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Hello all my NewMars friends,
I am new to the role of Executive Director and I have been asked to come up with some options of how we can improve the benefits that paid members get, including ways to connect and discuss topics with other members.
Currently we have many ways for people to talk to each other online including the NewMars Forums (which have been running since 2001), but also: Slack, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even Instagram and Pinterest.
1) Any other ways that our members and community should be communicating with each other in 2021 that we do not currently have as an option?
2) Which of these should we highlight the most?
3) What would you do to improve the New Mars Forums as they stand now?
4) What would you give to paid members of the Mars Society as special benefit? This could be anything!
Thank you in advance for your advice on these topics!
Hello all my NewMars friends.
I am 1 month into my tenure as Executive Director and I would like to ask you for your advice on a couple of matters.
1) What should we give paid members of the Mars Society as a benefit?
2) What would you do to improve the New Mars Forums?
For the 3rd question below, the context is: we have many ways for people to talk to each other online including NewMars, Slack, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even Instagram and Pinterest.
3) Any other ways that our members and community should be communicating with each other in 2021 that we do not currently have as an option?
Thank you in advance for your advice on these topics!
Mr. Burk,
Thank you for all you've done and are still doing to help to keep the Mars Society facilities lively and growing.
We are in the process of setting up Zoom sessions to coordinate activities.
By any chance, does Mars Society have a paid subscription to Zoom? I am a member of other organizations that ** do ** have paid subscriptions, and the features available with the paid version would be helpful.
Also! You are welcome to join our first Zoom meeting to meet our newest member, Clinician_Antilles.
C_A is in the process of sorting out opportunities to enter med school.
See the Zoom Collaboration topic if you are interested.
(th)
Yes, we do. I am happy to help coordinate this. We have Zoom Pro accounts with Large Meeting addon and also a Webinar account.
Hi all,
We are in the process of setting up a new Discord server for the Mars Society. I have asked the volunteers to use a similar discussion structure to New Mars Forums. And, of course, everybody here is welcome to join. Here's the Invite Link.
Discord is not meant to replace NewMars but as an additional way for people to participate in the Mars Society and in discussions about Mars-related topics.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Hi all, I have updated the Forum to the latest FluxBB (1.5.11). Please let me know of any issues you experience. jburk@marssociety.org
MarsVR is still an active project although it has been hard to recruit volunteers that know VR coding & 3-D Modelling. We are having a meeting soon to coordinate the project. I am also working with one of our original team members from 2018 to upload the models into Sketchfab.
I am editing videos nonstop and posting to Youtube. The goal is to have everything online within 2 weeks. Farah Alibay is rendering now...
This is the official playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P … z9NgdtxDAF
So far I consider it a guarded success.... people are able to login and there are some chats happening. I am completely open to suggestions on how to improve it. We will be rolling out new membership renewal & confirmation of membership features in 2020 which are quite complex to implement.
You guys are doing a great job, keep it up!
-James
Tom,
I have manually activated you, so you should be able to login now and use the system.
Thanks,
-James
Hello my longtime friends on New Mars Forums!
Today we are beginning to roll out our new Members Area for the Mars Society.
It is login-only community for active (paid) Mars Society Members. During a brief period it will be open to everybody who'd like to join.
https://members.marssociety.org
It includes several social media-like features including user profiles, member-to-member instant chat, and several discussion groups. I will find a way to tie together the topical discussion groups with our forums here. I am still trying to figure out the best way to do that.
Please login and let me know what you think. You can register for an account using the "Register" button on the login page. It's open to everybody at the moment to do that. In the future, we will have more restrictions on whether you are an active member and have paid your dues.
Thanks,
-James
With rising public interest in the exploration of Mars and a human mission to the Red Planet, the Mars Society invites you to participate in a special AMA (Ask Me Anything) r/Space session with its president and founder Dr. Robert Zubrin on Friday, November 16th at 1:00 pm MST (3:00 pm EST / 8:00 pm GMT).
As a top Mars advocate and one of the world's leading experts on planning a mission to Mars and eventual human settlement of our nearest planetary neighbor, Dr. Zubrin will be available to answer as many of your questions as possible.
Join us at: https://www.reddit.com/r/space (DrRobertZubrin). Thanks!
Hi all,
Back with my every 6 month request to help on Marspedia.
Marspedia is a project of three organizations -- the Mars Society, the Moon Society, and the Mars Foundation. While the project has been going since 2007, the Mars Society joined the project last year and announced it here: http://www.marssociety.org/mars-society … yclopedia/
Marspedia now operates as a "committee" of the Mars Society and is under our 501(c)(3). Along with members of the other two organizations, we formed a Governing Council and I am the current Chair of the council. We created Editorial and Technical subcommittees to do the day-to-day work. The technical committee had a flurry of activity last year getting the wiki modernized and spam content cleaned up. Now we are building a category selection tool and working on a bulk article creation process.
