From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Sat Jan 16 1999 - 00:12:00 MST
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.
This helps, to vent the frustration, for the first 30 seconds or so.
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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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
Extropy Online <http://www.extropy.org/eo/index.htm>
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