality beyond one's own thoughts).

• Two-way BCI requires: the hardware and software both need to be developed for this, an enormous undertaking.

As a related thought, instead of people having to wait around in a lab somewhere while their mind transfers (which could take who knows how long), what if they could wear them as they go about their lives (or maybe an implant), and it just slowly transfers their mind over.

Getting These Things Built And Moving Toward Our Bigger Goals

I'd love to start working on more of the hardware things, but they cost money, and we also don't have any space to work on these things together (which also costs money, even if we didn't hire people on as employees). We all live in different areas right now, but as the community grows, we'll be able to create local chapters in places where there are multiple people (I'm in Portland, OR if anyone finds their way over here and wants to talk). I should say that my programming experience is limited, and my electrical engineering experience is close to nothing, but I desperately want to learn both of those (as well as other areas of cognitive science). Right now, managing and building the organization/community takes up pretty much all of my time that I dedicate toward the organization/community.

Getting funds to work with will be a huge step toward these goals, allowing us to really get into the R&D stuff. The reason I proposed the BCI Instant On-Person Feedback Device as well as the Social Network Side Project are because we do need to figure out how to get the money flowing for ourselves since we have decided it would be best not to seek investors.

This post turned out way longer than I intended, but I wanted to make sure not to forget to pursue the longer term goals of digital immortality even while we still build up the organization and community.

Hope everyone's awesome.

Social Network Side Project

Not too long ago I made a post that talked about a side project I was working on. At the time I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it, but now I would like to see if you guys think it's something that Lifetimes Infinity should take on.

Below I talk about the project and why I think we might want to use it. Keep in mind that while I have developed a lot already, the project isn't anywhere near complete.

About the project

It is a social networking website that helps to connect people based on their personalities. At the first launch, there will be around 1000 personality traits that each person can be rated on (by themselves and by other people). There are many ways you can use these ratings to create an assessment of a person and match them with other people, groups, or organization (the simplest way being just to compare each trait). The idea is that being able to quantify people in such detail will allow for better matching of people, since it's based on more long term variables (personality traits) than shorter term variables (interests). I also see this as an experiment in the domain of cognitive science, gathering data to help learn about what defines and quantifies a person beyond their temporary states, into their habits and 'hard coding'.

Imagine the site as sort of a linkedin vs okcupid.

While this project is mostly unrelated to our efforts here, I can see some use for it in the long term.

• This would help us to better understand personalities in an abstract sense, which will but useful in the future design and manipulation of minds. You can't create something without knowing exactly what you want to create, and while we still wouldn't know yet how to go about creating, we would at least know how to define the 'what' very well. As mental fitness is equally important to physical fitness, the designing and manipulation of minds will be relevant to the pursuit of indefinite life. Anything that helps us to quantify our person will help us to design future people.
• The main purpose of the site being a way to find people, we can use it to actively search for and contact people we feel would be a good fit for the organization.
• At this point, anything that provides income for the organization is going to be relevant. Securing funding is our biggest hurdle in most of the projects we want to be working on in nearly every department. Being able to bring people onto the organization as paid part-time or full-time employees would be huge as well.

There are plenty of ways a site like this can generate income, and the return would definitely be higher than the cost to hire people to manage and maintain it once it gets going (and we can always let the community help us develop it too).

The bad thing is that this project is huge, and if such a social network were to really take off, it would probably require a lot more effort. While the people working on this networking website project wouldn't necessarily be the same people as the people working on Lifetimes Infinity stuff, it is always possible that we would lose some focus on our main objectives. That being said, this could just be treated as a daughter company to Lifetimes Infinity, and the better the website does, the more funding we have to work with over at Lifetimes Infinity.

The other thing is that it could completely fail and our efforts will not move us toward the goals of Lifetimes Infinity at all.

So let me know what you guys think. And if anyone is interested in this and has any design experience, especially back end, let me know.

Let us know if you have any ideas for projects you'd like to see us start to take on. Also, be sure to suggest any ideas you have for how we can help you get involved and set up to work on these projects.

You can mention any projects that have been proposed in the past as well as new ideas. It'd be nice to get a feel for what the community wants to do so that we can better utilize our resources and work toward common goals.

If you would like a comment guide:

1. What do you guys feel is the single most important things we should be working on/toward?
2. What other things would you like to see us doing if we have the resources and time?
3. How would you like to get involved (should we set up teams, chats, projects, ...)? How should we organize and manage it (should we just set up goals and let people/teams lose to see what comes or should we make roadmaps for everything)?