The Editorial committee meets weekly on a teleconference (Mondays at 11:30am Pacific time). We created a new category system and are now in the process of coming up with article ideas. We will also be launching an internship program for science journalism students.
Frank Crossman and I presented on Marspedia at the Mars Society Conference last month, and our video is here: https://youtu.be/kNSIXuZkpBU
If you would like to help the project, please email me and I can add you to our Slack communications tool and send you invites to the upcoming meetings.
More details are on Marspedia itself such as:
https://marspedia.org/Marspedia:About
and
Hi all,
This past week, we have started our official channel on Reddit (called a subreddit) and it has already added over 500 subscribers since we started it on Thursday.
Please join us there and follow the latest on the Exploration of Mars and the growth of the Mars Society. We will be posting all of our convention videos there so they are easy to cross-post on other subreddits, and also to comment on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MarsSociety/
Don't forget to add some "Flair" to your Reddit user in the form of "Mars Society Member", "Chapter Member", or even "Founding Member" if you are one of those (like me) who joined the organization in our founding year 1998.
Thanks,
-James
Thanks to Danny Murawsky for fixing our CAPTCHA. New user registrations are back up!!
Hi all,
I'm James Burk, the IT Director for the Mars Society. We'd love to get your help with maintaining the forums. We are an all-volunteer staff and could use technical help with updates to FluxBB and overall improvements to the domain newmars.com. It would be great to build out newmars.com to be a news-worthy website with original writings about sending people to Mars. If you would like to work on that, or help us to maintain the FluxBB forums, please drop me an email: jburk@marssociety.org
Thanks,
The Mars Society is building a new open-source Virtual Reality platform — we call it “MarsVR” — that can be used for serious research towards the goal of sending humans to Mars.
The MarsVR Program will be a multi-phase effort designed to pioneer the emerging field of CrowdExploration, which we define as the partnership between the first astronauts on Mars and the VR experts and enthusiasts back on Earth. We aim to establish the capability of using Virtual Reality to assist with the initial human exploration of landing sites.
Phase I of the Mars VR Program will focus on designing training simulations for use at the Mars Desert Research Station, providing direct assistance in the training of MDRS crew members. We will also open-source the key elements of the platform so that the general public can freely make use of it to experience the exploration of Mars.
I want to re-emphasize that -- EVERYTHING WILL BE OPEN SOURCED. The only thing that won't will be the MDRS training content which we will be selling on Steam as a fundraising mechanism. Everything else -- the Unity project, the terrain assets, the 3-D models, and all documentation & training for the same, will be FREE AND OPEN SOURCE. We intend for this to be a serious research tool, public outreach tool, and STEM education tool.
Please support our Kickstarter and share this project with your friends & colleagues. Please like/share/comment on Social Media.
Kickstarter Page: http://bit.ly/MarsVR1
MarsVR Program Website: http://marsvr.io
Kickstarter Video: https://youtu.be/p4gObBBTzR4
Other videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P … 4X9dnwEFs-
Whew. A few of us worked hard to make that happen too. Go Bridenstine!! He's already said some amazingly good things ("We're going back to the Moon, it's not going to be Lucy & the football this time" and "we'll work on Moon and Mars in tandem"). Very excited!!
In case you missed it... here's what Robert wrote today:
Congratulations Jim Bridenstine for your confirmation as NASA Administrator! The Mars Society offers you our full support in any effort you make to give the American people a purpose-driven space program that is really going somewhere. May you succeed in once again making NASA the banner of the pioneer spirit. New worlds are at hand, filled with wonders waiting to be discovered and history waiting to be made. The chains that have held us Earthbound for too long are ready to be broken.
End the stall. Let’s break them all.Robert Zubrin
President and Founder
The Mars Society
And, here's what I posted to Facebook....
I know some people are angry that a Trump person is now running NASA, or maybe angry that a person who wasn't crisp & real on climate change while he was in congress is now running NASA. But consider this: Bridenstine has a clear track record of promoting the human exploration of the Moon & Mars, and introduced the Space Renaissance Act in congress which is widely considered the most innovative proposed space legislation of our generation. I personally think he will turn out to be an excellent NASA administrator, maybe the best ever, and will help point the US back to human exploration of the solar system in an effective way.
Hi all.
Please consider joining and contributing to Marspedia. We are planning to add some more volunteers later this summer that are journalism students, and we will soon be rolling out a new logo and a new Mars Atlas (Areography) section.
Thanks for the heads-up. I'm on it.
Taken care of.
Welcome Number04!
Glenn Scott is running the Canada website now. You should be able to contact him through the website.
My advice for all chapters is to find space-related events and do outreach. Or organize your own events. Find other martians to grow the chapter, then work on whatever they want to work on.
Yes, the time is now to express your views to your senators. Nomination hearing is tomorrow in the Commerce committee.
See telecon.marssociety.org for some meetings we did & a powerpoint deck with more info on this, and how to contact your senator.
The Bridenstine hearing is now set for Wednesday Nov 1st at 10AM Eastern.