Permanent Space Development Foundation

[Mark Prado]

Thanks to the help of Mr. Charles A. Williams, a Revenue Auditor for the State of Kentucky, we set up a nonprofit corporation some time ago which allows us to receive tax deductible donations, and gives us another structure for administration of some of the plans to promote space settlement.

That company is called Permanent Space Development Foundation.

It was set up with some minimal standard paperwork. There was a plan to update the administrational structure at a later date.

Does anybody have any experience setting up custom bylaws, a Board of Directors, etc., for an organization like this? Or willing to research this and help out along these lines?

Mark

[Rhyshaelkan]

I will try to find some information on articles of incorporation, bylaws, electing officials. Awhile back my family and I set up an corporation for tax and investment reasons. During early research we found out that many bylaws can be bizarre, with high levels of eccentricity.

Rules governing dismissing members of the board, adding members of the board, voting percentages, absentee voting, funds disbursement requirements(what percentage of the board must agree on how the funds will be disbursed), whom might have veto powers, levels of directorship, where funds will be held, how corporation assets might be held, sold or traded. Bylaws can be as all inclusive as you desire. As long as they are ratified by those in charge and the signatures notarized.

Bylaws, as a whole, protect the organization as a whole. Only try to be succinct in the bylaws to prevent loopholes. Trust is an great thing, but can be terribly exploited, plan for the worst, hope for the best.

Just my first thoughts on this.

[Sam Fraser]

Foundation, you say?

Warren Buffett has donated another $1.93 billion to five charitable foundations, the third-highest amount since the investor began donating 99 percent of his wealth in 2006.

Following this year's donations, Buffett still held about $43.9 billion of Berkshire stock, or 23.3 percent of the total outstanding, Friday's filing shows.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100702/ts_nm/us_buffett_berkshire_donations

Is anyone thinking what I'm thinking? :D

[moonus111]

John,

I think it's time you get cracking on you letter...

j/k... or am I

[Mark Prado]

We did a project about 10 years ago whereby we researched potential philanthropic investors in order to send them a complimentary copy of the PERMANENT book and solicit a donation. There was a lot of verbal enthusiasm, but in the end very few volunteers ever came up with a good mailing address.

We started with a list of the richest people in the world and then sought to find out which of those were interested in philanthropic causes.

(A volunteer named Steve McCann helped out a lot in many ways.)

In the end, we received two responses -- a very good one from Arthur C. Clarke (who we did not solicit for any donation; that was just so he'd be aware of us), and a nice message back from Tom Hanks' secretary (but never anything back from Hanks himself).

The project eventually died out because only a few volunteers were helping in a systematic and diligent way. Most were just sending cheerleading comments, more or less. What we needed was good addresses. Also, few people helped with the expense, while Sam and I were scraping away trying to make ends meet while working on the website and shipping books at our expense.

The cost for shipping books is not cheap from Thailand, always over $10 each (and these days it's running to nearly $20), whereas surface shipment within the US is cheap -- $1 or $2 ???, so Sam and I saved up a considerable amount of money over time in order to put together a heavy box for bulk shipment of books to a longtime chatty volunteer whose name I won't mention here. (NOT Steve, another guy!) The last we heard from him was his request for us to send him the cost for US mail, along with comments like he was too busy expanding his personal capital (for example, was the latest building a wine cellar in the basement of his home?) ... so after a long time of him on the groupmail circuits, when it came time to actually do something and following up, he went quiet, and we haven't heard back from him in many years since.

Therefore, after that experience, and countless others like it, I think you can see why I don't jump at "good ideas" but look for true commitment to follow up the talk with the walk. (Actually, I've found that asking people to actually DO something significant usually results in their disappearing.)

Creating the letter is easy, and I still have a couple of hundred books left over, still wrapped from the print house. They don't need to be absolutely up to date, since the concepts are the same.

For starters, somebody needs to systematically research all the rich people in the world.

