Biographical information

Name

Heath Rezabek
Biography

Heath Rezabek — https://labs.vessel.cc

Long Now Foundation (Intern) — Manual for Civilization Project — https://longnow.org

Open Knowledge Foundation — Texas Ambassador for the OKFn — https://okfn.org

Icarus Interstellar — FarMaker Team — https://farmaker2013.tumblr.com

Heath Rezabek (MLIS) is a futurist librarian, technology grants coordinator, writer, and systems designer. He lives in Austin, TX, where he serves as the Teen Services Coordinator within Youth Services at the Austin Public Library, focusing on digital literacy initiatives for at-risk youth.

Heath has recently begun an Internship with the Long Now Foundation (https://longnow.org/) as an initial curator on the Manual for Civilization project. This 3,500 volume core collection will be housed at the Long Now Foundation’s San Francisco headquarters, and its volumes will be mirrored at the Internet Archive. It will form the starting point for their eventual Library of the Long Now, a 10,000 year archive.

Heath is also a longtime advocate for open source, open access, open knowledge, and collaboration via Creative Commons. He serves as the Open Knowledge Foundation Ambassador for Texas. (https://okfn.org/)

In the realm of creative foresight, Heath is concerned with improving the prospects for Earth-originating life, very long term preservation of the cultural, scientific, and biological record, and the application of advanced discoveries to enhance life’s prospects on Earth (and beyond it).
Previous Works

Heath presented at the 2013 Starship Congress, organized by Icarus Interstellar, on Xrisk and very long term archival as a mitigation of risk to future potential. A summary of his proposal for very long term archives as learning and research labs — called Vessel — can be seen in the first of several guest columns at Centauri Dreams. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=28790

At the 2012 100YSS Symposium, Heath presented the Vessel Archives proposal — a strategy for sustaining and conveying Earth’s cultural and biological heritage — which was directly inspired by Gregory Benford’s Library of Life proposal. Preprint at: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.157109
Website

https://labs.vessel.cc
Occupation

Librarian and Futurust. Advisor to projects on very long term archival: Long Now Foundation's Manual for Civilization and Lunar Mission One.
Story Ideas and Burning Questions

Dystopian tropes are abundant, an easy out. What would an open source creative project to collaboratively worldbuild a vision of a resilient future, where Earth-originating life achieves its full potential, be like?