Extropian projects and popularity - call for action.

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In many of the non-profit projects that I get involved in, there arise typical problems - coming, I guess, from some common features:

• difficulty to explain the project to many people, as it is usually highly technical, relatively obscure (can't show it to a large audience)
• lack of funds
• difficulty in managing a diverse group of people who may sympathize with the goals of the project, but are too busy to push it forward.
• probably a bunch of other common factors [?]

There are two basic approaches to this problem as I see it.

1. Whine and complain that normal people are too stupid to understand great ideas, and smart people are too depressed and/or selfish and/or unreliable to implement them.

2. Realize that the world is imperfect (that's good, isn't it, what

would we do in a perfect world? Or in the world whose imperfections would be beyond our understanding?) and do something about it.

I would like to suggest some ideas on this last one.

The crucial thing I think is visibility, from the very beginning. You want to find people who would help you do the work, criticize your approach, donate money, test the results, etc.

One way to do this is gaining high visibility on the Web. A service that I have been happily using recently, is Clicktrade - originally an idea of our fellow extropian, Scott Banister. It allows you to _buy_ visitors for your website for as little as 1 penny. An investment of $100 dollars, and a modest link (e.g. "visionary socially responsible projects" will bring you 10,000 visitors that hopefully (and actually, in my experience with my own site) will make this investment worthwhile.

We can also create a Frontier Projects web page. This page would list a number of good projects, describing for each the goal, the approach, contact info, and call for participation.

This could go beyond extropian projects. Awhile ago, I stopped giving money to any "good causes", thinking that it would be humiliating to decide that the best way I could use my resources for social good is to pass these resources to someone else. So instead I can spend my resources on the projects that I work on myself. I am sure there are other people who feel like this, and there are more people who would like to contribute to a visionary project that can actually take the world forward than toss their money down the seemingly bottomless pit of the traditional attempts to alleviate problems of backward social structures.

So my first two suggestions are:

• Create the [Great/Extropian/Frontier] Projects website
• collect some seed money for advertising this Projects site, and also other visionary sites - Extropian and TH pages, Global Bank of Ideas, etc.

Maybe, after applying visionary PR methods, we'll turn the most visionary projects on the planet into the most popular ones?

I have more meta-project ideas, but first I think we should address the above issues.

Or maybe you see other issues, and other solutions?

Meanwhile, is there anybody with some HTML skills and/or a few extra dollars and a will to use them to promote worthy causes?

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