I can create an on-line database whereby we can keep notes on them, and identify those who make philanthropic donations. Actually, that database already exists and is already on-line, just needs a few cosmetic tweaks and add a checkbox for "potential donor" and perhaps a few more fields like "estimated net worth" and "history of known donations" and a way to track comments from contributors like you all, linking a contributor's identity and information on their source to each particular comment. Something like that. I could hire my programmer to add these modifications, and I could clean up the cosmetics myself and allocate usernames and passwords to volunteers here.

However, the main considerations are:

1. Researching the potential donors to get a good mailing address

2. Paying for all these books to be shipped

I'd like some people to commit to paying the cost of shipping a book. Then, do the extra research to make sure we have the best address to ship it to!

So, yes, this is a very good idea and an important project. So, who is willing to do what?

[moonus111]

I think I've got a response for that pessimism, and how to turn it around. I don't want to argue with the big man (Mark Prado), whom I respect a great deal.

I do disagree with the methods. How the internet works is in a collaborative way. We have to give all the thousands of people the freedom to contribute in their own way. Yes the vast majority, and probably almost everyone will cop out when asked to do something. However, if simply asked to talk about the subject they will more likely be wiling because it's much less of a commitment. If told they can do what they want it makes them even more motivated.

So I've been contacting ppl slowly and getting about a 10% response rate. Figuring that in there's probably a 1% commit rate to join us. Then another 1-5% commit rate to a project with specifics. Simply put that means we need numbers, large numbers of people to join. Then these minions, and members generate buzz and in turn generate more members and notes from the "high and mighty captains of industry". That's the way to get investors eye. I have no faith in angle investors, albeit nor faith in individual organizations.

A section of the forum devoted to assailing the internet through promotion, and spreading the word would go a long way towards making it easy to send people here. It would also, help persuade potential investors because there is a significant movement for our cause. It would facilitate getting people on board, and spreading the word. I think that was the reason the forum was started in the first place. It would garner a lot of losers that don't do much other than post sure, but for every 1000 that come and go we get 1 golden boy... if lucky several.

Last Note maybe we could generate buzz by becoming a rubber stamp on things? I think that permanent has a lot of prestige... Partnerships, I do not have the authority to do this, but a partnership would go a long ways toward helping out cause. Permanent is referenced in many places I've seen. I thought there was something on the permanent site about this, but can't find it. If permanent was able to get partnerships with organizations like SpaceX, openluna, etc. It gives us prestige. Even if their goals fail it may become a stamp of approval that space advocacy, and space industry organizations seek.

If we're gonna get this done we have to think outside the box in order to get around this wall.

- the crazy guy on the forum

[Mark Prado]

I always welcome suggestions, criticisms, and anything else appropriate, as long as it's rational and well thought out in advance.

In the case of Moonus' response to my message, the main thing I can say is that I previously had the optimism of Moonus -- the idealism of the internet in raising PERMANENT up. (In fact, it was internet idealism which also caused the big stock market bubble and dot com startups crash of the 1990s!) Experience is what makes the difference between my message and Moonus' optimism, so I wish to share a little bit more of my experience here, which could save Moonus and others a lot of time and effort. I have also covered this issue well on the website. Sam is an eternal optimist, yet Sam shared my experience when he joined me here 10 years ago.

The fact of the matter is that yes, we've had some good volunteers since 1996 (and also since the PERMANENT BBS went up in 1985), but they are less than 1% of the enthusiastic messages. Talk about creating some sort of popular culture movement is a lot easier than getting it started, much less managing it well. Sam and I spent a helluva lot of time trying to develop and manage volunteers, and our initial optimism about the internet and volunteers left us with vast amounts of wasted time and often wasted money, too. It ran us into the ground financially. Try it and you will see all the time it takes managing volunteers, most of whom will flake out when it comes time to implement.

In the early years of volunteers, I would ask people how they would wish to contribute, so they could do so in their own way, as Moonus suggests. Most didn't have much of a clue about what they could do. So I put together a list of things people could do which would be useful to PERMANENT and suggested they choose from the list. A very small percentage did. I even suggested ways. Not that it made much of a difference. That said, those people who did pick out a way on their own often did a very good job. However, that was largely offset by the "high maintenance" people who promised all kinds of grandiose results but then disappeared and came up with nothing, wasting prodigious amounts of my time trying to work with them.

