The $1000 Seastead Design Contest

Or open source design for inde­pen­dent microna­tions.

The idea is this: The Seast­eading Insti­tute, a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion con­ceived about a year ago by Patri Fried­man and Wayne Gram­lich, is propos­ing a frame­work that would make it pos­si­ble to per­ma­nently set­tle on the ocean. Their vision, inspired by the cul­ture of web 2.0, is to crowd-source the devel­op­ment of government.

seast­eading

What they have done is designed a bare plat­form, called a seast­ead, that is about the size of a city block. They are encour­ag­ing every­one to share their idea for a per­ma­nent civ­i­liza­tion on the ocean through The $1000 Seast­ead Design Con­test (sub­mis­sions due May 1st, 2009). Con­tes­tants are to expound upon the plat­form in any way they see fit – “It may be a hos­pi­tal, a casino, a res­i­den­tial com­mu­nity, a cricket sta­dium, or some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent.” The idea is to share and to col­lec­tively reach this goal. Designs for the seast­eads will be released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Wendy Sitler-Roddier

[They are] hop­ing to cre­ate a plat­form in the sense that Linux is a plat­form: a base upon which peo­ple can build their own inno­v­a­tive forms of gov­er­nance. The ulti­mate goal is to cre­ate stan­dards and blue­prints that can be eas­ily adapted, allow­ing small com­mu­ni­ties to rapidly incu­bate and test new mod­els of self-rule with the same ease that a pro­gram­mer in his garage can whip up a Face­book app.
–WIRED and BLDGBLOG

As com­pared to other projects of this nature, The Seast­eading Insti­tute is try­ing to build a mod­u­lar frame­work which allows for many dif­fer­ent ideals. Because they don’t focus on one spe­cific model that could fail, the project is much more sus­tain­able. Although I do not par­tic­u­larly sub­scribe to Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism, I have inter­est in projects like this for their for­ward think­ing ideas. The Seast­eading Insti­tute is not respond­ing as much to cli­mate change, but to soci­etal change. Maybe there is some­thing we can learn from their model.