Sci-Five KickStarter campaign

The SpaceUp Foundation is getting ready to launch it’s first KickStarter fundraising campaign - “Sci-Five: Five SpaceUps for 2015.”

SpaceUp Sci-Five The Foundation’s goal is to bring more awesome people (space geeks) together to share their passion and excitement about space.

Why are we doing this? The Foundation is a functioning non-profit organization that helps SpaceUps, but it’s currently unfunded. Any SpaceUp run as a Foundation project gets some benefit from non-profit accounting, but as we’ve seen over the past few years, that’s often not enough to get a SpaceUp off the ground. We strongly believe that this bit of seed funding, plus the tools this will allow the Foundation to develop, will make the difference between a successful SpaceUp and one that doesn’t launch.

What can you do to help the SpaceUp Foundation campaign? First and foremost, spread the word. The more people that we reach, the more SpaceUps are likely to be held. Second, consider contributing to the KickStarter campaign. There will be great SpaceUp awards for all the various levels, but even one dollar helps!

Here is quick peak at a few sample awards:

$1 – Singularity Drive

One vote for your favorite SpaceUp city.

Exclusive access to a thank-you video from the Foundation.

Notification when public registration to each SpaceUp is open.

$25 - Breakthrough Paper (Limit 100)

Three votes for your favorite SpaceUp cities.

A personal sci-five video from the Foundation.

One priority registration to one of the five SpaceUp events (your choice).

Swag Factor 1 and Swag Factory 2 eligible.

$625 - Beyond the Realm of Science (Limit 1)

aka ALL THE THINGS

Six votes for your favorite SpaceUp cities.

Personal sci-five videos from EVERYONE listed above.

Priority registration to all five SpaceUp events (one each).

Naming rights to one of the rooms/pods at your favorite SpaceUp event

Swag Factor 1, Swag Factor 2, Swag Factor 3 multi-pass.

Click here to go to our #SciFive Kickstarter page!

Over the last five years SpaceUp has evolved into a major brand in space outreach and education. By strengthening the foundation we can support more local organizers and be an even more professional partner to the space and science communication industry. Help us make the SpaceUp Foundation even better. Spread the word around the word and encourage everyone to join in!

What SpaceUp is All About

CraftLass summed up the importance of SpaceUp (and other BarCamps) quite well today:

Modern society is very disjointed. We like to divvy everyone up into little groups and then slice those groups up even smaller, building walls between each time. Companies keep the left-brainers away from the right-brainers who are kept away from the executives and the underlings. This is bad, very bad. The best ideas happen when people who seem to have little in common work together as a real team, even if there are serious disagreements along the way. Actually, especially if there are disagreements – those are needed to kill the inevitable bad ideas that crop up and spark a new direction of thinking. Compartmentalization is bad for everyone and everything, at least, in my opinion, and it’s time to break free of this modus operandi.

This is why SpaceUp is my favorite event. It’s living, breathing proof that people CAN communicate across all the artificial boundaries we put up and find ourselves subject to. Even better, the way a lot of that happens is through actual fun! We have fun debating serious topics, we have fun sharing stories and getting to know each other, and then there’s the actual Fun Time built into the schedule.

Be sure to read more about her upcoming trip to SpaceUp Houston in her post, “Wake Up to SpaceUp“.

SpaceUp DC Coverage in NASA’s Ask the Academy

SpaceUp DC participant Haley Stephenson wrote about the unconference for NASA’s Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL) newsletter, Ask the Academy. In her Aerospace Unbrief, Stephenson captures the essence of how SpaceUp works:

No agenda. No keynote speakers. No audience members in rows of uncomfortable chairs fidgeting through serial PowerPoint presentations.

[...] SpaceUp breaks the typical conference paradigm of mediocre food, large registration fees, and rigid lecture schedules. It engages and motivates all attendees to participate because they want to, not because they have to.

I had never been to an unconference. Quite frankly, the concept made me uncomfortable. But as I discovered, that’s the point.

More importantly, she portrays the sense of fun that we’ve seen at SpaceUps so far:

We fiddled with pipe cleaners (out of which one person constructed the space-time continuum), built spaceships and rovers out of Legos (our “green” ship was powered by Lego conifers), conducted a MoonPie eating contest (beware the banana flavor), and held what is probably the first Tribble war ever (they’re not as soft as they look). If this all seems quite silly, then take a moment to think on what sparked your interest in space and what fuels it now.

…space exploration is fueled by the imagination and enthusiasm of both fifty-year-old engineers and eleven-year-old kids like Caleb Doornbos, whose disarming intelligence and freedom from limitations made us all walk away asking, “Why not?” Why not inspire the next generation about space? Why not go to Mars and back in 80 days or less? Why not launch your own satellite? Why not?

Yeah, why not?