Our experience reflects that of other organizations, too. SSI went dormant for a long time after Dr. O'Neill died prematurely (and I'm afraid exhaustedly). The L-5 Society (of which I was elected Washington, D.C., chapter president about 25 years ago) got over 10,000 members and had a monthly magazine but was always scraping the bottom of the barrel, and eventually the poor administrators essentially sold it out to another organization (despite outrage from L5 chapters), which lost its focus ...

Our goal is not to have thousands of participants and a "society". There are a lot of organizations and societies out there which don't actually get a lot done. (Even the United Nations doesn't get a lot done besides printing a lot of paper.)

The entities which have made it big have done so usually due to one big philanthropic investor -- Bigelow, the many current earth launcher startups ... you can look around and see one big philanthropic investor behind many organizations.

That's what I also saw in nonprofit organizations while in Washington, D.C. -- one big donor being the prime mover -- though the source of their funds was usually their most closely held secret!

We may not get very far with small donations. We don't have a starving and innocent looking third world poster child to appeal to the masses of peoples' hearts to truly open their wallets, to get enough donations. We are trying to appeal to peoples' minds, not their emotions. You don't find many "quasi-technical" organizations rolling in donations, unlike emotion driven ones. Having worked for nonprofits, I am well aware of the difference ...

However, I'm still willing to try both routes -- small donations and large ones. I'm willing to try any route, as well as it's well analyzed in advance.

Small donations actually help us a lot for little things like earmarking the money for a few books to mail from Thailand to potential philanthropic investors which in turn gives volunteers focus for practical work instead of drifting with vague direction, or ordering a key piece of literature such as a conference proceedings which has a lot of work we can integrate into PERMANENT ...

... but the small donations are not enough to go into supporting the staff required for the focused, *continuous* work required to promote PERMANENT effectively, because there simply aren't nearly enough donations. The donations we do get are much better spent on PERMANENT's small expenses in carefully targeted ways. There is no way we could look at any sizeable expenses.

We do need good volunteers, but it's my experience that if there isn't a paycheck at the end of the month, then precious few people will maintain their focus and put in the time, effort, and skill required to do the work properly and *completely*.

I wish somebody would prove me wrong. However, I have seen a lot of organizations flounder which initially looked promising, over the past 25 years. Those which have prospered often had one major philanthropic investor. (Some had a Hollywood sponsor.)

Look how long it took the X-Prize to raise its money -- years, and at high expense to Dr. Peter Diamandis and his amazing team. Finally, they got their philanthropic investor (Ansari).

So, my plan is to:

1. Continue developing the library (paper library in my house as well as electronic library) and databases of technical research and development reports which form the business/financial modeling and engineering basis of PERMANENT and also give us a database of proven competent professionals who can be called on when the time comes,

2. Continue ordering and reading all this literature in item #1 myself so that at least I understand the best ways to implement PERMANENT (just like I do in my other professional work, keeping up on the state of the art, performing much higher quality work than normal, and being among the first to pursue strategically key ways),

3. Develop a bootstrapping business plan,

4. Develop a database of philanthropic investors.

It is items #1 and #4 and item which people here can help on.

Actually, we need some donations from item 4 before we can really do item 3 well enough, but we also need a database of potential contributors, from professionals with the requisite Real World experience.

We can do items #1 and #2 now ... because I can continue to afford those things out of my pocket, from my own business ... in view of the reality that we've had donation buttons on our website for a year now and not one donation yet, albeit lots of transient enthusiastic emails.

If you want to bring in enthusiastic volunteers, then I want to ask you: What do you want them to do, which would be useful?

I have some old lists of things volunteers can do. Develop databases of journalists who cover space and/or technology as it relates to human affairs, including their contact info, so we can contact them. Translating the PERMANENT website into one's native language (Russian, German, Japanese, whatever), in part or in whole. Other things as well. There are lots of things volunteers can do ... if they just would.

Journalists have always been particularly interesting as part of outreach. We've occasionally gotten surges on our website from that. It's a channel that seems worthy of perseverance.

However, there needs to be a plan on how to manage any and all volunteers, and *quickly* vetting them, starting with a list of things they can do.

