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2018 Society Annual Report

President’s Report to Our Members on the State of The Society
for our 19th Annual Membership Meeting
August 5, 2018

The Society is in better shape than it has been in some years and is on a path of growth and activism.

Membership Report

As of 08/05/17, Moon Society membership stood at 106 members, up from 89 a year ago, a 17% increase.

Treasury Report

The Society has funds available in the amount of $33,655, approximately flat from a year ago but with expenses were up significantly from recent years.

Website

Our Vice President, James Burk, has gone above and beyond this year by consolidating and upgrading the various sites that the Society is responsible for to the latest versions and updated our main site’s Drupal theme to something mobile compatible in preparation for a new design and to be in compliance with search engine standards.

A redesign of the main Society site was finished this year and is now being implemented. Here is a sneak peak of the new design:

The new Moon Society website

Lunarpedia

Lunarpedia.org is back open for business after several years of spam attacks required us to turn off the ability for new users to join, and put the wiki effectively in stasis.  We have now modernized the design of the wiki, upgraded the technology backend, and created a request form for new users.

Other Wikis

The Moon Society has joined with The Mars Society and Mars Foundation to grow the Marspedia.org wiki into something much bigger and more advanced than before.  We formed a Governing Council with the other two organizations and our Vice President James Burk (who is also an officer at Mars Society) has been leading this effort as Chair, with several other Moon Society members also involved.  The team hopes to grow the Marspedia wiki by recruiting volunteers and creating a large Mars atlas feature. We intend to fold back the technology developments created by the Marspedia team into Lunarpedia and our other wikis. We recently registered the domain name “Spacepedia.wiki” and we be growing that property out as a third wiki in partnership with the other two organizations.  We intend these wikis to be great STEM and educational resources and also help to tell the story of the human settlement of space and all the technologies, methodologies, and plans required to do so.

Other Web Assets

Our social media presence had a small hiccup earlier this year that prompted the management team to modernize and update our social presence across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We have also begun to archive and consolidate the web assets of the Artemis Society and The Lunar Resources Company (more on that below).

We have restored and are curating some of the historical content previously available such as the Artemis Data Book, the Lunar Reclamation Society website (formerly our Milwaukee chapter), and the Space Chapter Hub.

Back Office Processes

As those who have recently renewed are aware, another one of our significant accomplishments over the past year is successfully moving off of the older Web Site Director system and onto a commercial hosted product called Wild Apricot for all of our member processing needs. This has freed up much of our time to focus on the Society’s mission and has made for a much better member experience.

Moon Miner’s Manifesto

The Moon Miners’ Manifesto is being carried forward by the Society and will see a few release shortly. Things are moving very quickly in the space world at the moment so expect it to be full of updates. The founder of the Manifesto, Peter Kokh, has published an update and archive of many of the reports in the Manifesto in a new book titled “A Pioneer’s Guide to Living on the Moon”. The book is downloadable via Amazon: https://amzn.to/2uALjK6

Peter’s book is part of a general effort to ensure that out of print lunar-related books are available. Our new publishing imprint for this effort is Lunar City Press and other works are in progress.

Peter Kokh's new book

Much thanks goes to James Burk for working with Peter, the contract editor, and Amazon on getting this out so quickly.

Collaborations

Alliance for Space Development

With the pivot to the Moon by the White House it became important for the Society to re-engage with Washington. The easiest way to do that was to join the Alliance for Space Development and participate in 2017’s March Storm lobbying event. Michael Mealling, our President, met with over twenty House and Senate staffers educating them on the importance of funding the White House’s funding for lunar lander development and lunar surface characterization for future prospecting.

The Waypaver Foundation

In 2017 the Society also worked with the Waypaver Foundation to use their matching grant to develop a professional website redesign for the Society. The donation of $1500 to the Society from the Foundation is greatly appreciated.

Chapters

Within the past month the Management Team has begun its chapter outreach and is actively working on a New Chapter Packet which includes a website, posters, and other promotional items. Our newest chapter is based out of Tampa, Florida and we expect a half dozen more within the next few months.

Looking Forward

The Society has several projects in process that will continue to make the Society more efficient and expand our impact on various Lunar projects around the world. One significant development is our effort to consolidate and archive the historical assets of the Society and its sister organization The Artemis Society. We will update Society members once we disclose the details.

For members and potential members: please consider the Society to be back open for business! We are ready to help support your membership, chapters, and projects. The past year included a lot of work but now we are ready to move forward and get things done. Come join us!

A Personal Thank You

I would like to personally thank James Burk for the hours of work he has put in on Drupal updates, Mediawiki updates, site consolidations, DNS wrangling, book publishing, digital archeology, and countless other tasks I probably don’t even know about. Much of the progress above is due to James’ hard work. Thank you, James!