CSTART’s roadmap for the upcoming months

CSTART is very excited to announce that it is gearing up for a period of intense organizational activity.  A lot has been happening on the CSTART scene of late, we have received a lot of new members and also a lot of excellent advice and ideas on how to proceed in our ambitious goals.  We hope to act on this advice soon, and the purpose of this post is to outline a lot of the things we hope to tackle in the near future.  We’d like to get as much of what is listed here done by the end of March, and to have all of it done by the end of April!  It will be a time of considerable change, for the better.

First and foremost, we will be returning our full attention to the long-neglected task of becoming a non-profit corporation.  If we choose to incorporate in the United States, the ultimate goal of this effort will be 501(c)(3) tax-exempt certification, so that donations to CSTART will be tax deductible.  The CSTART community contributed very generously last year to raise funds for this effort, and we hope to finally put this money to good use some time very soon.  This will be one of our top priorities for this month.  Once incorporation has been achieved, work can begin on dissolving the current temporary leadership system of acting directors taking on the role of “benevolent dictators” and replacing it with a proper organizational hierarchy, with responsibilities and powers clearly outlined and controlled by formal bylaws.

We also hope to start selling CSTART merchandise soon.  We have spent some time looking at various online store options for this, and we are close to making a final choice (Zazzle.com is looking like a very likely contender at present).  Once this choice is made you should expect to see CSTART tshirts and the like become available in short order.  Naturally, all money raised from the sale of these items will be used to finance further CSTART activities.

Several of our most recent members bring solid experience in graphics, animation, film and related fields to the CSTART community, and there is a lot of excitement at the prospect for both much higher quantities and a much higher quality of online promotional material in the near future.

In addition to the above changes to the team’s legal status and outside appearance, we are also aiming for a major overhaul in our internal organisation.  The process by which plans for CSTART’s projects have developed so far has been extremely ad hoc and informal, and while some great work has been done in this manner, the system is really starting to fray at the edges.  Some parts of the website (like the Wiki) have shown a tendency to get out of date with respect to other parts (like the forums, and documents in our Mercurial repository), new comers to CSTART have had a difficult time getting up to speed on the current state of things, and recent ideas in the forum have made it apparent that we have no clear process for handling the parallel development of different approaches to a project.  Thus we will be devoting a lot of effort in the coming few months to developing some clearly defined, formal processes for project management, data managment and making engineering decisions in an informed, documented fashion.  We will also be both installing and developing open source software to support these processes.  It will be challenging to find a workable system that sits on the fine line between having projets fall apart due to disorganisation and stifling development with overbearing administrative processes, but we will do our best.

These are just some of the most important items on a long list of things we hope to turn our attention to in the immediate future.  Naturally, all of the changes above will happen in the most open and transparent manner possible.  A large IRC meeting in the #cstart channel on the Freenode network is being planned for an upcoming weekend to help facilitate this work: once the date and time of this meeting is decided it will be published in this blog so that any interested people from the community can come along and either offer their advice or opinions, or just watch to see how things work.

Of course, once these organizational issues are sorted out, the community will return its energy to working on our established projects, which are progressing very nicely indeed.

The acting directors of CSTART express their gratitude to all the members of our community who have offered their time, skills and money to help get CSTART off the ground, and look forward to the community’s continued input, help and support as CSTART continues to grow and evolve into the future of space exploration.  Thank you for believing in us!