8 replies to this topic

[Mind]

Last night on the Sunday Evening Update I did a little review of how things went in 2008 for Imminst and when I wrote it all down I was pretty amazed, and you should be as well. Throughout the last couple of years, ever since Bruce Klein left (sort-of) to pursue AGI (a worthy pursuit with a potentially big pay-off for life extension), people kept asking me what is Imminst doing? What is Imminst accomplishing? People complained about the name. People were weary of past internal politics. There were a ton of ideas floating around but no action. Well, in 2008 Imminst finally moved ahead with many new projects and outreach efforts. It might have seemed like a glacial pace at times, but momentum is now in our favor.

1. Imminst hired an Executive Director - first paid position in 6 years of existence. Will continue into 2009. The largest regular expense of the Institute, but well worth it considering how things have moved ahead in 2008.

2. New forums. New functionality. Applications such as the wiki, blogs, and calendar. Many thanks to Bruce for putting some long hours in last November and December. Kamil at Helldesign was also instrumental in this process.

3. New front page. Not ideal since it is not directly linked to the IPB software, however it is a nice fresh look for new visitors to the Institute and the Institute has received many compliments throughout the year. Many thanks to Richard for his help in updating the front page throughout the year.

4. Sunday night IRC chats evolved into the Sunday Evening Update program. This is still a homegrown amatuer effort but we have been able to book a surprising amount of high profile guests throughout the year. This has more potential and hopefully can be improved and promoted more heavily in 2009.

5. Regular meetings at the Sunday Evening Update channel: see here. Thanks to Eric for getting these things going and keeping people aware of them. Attendance is growing and these will be a useful tool in 2009 as well.

5a. Weekly open Board meetings occurred throughout the year. The first time the Institute has ever made an effort at Board meetings. Very beneficial. Many thanks to Caliban for attending and making these quite fruitful.

6. The F@H prize - begun April 1st. TLM is now in the top 100!!! Nuf' said. check here for more. Big thanks to dnamechanic and many others.

7. Aubrey De Grey comes to Madison. An event organized by Imminst members.

8. Imminst sponsored UABBA. Large attendance by Imminst members. Information here and here.

9. Imminst sponsored Convergence08. Had a booth there. Had an Imminst meeting. Good exposure. The Institute will most likely break even on cost.

10. Approved $2,000 in scholarship money for MFURI. Imminst members have been the first people leading the way in MFURI research. Weekly MFURI meetings are also held at Ustream.

11. Back end improvements. Structure for supporting paid staff (tax reporting, accounting software) was set-up. Membership list was refined. Many thanks to Richard Leis for all of his accounting work in 2008.

12. The name change discussion, while not getting anywhere, did spur a lot of discussion and brought a lot of members out of the wood work. As a results of the discussion, AgeVivo has set up some new portals for spreading the meme, such as Longecity.com. Imminst members are also branching out to reach a new audience. DidierC, S123, JML, and others are working on an organization called Heales to bring the life extension meme to French speaking areas of Europe.

13. Imminst members/leaders former and present continue to be instrumental in the development and research efforts at the Methuselah Foundation.

14. Helping members began. Imminst members/users have shown great capacity for caring and charity.

15. The Imminst forums continue to be the most active and informative life extension forums on the net. Keep up the good work everyone.

16. Other ideas. Eric has come up with a huge list of potential projects.

At the beginning of the year, Caliban thought that Imminst could fade away and it would not matter to the life extension community. At the end of this year he stated that Imminst is now instrumental piece of the puzzle. I agree.

Let's work together and make 2009 even bigger!

[brokenportal]

I noticed. I finally found a place like imminst back in 2003 with my wheels spinning and hoped to grip in and take off here, but it didnt work. The site was to new, not enough active members, some people didnt have enough beleif in the life extension community to get this done, there werent enough resources, we hadnt all developed our mindsets fully yet even. I always considered myself proud to be supporting the cause by being an imminst member, but I only posted like twice a month. Even then, I thought imminsts speed was progress, and it was, more progress than none, a book, documentary and small conference came out of it, it was good. Now we have a modest amount of regular activity, but its a lot more than it ever was. Its hard to notice though unless you actively compare it relatively. I think a big part of that is the increase in active members. The seeds imminst has planted so diligently are sprouting and I think the harvest of the coming year is going to be all that and more.