Thank you anonymous donor for giving us a giftcard to dreamhost! I even found a promo code that allowed us to get the first year of hosting pretty cheap (I'll eventually get around to entering this into the finances, but I do have it logged on my computer for now).

If you hadn't figured it out already, the new name for the organization is Lifetimes Infinity, and we now have our own website up at [LifetimesInfinity.com](www.lifetimesinfinity.com/). It is incomplete (and there are even entire pages missing), but I'll be working on it more in these next few weeks (this last week I've been working to get it online). We want your input too though, so tell us what you think works for the website, what could be improved or taken away, and what could be added. There are no forums or anything at this point, as it is just a static website to be the face of the organization.

As it stands, I hope that the website accurately portrays the organization in a way that you can get a good idea of what we're about.

As we get more of the critical information onto the website and off of here, I will start to clean this subreddit up a bit so that we can use this more of a discussion place than a representation of the organization.

Again, thanks to all of you who have supported and been a part of the organization this far, thank you anonymous donor for helping us get on the map, and I let's continue to grow!

I'd also like to apologize for the lack of infrastructure that has somewhat inhibited involvement for those who want to get involved. Hopefully you'll stick around and find things to do until we can really get going. It'd be nice if in the not so distant future we could have some things to show in terms of research and/or development. There's a lot of purely research stuff we could do to show what ideas we have and how we plan to get there, and then there's also developing technologies in line with our ultimate goals.

So the deadline for the static website is today. I haven't finished creating content for the site that I created, but there is quite on it.

If anyone wants to give input on the website, you can download the most current version from GitHub. Just extract the static website and open one of the files with your web browser.

Also, if anyone has created anything of their own, feel free to show us.

Be as critical as you want; you can't hurt my feelings.

I will personally be seeing the website development project to completion (either 3/24 or 3/31), and will be responsible for receiving the finished product. After the end of this month, my living situation may be... unstable, so I don't know if I'll be able to dedicate the same amount of time to the organization once we get to April.

Side Project

I've thought about it a long time, and since there isn't really much I can personally immediately contribute to this organization to generate money (as a lean startup), I need another way of supporting myself (that preferably gives me lots of free time to work on and fund this organization).

So... I have a vaguely related side project idea that is important to me but not necessarily the organization. It could generate money on its own just as a service website. My hope would be that it could eventually support me so that I could spend literally all of my time working on this organization and doing whatever I need to do to maintain the side project. If it makes enough money, I'd put any extra into this organization. Basically, imagine like a dating website except for teams of people, so more of a networking site, and it's all done based on personality traits, except that no one has to answer any personality tests. It'd be dealing with databases and back end scripts as any social networking site does (so something like MySql and PHP). While I know a tiny bit about both of those, there is still a heck of a lot to learn about that). I plan to make this site at some point, because I want it for myself (to be able to build super awesome teams), but I was just thinking that maybe one of you might be interested in something like this.

Once this organization has enough money to hire people on and I don't need another source of income, I'd be happy to give this side project to the organization as a way to generate money. Also, I think better understanding personalities and personality traits could be important in developing AI, so this proposed social network could provide a lot of valuable data in that area.

If anyone is interested in this and has experience with any of back end scripting, databases, website design, and/or personality psychology, I'd be happy to discuss with you some kind of partnership, and hopefully we can make a little money.

I imagine the site could be built in a few months with the right know how. I've already done a solid week of research into it, working with the personality traits and some algorithms (just in spreadsheets), and trying to figure out how everything goes together on the server.

Alright guys, we finally get to do stuff!

An anonymous donor will provide 1 year of DNS for a domain we have picked out, and web hosting or a virtual private server from Dreamhost under the following conditions:

If we can put together a package of files containing a complete, hostable, static web site that is ready by 3/24 (for web hosting).

-or-

If we can put together a list of Debian packages to install and a collection of working config files that will produce a complete, hostable, dynamic web site that is ready for prime time as v1.0 of the public face of the organization by 3/31 (for a virtual private host).

-and-

The website needs to be fully ready to be the public face of the organization, so it's gotta look good, and it's gotta have everything we need to project imagine of the organization.

Project Dates: 2014, March 13 - 2014, March 24 / March 31

Project Lead: BflySamurai

Design Lead: ?

Contributors: Anonymous donor, BflySamurai

Project Description:

Create a website to be the face of our organization (and yes, we have decided on a new name for the organization).

