From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 06:25:50 MST
It has occurred to me, as I spiral through my various endeavors, that
there's actually quite a large potentially transhumanist online community
out there. There are a number of groups that churn out a healthy amount of
content via mailing lists, forums and websites. There is a fair degree of
isolation between different special interest groups with high transhumanist
cross-over (or cross-over potential), since most are e-mail based. The point
of separate lists is so that people don't get overwhelmed, after all.
I fall into the category of people who think that if you can sort out a way
to make a bunch of like-minded people talk to each other, leaders and
actions tend to follow on as a natural consequence. More people in the group
directly correlates to better and more effective leaders and actions. I also
think that getting people who have been in previously remote tribes together
produces interesting results rapidly.
I also fall into the category of people who thinks that selling/raising
awareness of transhumanism (and life extension -- I will admit to being very
much life extension first, other transhuman issues second...solve the
problem that's going to kill you before the rest of them, IMHO) is as
important at this stage as working or funding transhumanist technologies.
Money spent on raising awareness and creating demand/desire is a seed
investment in generating monies that will flow into transhumanist
technology. Few entities would be more effective at direct action than they
would in creating the atmosphere that induces many other entities to take
direct action.
So I think that some form of technological community integration tool would
be very beneficial to the transhuman community at this time. The integration
between ExI boards and mailing lists is a first step in that direction, from
a technology point of view. What I have in mind would be something of the
"all places are one place" ilk:
1) Any forum or mailing list can opt into participation
2) A central server receives all posts to that forum/mailing list and stores
them for client retrieval
3) A client is loosely integrated with each forum/mailing list: it retrieves
new posts from the central server and inserts them appropriately. I have a
fairly loose client-end-controlled scheme in mind for this that deals with
the common issues in mail/forum integration and cross-posting
(conversational timing differences, desirability of list restrictions, edge
cases, etc).
This sort of arrangement can be set up without treading on toes; from the
point of view of a forum operator, it's free (and as on-topic as it gets)
traffic. There is no central other place that's benefiting without doing the
work to get a community (the central server #2 isn't a forum or list
itself). Anyone who wants to run a transhumanist forum site can just jump in
and have their users become part of the larger space. Traffic like that is
also a very slick tool for spreading our reach to more mainstream science
and futurism sites. Community is an envied property in the business and
pseudo-business web world, and so far as I see, we have everything to gain
by giving it away.
I've chatted with a couple of people in the space who seem to agree with me
that this is a good idea in principal. Certainly, there are few enough high
traffic locales at the moment that custom-fitting instances of #3 above
wouldn't be too onerous. It's a project that can proceed at its own rate,
site by site once the planning is done.
Feel free to comment. If any of the technical types can identify existing
open source projects that would fit the bill, that would be interesting to
note too. I suspect I'll be building it from scratch, however, once my Q1
obligations are out of the way and assuming I get buy-in from the relevant
people.
Speaking of buy-in, this would be a good time to hear any major objections,
to -- say -- a hypothetical integration of communities from:
betterhumans.com
crsociety list
cryonet list
ExI BBS
extropians list
imminst.org
longevitymeme.org
wta-talk list
transhumantech list
into something that's very much more tied together than it is now. (I should
note I haven't talked to the owners of most of them...this is just being
thrown out there).
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
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