The best part I like about this surge is that it leads to the next big surge, and I think the next big surge is going to help take us all the way to being fully mainstream, and on the world stage, or at least the stage of many nations.

We needed this, its coming along great. Its kind of almost right on time, it seems like the right time to me, like things are coming along on schedule. Any later though and it starts pushing it. As we all know this is a time sensative cause. Now, like a lot of people have been saying, is the time to grip in and put your weight in to this momentum. Theres a very real chance for it to slow down and stall. We can not afford that at all in any way whatsoever. I know we can keep this going, and I plan to continue to help everybody rally people and blow the trumpets and usher people in and hang up signs and help gives speeches and call news organizations and get people volunteering and helping and talking about this until every battle ship and every Higgins boat is filled and ready to go.

If we stall we will all die, if we put our all into this then glory and the universe and the incredible things continuously unfolding ever more and more on grander and grander scales awaits us. The choice seems clear to me.

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Edited by brokenportal, 24 December 2008 - 02:31 AM.

[Live Forever]

Awesome! When you put it down on a list like that it really is impressive.

Of course there are lots of minor accomplishments that haven't risen to the importance of a place on a list like that, but are still important, such as:
1. The blogs that people have been contributing to (although I suppose this is a subsection of the new forum software); It might be good to get them more prominence (show up in active topics, or front page or something) in the future to encourage contributions
2. Media (such as Mind's appearance on Wiretap, & Aubrey on bloggingheads); It would be great to increase our media exposure on podcasts/radio shows/etc.
3. Various unofficial ways of keeping things up to date/spreading the word like updating relevant pages on wikipedia, YouTube vids, etc.

These are just off the top of my head, but I am sure there are lots more minor stuff that goes on which our membership is a part of that helps out in various ways. Keep up the good work!

[brokenportal]

Ive been chatting with Dreem Weaver about blogs. He thinks he may be able to help launch imminst blogs into the google top page for searches. Thats one of many other sprouting ideas to add to a possible list of goals for 09. Our teams network is working on getting a variety of other projects fully going. Im sure many reasonable goals can be plotted out from there too.

[Live Forever]

Ive been chatting with Dreem Weaver about blogs. He thinks he may be able to help launch imminst blogs into the google top page for searches. Thats one of many other sprouting ideas to add to a possible list of goals for 09. Our teams network is working on getting a variety of other projects fully going. Im sure many reasonable goals can be plotted out from there too.

That would be good. It appears that people don't update them much (or at least recently they haven't much). I wonder if we had some type of crawl across the front page or the active topics page or something kind of like on Betterhumans if people would add to them more? Most of the time when someone has something interesting to say or discuss, they just start a thread on it which serves the same purpose, I suppose, haha.

[brokenportal]

That would be good. It appears that people don't update them much (or least recently they haven't much). I wonder if we had some type of crawl across the front page or the active topics page or something kind of like on Betterhumans if people would add to them more? Most of the time when someone has something interesting to say or discuss, they just start a thread on it which serves the same purpose, I suppose, haha.

I dont see the crawl at betterhumans. How do I find it? If anybody knows how to do stuff like this then please let us know. It might make one of many good goals for 2009.

[JediMasterLucia]

DidierC, S123, JML, and others are working on an organization called Heales to bring the life extension meme to French speaking areas of Europe

and the dutch speaking people off course.

I think this year will be a good one for life extension here on imminst ect.. (in Europe too with Heales)

Keep up the good work everybody!

[technetium]

Bumping this thread so new members are aware of the excellent work achieved in 2008.

[AgeVivo]

12. The name change discussion, while not getting anywhere, did spur a lot of discussion and brought a lot of members out of the wood work. As a results of the discussion, AgeVivo has set up some new portals for spreading the meme, such as Longecity.com. Imminst members are also branching out to reach a new audience. DidierC, S123, JML, and others are working on an organization called Heales to bring the life extension meme to French speaking areas of Europe.

Tadaa!! Longecity is up!!!

See http://www.imminst.o...showtopic=38203