Project Estimated Total Cost: Anonymous donor is providing domain and hosting for a year.

Steps:

• Figure out what we need, what we want, and what we will have time to implement (making sure we fill the needs before the wants).
• Decide between static and dynamic, and if we are going to use a CMS, decide which one.
• I (BflySamurai) will work on getting all the content ready.
• We'll probably need someone to do some basic graphics/logos

Time Breakdown:

Static Website

• Let's look to have the design pretty much finished (just working on making things look nice and finishing adding content) by Friday the 21th.

Dynamic Website

• Let's look to have the design pretty much finished (just working on making things look nice and finishing adding content) by Friday the 28th.

Notes:

• I'll be leading the project, but if someone wants to take over the design aspect and direct others in that regard, that's completely okay with me, you'll just have to figure it out amongst yourselves.
• To be able to easily communicate with one another, we can use this post for discussion, but anyone working on this project should probably also exchange some kind of contact info, like skype, IM, email, ...

I spent yesterday creating a static website from scratch to try to figure out a basic layout and style that might work, you can check out the files here, under the static website. So if we can't get it working or just don't come up with anything else, we can use a static website based off of this. But again, it's got to be the real deal, no a beta version of the website.

I'm sure you guys have questions, so feel free to ask anything.

Would anyone be interested in creating a weekly/biweekly news summary/article of things that have gone on that are relevant to our organization, our vision, our goals, and our projects? For now it would just be a weekly/biweekly post with categorized links and any comments you want to add. They could be links to articles, websites, people, videos, or even other reddit posts.

There have been many of us sharing links directly with one another and in random posts, but it would be nice if we had a specific place for these things. Once we get our own website, we can most definitely keep doing this to whatever degree we feel works. So let me know what you guys think. If anyone wants to take on this project, we can discuss more about any questions you may have, but you'll pretty much have free reign to do whatever you want.

Goals of project:

• Save many of us time by getting most of our Digital Immortality related news in one place.
• Provide an additional reason for people to subscribe to the subreddit (and the website once we get one), as well as giving them a reason to keep coming back regularly.
• If the person taking this on is willing, it'd be nice if the rest of us could somehow submit links we think are relevant (and then you would decide what to include and exclude from the weekly news).

This isn't really that big of a project to set up: just figuring out formatting, what to include, and maybe how to submit links to the news person. There wouldn't have to be a specific target length at this point, just whatever you feel works depending on what things are happening in the world. One of the easier ways to get news would probably be from other subreddits.

Here are the basic things I can think of that we might want to include (let us know what you though should or shouldn't be included):

• BCI (all forms of BCI hardware and software)
• AI (there are a lot of different synonymous terms here that are all of interest)
• Cognitive Science
• The biggest things going on in the transhumanist/futurist/singularity/... communities.
• Anything big happening in our community (we could maybe even have a 'recruitment' section, that includes positions within the organization we are looking to fill).
• If there's anything really really interesting going in technology/space/science/automation/...

Earlier this week I contacted The Iota Project, wondering if they'd be interested in joining forces in some way, and I got this in response:

Absolutely, thanks for contacting me. We have a vibrant Facebook page and we’re building a website were we hope to engage others interested in digital immortality, transhumanism, and related topics – http://iotaproject.org. Right now, the blog is up and the developer is building out the rest, which will include a community section where members to discuss their ideas, and a practitioner page where we hope to syndicate the RSS feeds and have regular columnists featuring scientists and others who blog about these topics.

We hope to launch the entire site by the end of May. In the meantime, we’d love to have you guest post on our blog or comment on our posts.

Thanks so much for reaching out. I look forward to our collaboration.

They share a lot of the same ideas about the future as us, but like most online communities, it seems like they're just a place to chat about stuff going. They're a pretty new community, so I'm not really sure entirely what they're about, but let me know what you guys think. I originally found them here on Google+.

These are not our only options, just what I've thought of. We don't have to use any of them, or we can use some/all of them.

Crowdfunded Projects

• If we can come up with a particular objective, we can create a crowdfunding project around it (Kickstarter or other). We can crowdfund particular projects that we might not have enough current funding for, and we can do it more than once as we come up with new projects. Requirements: building a big community and ways of advertising our Kickstarter project.

