Interested in volunteering? Please read:

1. Volunteer Guidelines
2. 2007 planning document, very similar to this year.
3. skim the summary

Apparently the correct term for someone who finds sponsors for a property is a "sponsorship agent" or "sponsor agent."

SpaceShare would like to find one -- perhaps someone new to the field? Or willing to work on just commission because they are green? One of our short-term volunteers could call 10 agents and see what kind of answers we get. Or invite them to be advisors?

Help SpaceShare create a guide to planning and traveling to events as green as possible, gathering and sharing information from other experts when possible and create our own information as necessary, then get it to many thousands of people to help them be greener travelers/planners.

1. Recreate spaceshare.com/green, our rough draft of a greening guide
   

When I first heard of carbon offsets, I loved the idea: a very committed, thoughtful person used them to reduce her guilt about the impacts she couldn't change. Since then they've been drifting into the old paradigms that got us into this mess, "Carbon Indulgences" letting us sin. Even at their best, they work like this: a windmill farm creates some electricity. They sell the electricity to someone who says, yeah! I'm using wind power!

SpaceShare will be leading a workshop at the Redefining Wilderness conference in April in San Francisco (at SFSU), hoping to launch a national carpool-to-the-wilderness system.

Stephen would love a co-creator for this project (good for an undertasked intern?)

Could become something amazing, be one of the co-founders of something that becomes national and well-known, great resume/contacts.

(This is unpaid for all involved. A good "Help me get funding and share in it" possibility.)

Brief guide of next steps:

* Improve letters to possible allies and press releases.

Collecting information about Carbon Calculators:

Likely:

• Drive Neutral, yearly car trips calculator: https://www.driveneutral.org/calculator/friends?=spaceshare
• Nice broad tool at Carbon Neutral: http://www.carbonneutral.com///calculators/index_shop_calculator.asp?referredby=spaceshare
• Inconvenient Truth, vague: http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/

* We're begining to work with Drive Neutral https://www.driveneutral.org/friends?=spaceshare who are working on a conference carbon calculator that will do the whole thing. From them, I can get the rest of the details soon, but the online calculator isn't launched yet. I can probably put this on our website in another month or so, maybe sooner. I can get you their estimates for how to calculate your conference's impact by hand (somewhat complex to really determine what should be counted), as well as for travelers. I'm talking with them - if you tell me more specifically what you're looking for, I can try to make it happen.

Let's create a directory of the "Peak Sharing" movement... all the new places where sharing is happening. (Great early-intern or volunteer project... 8 hours total of interesting google research would be great.)

* Has anyone beat us to this?

Quick start (we'll add descriptions and categorize):
All the rideshare sites:
a- event
b- place to place
c- commute (or someone else's index of these?)
All the carshare (flexcar, city car share) sites
Couchsurf and similar homestay sites
Freecycle

Non-internet or articles to be written:
Burning Man's Gift Economy
Some intro to the open source movement

Create a list of the possible on-line shopping+donation services, and compare them. For each one:

* General description: Are they green or general consumer? What is their product line like? (We may have more than one partner, one with all kinds of products, one with green products only, and perhaps a couple of specialty stores, like Barnes and Nobles so we can sell books.)
* Can donations be made to a non-501-c3 (we're not registered as a 501c3)
* Google them on a blog search engine, and see if anyone has written about them. Take quick notes, including the URL of the blog so I can see it.

A great little task for a new volunteer, because it involves learning about SpaceShare: pick a title for each untitled newsletter.

Details: Write a spreadsheet that compares the index number of each newsletter to an appropriate title and a few notes, as in:
8|Dec 2005 Year in Review|Looking back at 2005, Buy Nothing Day, ....
Stephen can easily integrate your file into our website.

Help us create a helpful and thriving venture around the
green / environmental weddings website at http://www.green-weddings.org