Suggestions for that list are welcome here. You can also absorb my list on the website.

I will not be working on attracting volunteers at this time, so somebody else would need to do that.

The databases above have already cost me well over $1000 in programmer fees (Thai rates) over the past several months, and between working on those databases and also working on my business so that I can pay for them, I don't have time to be vetting volunteers like I did 10-25 years ago. Besides, maybe somebody else can do it more effectively than I can.

PERMANENT has run me several thousand dollars over the past year. This forum software alone cost me $150 but compared to the freeware alternatives, it saves me a lot of valuable time and I have a lot more confidence in a commercial operation to be plugging the security holes and supporting & developing their product over the long haul. How many freeware software packages did we run in the past which went by the wayside ...

There is a lot of promotion of "open source" projects, and I'm a supporter of that. I use the open source Linux operating system. I set up an open source Wiki for development (but nobody followed up on it ...). I would like PERMANENT to have some open source engineering design alternatives.

However, unlike software, which is immediately useful for a wide variety of applications, especially the most trivial ones ... open source engineering and business plans like PERMANENT are an entirely different kind of "open source" project ...

Speaking of donations, small ones would cover the international shipping costs of lots of reports and books from the USA and around to Thailand.

... and I know these costs are endless, but they are substantial progress in small increments. It may be a brick at a time, but it's solid progress.

If somebody else has the time to recruit, vet and manage volunteers as a first responder on the front lines, that would be useful, and also allow me to focus my limited time and resources on forwarding PERMANENT in the substantial ways which I think will eventually get us there.

But I need to see plans and processes, not just vague goals.

[Mark Prado]

I'd like to add that having run my own overseas businesses successfully, including a business division which advises others how to create a startup business in Thailand (akin to a remote frontier from a western perspective) and helping them along the way, I can often spot from the start whether or not a person or a business will be successful. It requires a combination of things. However, skills alone won't work. What is often lacking is a thoroughly analyzed plan, experience, and perseverance. You can gain some kinds of experience along the way, and you can gain from others' experience when they convey it, but you'd better have a thoroughly analyzed plan and the trait of perseverance.

I actually look for the same in vetting volunteers as well as potential employees and strategic partners.

(By the way, anybody out there want to do import/export business with us?)

However, I've tried banking too long on volunteers in the 1990s.

The philanthropic investor route came this century, after many years of internet idealism about the potential of volunteers worldwide panned out nothing.

Notably, there's a reason why many big aerospace firms are named after an individual -- Boeing, McDonnell Dougless, Rockwell, Lockheed, Hughes ... because those guys had enouigh seed money to get started. (I don't have the kind of money those guys had to start up, nor do I have the ego or vanity to put my name on it. So stick to "PERMANENT", the meaningful message, not the messenger!)

That's why we started the Permanet Space Development Foundation -- to try to raise enough seed money.

However, I think the most successful route is *probably* a philanthropic investor.

We haven't ruled out other ways, though, if somebody is really willing to work on them.

Of course, we are an internet collaborative organization, and always will be, one way or another in this networked age. However, at some point, we must send hardware out to asteroids near Earth and/or the moon ... and I don't think we can do that with volunteers and small donations.

Nonetheless, the volunteers and small donations can actually be a key to raising us to the next level where we can attract a philanthropic investor or serious support otherwise. Every dollar is appreciated, and the person behind that dollar. The same applies for useful work. I'd rather get the useful work than the money at this stage, but if people aren't going to put in useful work then at least they could do something quick like put in a little bit of money.

[moonus111]

I have an axiom I live by: "Festina lente", latin, translation: "Make haste slowly" I'm gonna have to digest that material for a while.

Good stuff!

[moonus111]

I thought it through and I think I get it. Basically we're trying to build a brand, not a movement? I think it would make sense this way.

[Mark Prado]

We need to build both a brand and a movement. A movement needs a name, so the name is the brand name.

By the way, your YouTube video is absolutely awesome!! I just now saw it for the first time. Very professionally done -- the graphics, the voice over, and the script.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvL0tOd-pys

[joertexas]

By the way, your YouTube video is absolutely awesome!! I just now saw it for the first time. Very professionally done -- the graphics, the voice over, and the script.