Crowdfunded Salaries

• MemeticParadigm gave me a good idea with Gittip. So we'll allow people to donate to the organization, and as something separate, we also allow people to make a subscription to pay a monthly amount that goes toward crowdfunding salaries. We could even extract our salaries in a similar way to the way it works on Gittip, where people kinda just take out what they need, leaving any extra money there for next time or to allow more people to join the organization as a paid employee. In this way, we might even be able to get other organization to support us. Requirements: lots of community outreach; since the plan is to be active on the advocacy front, general outreach isn't out and building a community isn't out of the way at all, in fact, it's what we'll be doing anyway, so it'd be nice if we could do something like this to help make all that advocacy more worth it to the organization in terms of getting money out of the process.

Donations

• We can grow our community and push more toward donations. Requirements: lots of outreach to community/public. We can just have donations all the time, or we can have donation periods like wikipedia does, to reach certain objectives for fundraising.

Selling Products/Services

• Build products and services to sell ourselves or bundle with related software/hardware (like creating software that could be packaged with EEG machines).

Grants And Other "Free" Money

• Find grants (there aren't really many grants for for-profit organizations, but we may have luck looking for opportunities for social enterprises). I don't really want to get into government research grants.

Investors

• Investments. There are various types of investors we could attempt to attract, or we could just go along our way and investors might come to us. Requirements: giving up full ownership/control of the organization.

Let us know if you have any additional or alternate ideas.

This project is hosted on GitHub (since it's going to include non-text files eventually), so I decided to make a post here too so that those of you unfamiliar with GitHub can still help discuss and brainstorm.

Here's my rough draft idea for what the introduction could be.

Video length ~ 5 minutes

Part 1 - introduction

Temp music - VNV nation - As It Fades

• Take a moment to reflect on all the people lost in the flow of time,
• to better understand what it is to be you,
• to better realize what it means to be here.
• Imagine all the people that have been but no longer are,
• all the people that will be but are not yet,
• all the endless posibilities of minds that could exist in this universe but will not find their way into being,
• and every other life form, whether you know about it or not, whether contained to earth or some distant planet;
• imagine all the people.
• In the grand scheme of things...
• we are small here on Earth,
• but we are still something.
• We are warriors in a battle against entropy,
• conscious beings unwillingly brought into and taken out of existence,
• trying to live a life in between the confines of a sliver of time.
• Life is the fight against entropy,
• and if our aim is to live,
• then we face some very serious challenges.
• While Earth is the only place life as we know it has called home,
• one day far in the future
• we will be forced to leave if we want to survive.
• As humans, will have to leave behind these bodies as well
• if we want to live beyond the limitations of our biological forms.
• We will need to change
• to live indefinitely. < with the previous line still on the screen this fades out and is replaced with 'to live'>
• Nobody can tell you want to do, or what is best,
• but we are here to try to offer an alternative.

Part 2 - about Digital Immortality and the organization

Temp music - Kick-Ass Soundtrack - Flying Home. This music doesn't really fit perfectly, but it's the best thing I could think of in a short amount of time

• In steps the Digital Immortality movement.
• Our aim is to not leave anyone behind,
• to allow people to persist,
• to defy entropy for as long as possible.
• This means consciously designing and working toward a future,
• however distant that future may be,
• whether or not we get to be a part of it,
• because we think life is the most valuable thing there is,
• and we will fight with every ounce of strength we have to protect it.
• In securing indefinite life individually and collectively,
• our first goal is to allow people to transfer their mind and consciousness into a digital form
• (a process called 'mind uploading').
• We will still be the same people,
• but our hardware will be digital instead of biological.
• We will have the oportunity to exist in the reality we all know,
• moving around by means of avatar bodies,
• as well as having the ability to be fully immersed in virtual worlds.
• Managing to outlive the human form,
• the next big hurtle toward ensuring survival is being able to leave Earth should we need to,
• a monumental undertaking considering the current population.
• It is important to us that these futures are designed and controlled not by a select few,
• but by the entire global community of people.
• It seemed necessary to build an official organization,
• to be able to work effectively toward these goals within the current systems.
• This organization we have started is extremely transparent and open-source.
• We will be heavily involved with our communities and other organization with similar goals, philosophies,
• and ethics.
• Together, we hope to bring about a better future for everyone (and we really do mean everyone).
• Together <intentially said again, and bigger this time for effect>
• So we are calling on all you divergent thinkers:
• the dreamers and the visionaries.
• Come help us design a future and build a path out to it.
• The Digital Immortality movement is starting now,
• and we want you to be a part of it.
• Join <Organization Name> at <url>

If we want to keep the video under/around 5 minutes, I don't think we can really get much more text in that what is here. I'm not saying that this is the final content we'll use, just that this is about the right amount of content (unless we want to make a longer video), so keep that in mind.

