"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> Does anyone know where I can find accounts of the very early history of
> the Extropy Institute, Foresight Institute, or any similar
> organizations? Who founded it, the size of the initial group, how they
> were incorporated, where the early funders were found (if any), what
> tasks the Institutes performed, what type of volunteer work was
> involved, how they found volunteers, at what point they were
> incorporated as nonprofits, the text of their charters?
You can find that information for STHF/Aleph at http://www.aleph.se/Aleph/historia.html and http://www.aleph.se/aleph.html although it is in Swedish.
In our case, the association began as a mailing list run by Felix Ungman, where we discussed transhumanism-related stuff. People joined in because they heard about it from friends, through the swedish young scientist association or found it on the net. Eventually we decided to make it a real association, and in 1996 it was formally founded as a nonprofit organisation. Since then we have held social meetings, written our handbook, organized courses and seminars, organized TransVision and gone to various conferences. Overall, most things run through volunteer work, which keeps costs down but makes progress slow. This is why we are currently implementing Aleph as a separate organisation from STHF, a for-profit mini-think tank intended to stimulate transhuman activity by giving members a chance to earn money on writing and teaching.
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y