Timeshares on Mars

Tomorrow is a big day for my new journey in space systems engineering. According to the MIT open courseware, the first step is stakeholder analysis.

My objective is to identify a new set of stakeholders capable of achieving a human mission to Mars.

My initial theory is that people would be willing to learn the skills and tasks required to accomplish that.

They will need to benefit from contributing from completing those tasks in a way that expands beyond the transactional nature of money.

There may be a few ways to do this:

Trading time on various tasks

Trading skills involved with various tasks

Tracking these with a ledger such as through blockchain or web based spreadsheets

It turns out there are organizations that already facilitate this. For trading time on Tasks, New River Valley Time Bank enables this:

https://nrv.timebanks.org/

For trading Skills, apparently Skill Exchange has a Spotify plugin.

https://www.skillshare.com/en/

For tracking purposes, one could use blockchain for transparency but scalability and transaction costs might be an obstacle. Picking one would depend on the use case. Tools such as Airtable and Smart Sheet could work in the beginning among a small community and could be extended to solutions such as H0urworld or TimeRepublik.

https://www.hourworld.org/index.htm

https://timerepublik.com/

https://www.airtable.com/

https://www.smartsheet.com/

So given there is already a nascent market for said approaches, the next logical thing would be to see if people would be predisposed to trading time and knowledge for a human mission to Mars. Now that would be a big shift from just getting people to exchange money. So this is where we’d need quantitative and qualitative methods to do the stakeholder analysis. We also need a smaller, more familiar use case.

Remember, the goal is to get sports on Mars. So initially we can start with sports. Running seems the most practical because most people can walk, run, or transport themselves through the use of a wheelchair. And people like beer.

So the idea for an initial test would be seeing if people would donate their time to train others to run at a local brewery. Let’s say one person once to improve their mile time for a 5K race. And another person wants to get tips on how to learn more about beer. Both people will be at a brewery routinely. Nearly everyone has a notes application they can keep track of their progress on.

So, as a designer, my first step is to create a mood board of different solutions of tracking time and skills. Then the second step is to observe how people are trading time and skills at a brewery.

While I’m doing this, I can learn more about stakeholder analysis from MIT and map out my inputs and outputs for this concept.

So the rest of the week looks like this:

Set up a shared note accessible from Android and Apple (1 hour. Deliverable is a shared note with a friend)

Create the mood boards (2 Hours. Deliverable is an accessible FIGMA file

Observe people at breweries. ( 5 hours. Deliverable is an article detailing participant observation

Ad Astra per Aspera,

Micah