How the board works
The board is asynchronous and globally dispersed. There are no mandatory meetings, no fiduciary duties, and no governance authority over OCS operations. Advisors are people whose work overlaps substantially with OCS research themes and who have agreed to lend their expertise and standing to the project.
The board has three practical functions: providing expert critique of drafts and speculative frameworks; making introductions to relevant researchers, institutions, and funding bodies; and publicly affiliating their standing with the OCS, which signals to the wider scientific community that the work is worth engaging with.
Advisors are not employed or compensated by the OCS. Engagement is voluntary and self-paced. In practice that means one or two interactions a year: a manuscript review before submission, a note about a new publication, or a short consultation on a specific question.
Review of OCS manuscripts, speculative frameworks, and public-facing writing before release.
Introductions to researchers, journals, grant bodies, and institutions aligned with OCS themes.
Public affiliation, signalling to the scientific community that this work deserves serious engagement.
No mandatory meetings. No fiduciary duties. Advisors engage on their own schedule.
Tim Swanson is the author of Consensus as a Service (2015), the most cited paper on permissioned distributed ledgers. He was Director of Market Research at R3, the first major enterprise blockchain consortium, and is the founder of Post Oak Labs. He currently runs AINumbers.com, tracking the economics of AI compute and infrastructure.
John Smart is the originator of the Transcension Hypothesis, formalised in a 2012 paper in Acta Astronautica, which proposes that advanced civilisations compress inward toward black hole environments rather than expanding outward. He is founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation and co-founder of Evo Devo Universe, an international research community studying evolutionary and developmental processes at cosmological scales.
Joining the board
The OCS invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners whose work touches on IMBH astrophysics, SETI and technosignature research, computational cosmology, or advanced civilisation frameworks to consider joining.
Engagement is asynchronous and self-paced. No mandatory commitments, no governance duties, no fees. If you think the OCS research programme is worth supporting, we would be glad to talk.
Advisory Board positions are by invitation and separate from the OCS's Affiliate, Associate, and Principal membership tiers on the main site. Board positions go to people with relevant expertise who can provide intellectual guidance. They are not tied to financial contribution.