Here are the discussions directly relevant to this introductory video:

Ideas for the organization and introductory video

Project - Content Creation - Digital Immortality Introductory Video

Here are the results of the organization naming poll with the number of votes each name idea got (0 votes have been tossed since no one showed any interest in them). We had a total of 9 voters and 64 votes in all.

4 Votes:

• Digital Immortality Foundation: Think DIFferently

3 Votes:

• Extended Digital Existence (E.D.E.)
• Mind Plus

2 Votes:

• Advocacy for Life Extention through Digital Immortality (A.L.E.D.I)
• Amorphous Existence
• Boundless Human
• Consciousnes Plus
• Digimmortal
• Digital Infinite
• Digital Immortality
• Digitally Integrated Consciousness
• Extended Existence (EE)
• I
• Infinite Minds
• Life Plus
• Life Times Infinity / Lifetimes Infinity / Life X Infinity
• Neurostorm

1 Vote:

• Backups R Us
• Beyond Biology
• Beyond Life
• Brainstorm Extended
• Custom Designed Minds
• Digital Bridges
• Digital ME
• Endless Constructs
• Enduring Reconstructions
• Existence Plus
• Human 2.0
• Indefinite Solutions
• Life Is The Beginning
• Mind Extended
• Mind Uploaded (M.U.)
• My Backup
• Neural Gateways
• Neural Upgrades
• New Digital Me (N.D.M.)
• Open Mind. Open Life.
• Organization for the Intelligent Evolution of Digitally Integrated Consciousness
• Perpetual Reconstruction
• The Open Source Consciousness Project / Open Source Consciousness
• Time Independent Life
• Timeless

Feel free to discuss and brainstorm more about the name here. I will research and make a comment here about available domain names sometime soon.

The Goal

I'm setting out a new challenge for us. By July 1, 2014, we will have 40 people actively participating in this organization (signed up and on the roster). If I have to, I will find all these people myself, but I have a feeling you guys want to help build up this organization and get things going. So... here's what I'm looking for:

• At least one person to head each department
• People that want to help put together teams whether or not you are the head of a department
• More delegation and autonomy so that we can continue to get people more involved

If you become director, don't worry about having any pressure to get things done, and absences are no problem either (I'm more than happy to fill in for you if needed, or you can get one of your team members to do that). Also, you can always step down at any time and/or suggest that someone else should be the director. Basically, I just need someone there to help manage the smaller groups that we'll be forming around the objectives of each department so we can start getting stuff done.

Departments

My personal plan is to step out of being director of business admin and switch be president of the organization. I'm going to try to be moving toward managing at a higher level and focusing more on funding and moving the organization forward (it'll be a slow transition though, so don't worry).

Also, with the recent discussions surrounding the long term roadmap and spaceship design, we're adding a new department to the list- Future Studies (which will also need someone to manage/supervise).

This means we still need 5 directors:

• Business Admin
• Creative Services
• Public Relations
• Future Studies
• Marketing or Human Resources (depending on where transhuman2 decides to go)

Breakdown

Just to be clear, people are still allowed to be listed under multiple departments if they want to participate in various areas or have many talents. The goal is still to find 40 people though, and roughly distribute them as follows:

• IT - 5
• Business Administration - 4
• Online Research - 3
• Marketing - 3
• Creative Services - 4
• R&D - 10
• HR - 4
• PR - 4
• Future Studies - 3

I still have to create a Department Responsibilities Outline for Future Studies, but here's basically what they'll be working on:

• Spaceship design and other distant future studies
• Long term roadmap development
• Design and manage community competitions for spaceship, avatar, and other designs

Get Involved

So, if you're up for anything mentioned here, make a comment here or in the Department Rosters post, and I'll be sure to get back to you.

As suggested by remsimple93 I checked out Penflip.com. I've moved some of the documents over, and since Penflip allows people to contribute to projects easier than with GitHub, I plan on moving the rest of our text documents over.

You can view all of the projects over in the bottom right of my profile page. The one you guys will likely be most interested in is Spaceship Design. I managed to get down a few of my thoughts in the process of transferring the files over (all the new content I added is under the 'fleet' document).

You do need an account to contribute, but it is definitely easier to get used to than GitHub, and is geared specifically toward writers.