My plans for the future of my involvement in CSTART | Welcome Center | Forum

This doesn't really belong in the "Welcome Center", but it seems to fit here better than anywhere else in the forums.

As most of you do not need to be told, since this whole endeavour started on /r/tothemoon, I have devoted a huge amount of my time and energy to CSTART.  I literally post on the forums every single day (393 posts since Nov 12, more than 10 posts a day on average!), have contributed extensively to the Wiki and have written a few simulation programs.  The whole experience has been a tremendously fun and educational and has rekindled my childhood fascination with space.  When I let myself get a little carried away I can actually imagine that when working on CSTART I'm doing something that may become a significant part of history one day.

I don't say all of this to try to make myself look smarter or more dedicated than the rest of you, I say all this to help underscore the main point of this post, which is that frankly my level of involvement in CSTART is becoming something of a problem for me.

I am not the kind of person who can naturally balance lots of things at once in my life, swapping the main focus of my attention between different tasks as different deadlines demand it: I'm more the kind of person who gets absorbed in one thing to exclusion of most others and changes focus only with some of effort.  Because I am a PhD student with a scholarship rather than a person with a "real job", I can afford to devote a lot of time to side projects like CSTART without immediate consequences, and I've done that to the point where it's now something of an obsession.  I find myself staying up quite late in my timezone to catch the first forum posts of the day by Northern hemisphere members, and sometimes I check the forum with my laptop after waking up before even getting out of bed.  I've already basically sapped all of my enthusiasm for my research (which I usually enjoy) and transferred it to CSTART, so that doing what I actually get paid to do now feels like a chore.  Plus, I think my wife is probably getting a little tired of my answers to "What are you thinking?" always being about rockets and orbits and non-profit corporate law…

Obviously I can't afford to keep this up, for my own sake.

I said a lot earlier in this whole ordeal (whether on /r/tothemoon or these forums I can't remember) that I planned to eventually limit my involvement mostly to the CLLARE Navigation and Guidance Workgroup, but was going to work on everything else as well in the beginning until the project got to the point where there were details, momentum and members enough that I could feel confident that by retreating into the corner of NGW I wouldn't be hurting the project as a whole (this was around the time when a few people couldn't post for a few days for whatever reasons and the whole project basically ground to a halt, so I was quite worried about backing off any time too soon).  At that time I imagined that we would reach that point fairly soon. 

While we have done a lot of excellent work since then and do have (I feel) more momentum and details than we did then, we haven't picked up a lot of new members, at least not ones who have stuck around – still 95% of the posts each day are by the "original team" of myself, Rocket, brmj, Rizwan and rpulkrabek (this is not meant to discourage people like johnnyping, noumena and squid who are helping and have done more than just introduce themselves).  Plus, while we have worked out more details, we've also expanded our scope and project list to the point that now there are lots of new details for me to fret about, like a lot of details to do with incorporation, bylaws, voting etc.

I'm starting to think that for the sake of getting my life a little more in balance and on track with things that I can't afford to mess up (like my studies and marriage), rather than waiting until I feel like all the important big details of CSTART have been taken care of (which could be a long time), I should set an actual hard date.

So, I plan to scale my involvement in CSTART back from my current quite insane levels starting from January 01, 2010.  Rather than going cold turkey, I will try to slowly tune things down during the leadup to that date.

To be clear, I'm not actually going away or anything like that.  I still very much want to be a part of CSTART.  I will follow the organization and our projects as a whole with interest, and plan to make small monthly donations as long as I can afford it.  I just won't follow everything in fine detail like I do now, won't be able to spare lots of hours in one day to write simulations, and will work primarily in CLLARE NGW.  I will probably take an approach like this:

• Subscribe to the CLLARE NGW subforum RSS feed and check it daily and participate in it regularly (though not as regularly as I do things currently).
• Subscribe to the CLLARE forum group RSS feed and skim over everything once a week or so to keep abreast of the project and comment occasionally when I think I can say something of particular value.
• Manually check up on OHKLA and general CSTART org stuff every now and then as time allows.

I'm afraid there's no way for now that I can realistically think about taking any board or officer positions once we incorporate, although I would be happy to go on the certificate of incorporation as an initial director, since that just involves being present at the first meeting where we formalise the bylaws etc. and appoint the first "proper" directors/officers.

For the rest of this year, I want to focus most of my energy on making sure that I can feel as good as possible about slowing down and backing off a bit come 2010 – this means making sure we don't lose our momentum on incorporation/bylaw issues, and also making sure that by the end of this year we have made official contact with Copenhagen Suborbitals, PSAS and TeamFrednet so that we have a promising source of new members and new information, and hopefully get a few links to cstart.org up at other websites.

I hope everyone understands why it's important for me to slow down a bit and nobody is too disappointed by this.  I've really enjoyed throwing myself into this full throttle.  It hasn't even been two months since the first post to /r/askreddit which started this whole thing and look how far we have come!  CSTART is a wonderful testament to how much can be achieved in a short time using the internet and human ambition.

This is the reason that I have often been an advocate of really getting on the ball to recruit new members as opposed to polishing our plan. We are to the point when we need more people just so that this can function without overwhelming ourselves. Having a solid core of 20-25 members who are as active as the current top 5 would be a lean yet effective group who could really tackle some issues.

I agree with this sentiment wholehartedly – we badly need more people and our plans are polished enough now that I think prospective new members can see us for the first time and take us seriously.   This is why I am keen now to forge ahead with Friends of CSTART (or whatever) before I step back, since making ourselves known to other groups of interested people who are better known than we are will be a good way to attract new quality members.

With regards to establishing real physical groups, this is probably a good idea too.  Unfortunately, the university year in Australia is over now (we have our long summer break betwen academic years from December to early March) so now would be a terrible time for me to try to recruit people.  However, when the 2010 academic year starts up I might approach some lecturers for final year engineering/physics classes about the possibility of giving a quick 5 minute plug for CSTART at the beginning of one of the early lectures (it's not unusual for student clubs at my university who are trying to boost their membership to do this, most lecturers do not mind as long as it is quick).  This may help to get us a few new members.

Thanks a lot for your kind words, once again I've really enjoyed helping to get this project off the ground.

Hats off to you Luke for putting in your complete soul to project. I understand it is necessary to balance life and hobbies.

Same case with me. I do read all the posts, but I am unable to contribute anything worthy because of time commitments.

Like others have suggested, we should start recruiting. Creating a topic on reddit when most of our regular members would be available and upvoting the hell out of it should help.

Well, the fated day has arrived!

While I still intend to tone down my involvement a bit this year, comparaed to the past few months of madness, I think that a complete narrowing of my attention to NGW is probably premature at this point.  I'll be keeping my eyes on MPW and SEW as well for at least another month since interesting and important work is happening there at present.