If I may chime in here - Logan's work is awesomely good - if that's even a word :-)

JR

[JohnHunt]

Let me 3rd that motion.

Excellent video Logan. Fast moving, fun...compelling.

I am looking forward to see how many hits it gets and hopefully it will bring people to this forum.

This is a movement. We could use all of the interest and help possible. I think that your video can get us exposure we otherwise wouldn't get.

Good work!

[sgeos]

I'm not convinced that actively pursuing a philanthropic investor is actually the best use of your time and energy. Nor am I convinced managing volunteers is either.

If your project is not immediately generating revenue, that means that it is not immediately useful. This does not mean that it will not eventually be useful or generate revenue. I think that finding something PERMANENT related that immediately generates enough revenue to put food on the table should be your top priority. If and when you manage to do this, you will be in a position to devote 100% of your time to PERMANENT.

Henry Ford noted three things that can be done with the profits a business generates. The obvious thing to do is to pay the owners. The owners of a business accept a lot of risk when they front the capital to get it started, and it makes sense to compensate them for it. Paying the owners is actually sub-optimal for the business. What Ford did instead, is he paid his workers more. He got all the best labor in the market and his shop was very motivated. Unfortunately, the end result what that he simply bid up the price of labor in the auto market. After the competitors adjusted their salaries and people got used to the high wages, the workers were no longer super motivated. (Note that the high wages must have served to divert some competent individuals away from other industries and into the auto industry.) Paying the help more can be a good idea for a company, but it is not necessarily optimal. After the labor experiment, Ford realized that instead of investing in the help, he could reinvest in the business itself. This is usually the optimal way to grow a business, to the extent the owners and employees are content with what the business is kicking in their direction.

If you get to the point where you can divert 100% of your energy into PERMANENT, and there are profits to grow the business, you are in a position to eventually grow into self funding an asteroid mining mission. Obviously, it would take a very long time, perhaps multiple lifetimes, to build up the requisite capital on your own. However, to the extent you are turning a profit, this inspires confidence and it should be easier to attract investors, including the elusive philanthropic investor you seek.

Often times very rich people create foundations to donate money to so they do not have to give it to the tax man. Personally, I think their courage in evading those who would plunder their wealth is a wonderful thing, but the upshot is that their money is not up for grabs. Often enough foundations are simply a way for wealthy people to maintain control of their wealth. This is one reason why the identity of the philanthropic investor is a heavily guarded secret.

You'll need to convince your philanthropic investor to give their money to you instead of giving back to themself in the form of a foundation. If you are turning a profit doing PERMANENT related work, I think that passively attracting a philanthropic investor should be a lot easier.

Just my two cents.

[joertexas]

For me, I have another project that I've been promoting for some time. So far, though, I've not been able to find an investor.

JR

[JohnHunt]

Hi sgeos,

Thanks for your thought-provoking input.

One simple income source for PERMANENT could be the sale of inflatables. From my post here (http://www.forumlog.com/nanobiotechnologyspace/showthread.php?t=445&highlight=inflatable) you will see that I am in the process of making a full-scale replica of a Falcon 1 rocket. All I am needing is a bit of time (and luck) and I'll be the only guy on the block with his own Falcon 1 sitting in his yard! How much is the envy (or puzzlement) of neighbors worth??? If we could develop a durable form then perhaps some businesses would want a rocket ouside urging people to "Let _____ take your business to new heights"!

Would the income be enough to pay someone full-time to work for PERMANENT? Maybe, maybe not. But even if it gets us part-way there, it could open the way to developing new revenue streams.

I am also working on a costume for a robonaut. I got two iron man masks and put them back to back. It's a learning process to be sure. I used some stuco-type stuff to fill in parts of the mask but then it lost its glossy texture when I sprayed on gold paint. I found a long-sleve shirt and some white gloves but it will take more work to make it a convincing replica of the real thing. The gold visor is the most difficult part. A market for a Robonaut 2 costume? Pretty small is my guess. But then I'm really working on it as part of the highschool space event concept which I proposed.