Lifeboat Foundation Website Redesign Fundraising Thursday, Sep 3 2009
lifeboat 11:33 pm
The Lifeboat Foundation is raising funds for a redesign of its website, which is out of date and not suitable for the 2010s. Since the Lifeboat Foundation is the only organization in the world devoted to coming up with comprehensive strategies to address myriad extinction risks, and its website is its main public face, it might be beneficial for humanity as a whole that its website be upgraded! The cost for such a venture looks relatively high because the company we want to use (Hell Design) is very high quality and because the Lifeboat Foundation website has a very large number of pages. Here is the fundraising email from Lifeboat Foundation President Eric Klien:
Michael,
We have been helping Ray Kurzweil for the past half a year on a new
version of KurzweilAI that we internally call “KurzweilAI 2.0″. In the
process, we have developed many useful skills in PHP, web design, MySQL,
etc.We would like to use these newly acquired skills on a new Lifeboat
Foundation site designed by Helldesign. Helldesign has designed many
prominent sites including The Singularity University site, The
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence site, The Singularity
Summit site, and The Methuselah Foundation site.We really need to fundraise at least $2,500 before this is able to get
off the ground. Since this is important, I have decided to donate $500
of my own funds bringing us up to $1,630 raised.If you wish to help out, go to http://lifeboat.com/ex/website.redesign
Eric Klien
Lifeboat Foundation
Consider contributing. Because the extinction of humanity would be such a horrible and permanent event, efforts to minimize the probability of extinction carry a relatively massive measure of utility. See Nick Bostrom’s “Astronomical Waste” paper.
September 6th, 2009 at 9:35 am
You are aware that it looks bad to have a separate fundraising drive for $2500, when you already have ~$150,000 in donations with no explanation of how that money is being used, right?
September 7th, 2009 at 12:40 am
I’ll second Kaj’s comment.
LF has recruited an incredible lineup of endorsers (”Scientific Advisory Board”). This is quite an achievement.
But beyond that, as far as I can tell, LF has done almost nothing.
If I had to choose one thing to get started on, the website would be it. Today’s website has much material only marginally relevant, so I hope that even though “because the Lifeboat Foundation website has a very large number of pages”, the site rework will greatly cut that.
September 7th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Kaj, yes. The $150K in donations is almost totally pledges. So, it’s not real money. You may recall that the MPrize also presents its prize fund as including pledges, just that it seems slightly less noticeable. The idea of putting pledges forward as a donation amount revolves around the concept that people are more likely to give money to organizations that already have some amount of money, but in reality Lifeboat is a shoestring organization. We think it’s a better idea to advertise our pledges than say “we have barely any money.” I’ve brought up this concern to Eric before, and he seems strongly convinced that saying our LF fund is at $150K is a good idea. Personally, I disagree, but still, it won’t stop me from trying to raise funds for the organization.
Josh, the reports that LF has published (including a paper by Michael Vassar and Robert Freitas that was published on KurzweilAI.net), along with briefing representatives of the Navy, sponsoring the Palo Alto workshop on existential risk, appearing as a prominent mention in the bio of writers of articles that have appeared in places like CNN, inquiries about the org from the New York Times, and sponsoring an electromagnetic launch competition during last year’s X-Prize games are pretty good for an organization whose budget is barely enough to sustain one permanent employee. Even if the Lifeboat Foundation had achieved nothing (it achieves something even by being out there), it still would make sense to support, because it is the only grassroots organization that stands for the fight against existential risk (unless you count SIAI, which mainly focuses on AI risk). If it has done too little, then it would need more support, not less. There are no other organizations pursuing a comprehensive set of strategies to fight extinction risks.
The lack of support and initiative around the Lifeboat Foundation reflects how humanity doesn’t take existential risk seriously, not how the organization has not made good use of the funds and skills it has available. If I were actually being paid by the organization, I could do a lot more for it, but it doesn’t even have enough money to pay for anyone but the President, who has done a lot of good work spreading awareness about existential risk given his skillset and connections.
September 9th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Hmm, interesting. I took the 150K figure from the “Donations Applied” row at http://lifeboat.com/ex/lf.fund.details - I thought that the 266K in “Commitments Outstanding” referred to the pledges and “Donations Applied” to the money that’s actually been gathered. If that isn’t the case, what does that “Commitments Outstanding” figure refer to?
September 9th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Gosh, you know what, I might be wrong. I really didn’t think that we’d raised $150K so far, but maybe we have. (I know I should be familiar with this, but I’m not.) I thought we had raised more like $90K. Anyway, I can say that it mostly has been primarily used to pay Eric’s salary over the last few years, while $10K went to the electromagnetic launch competition. Sorry for not knowing this right off the bat.