A call to arms | General | Forum

Post edited 1:19 am – December 7, 2009 by Luke Maurits

Here are my thoughts for where we should be focusing our efforts over the next few days.  Most of the ideas here ocurred to me overnight before Rocket had made his post to /r/pics, so depending on how much attention that gets us it may be too late for this proposal to make a lot of sense, but we'll see how things go (this isn't meant to be an attack on you, Rocket!  You had no way of knowing I was thinking this).

I think two important things have happened to our group just recently.

1. We have pretty much hit the limit of our real expertese.  We have a lot of smart, dedicated people here who have probably already learned a lot through our preliminary work.  We now seem to have two projects, at least one of them quite sensible and achievable.  We don't have  all the details filled in yet, but we know what details we need.  There are people out there who have forgotten more than we know about the next steps we have to take, so now might be a good time for us to redirect some effort from doing technical work ourselves to recruiting.
2. We seem to have hit upon a mission statement that seems popular, and a model for how the NPO will work with funding which seems popular.  We have talked quite a bit about what our by-laws will feel like, it feels like the rough skeleton is there.  I feel like we have really established a shared sense of identity and purpose in these past few days of hard work.  We also now have two people with legal knowledge and experience advising us on the incorporation process. and we have a decent bit of money to put toward that process.

Having hit these two points at roughly the same time, I think we should focus on getting CSTART organised and polished to the point where we are almost "ready for launch".

At the moment, while we have done a lot of fantastic work, we are a bit disorganised.  If a huge crowd of people, like Reddit, where to discover us just now, they would find:

• Important pages on the Wiki like the Mission statement, Design philosophy and Social contract would be partially fleshed-out dot point drafts with spelling errors, etc. and would be completely open to editing by anybody who just came along.
• The CLLARE Wiki pages are a little bit behind our most recent forum discussions (they still talk about a CM-SM system, etc).
• The "main page" material (i.e. not Wiki or forum) makes no reference to OHKLA at all, explicitly callling CLARE our only project.
• There is probably a general lack of consistency between material on the "main page" of cstart.org and in the Wiki.
• There is no general way to give money.

I think people would still be excited and think we are cool, but this is not quite an optimal first impression.  I think we should focus ourselves over the next few days on:

• Getting the mission statement, design philosophy and social contract pages polished to the point where everyone is happy with them; everything should be expanded upon, spell checked, etc, good to go.  Then we should lock the Wiki pages to admins only – these are not things that should be modifiable on a whim.  Ideally, the bylaws of the NPO should restrict the circumstances under which they can be changed.
• Changing the "about us", "FAQ" text etc. on the main page to be fully consistent with these locked in key documents, and link to them wherever appropriate.
• Getting all the CLLARE and OHKLA wiki pages fully in line with the latest thinking on the forums (but probably not locking them, at least not most of them)
• Making sure things like how the group will operate with regards to the board, money, etc. clear and easy to understand.  Make sure the basic statements of CLLARE and OHKLA goals are clear and easy to understand and make us look sane.  The average geek has heard of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize and is probably vaguely aware of Virgin Galactic.  They simply have not heard of  people like CSXT, Copenhagen Suborbital, or commercial efforts like Armadillo Aerospace, Masden Space Systems, Rocket Labs, etc.  They probably don't know about the various lunar lander/rover related prizes.  Space is still mostly for governments and megacorpos only in their eyes.  We need to make it clear to people who are not space geeks that CSTART is not entirely pie in the sky, it is a bold continuation of an established trend.
• Working our asses off to get the NPO on track, which means actually drafting by laws to cover all the things we have spoken about.  The sooner we can incorporate (not necessarily be 501(c)(3)) the sooner we can open a CSTART bank account which means the sooner we can start accepting donations and selling shirts, mugs, etc.  It would be really good if it was easy and obvious how to assist CSTART financially upon first arriving at our site.

Ideally, we should get as much of this done as possible before we make ourselves too well known to both crowds like Reddit and other groups like us, like Copenhagen Suborbitals.

What do people think?