Welcome to the official website for the Internet Task Force of the Mars Society.  

We serve the web and graphics design needs for the Mars Society organization, including its task forces, chapters, and major initiatives such as the Mars Desert Research Station.

Our Role:

The role of the internet task force will be “conquering cyber-space for The Mars Society”. This may entail – assistance with website development, monitoring other Mars related websites, monitoring internal sites such as MDRS and FMARS, assistance with mailing lists, and related IT support tasks.

Skills desired (one or more) – knowledge of internet compatible software and programming ability, written communication skills, database management skills, office productivity software, commercial art skills. Specific software knowledge: Google Sites, WordPress, MySQL, Skype, Jabber, MS Office, Google Docs, Adobe Photoshop and/or similar graphics design packages. Programming: PHP, HTML5, CSS, Javascript, Java, iPhone, Android, Windows RT.

Report any issues with the Mars Society websites via a Support Ticket.  To Open a Ticket, email: webmaster@marssociety.org

The task force is currently led by James Burk, Webmaster & IT Director of the Mars Society since July 2011.  James is a web developer, project manager, and engineering manager.  He is a member of the Steering Committee, a founding member of the Mars Society, and the Organizer of the Seattle chapter.  He began as an active volunteer in 1998, where he helped with many technical projects including the original CD-Rom magazine for the Mars Society and some of the first chapter and project websites.  James lives in Seattle, Washington, USA.

James is joined by several volunteers that work internationally and help out with the maintenance and new development of the Mars Society’s websites and membership functions.

The Internet Task Force was founded in 1998 by Harold Miller.  Harold presently still maintains the domain record for the MARSSOCIETY.ORG domain, and served as Dr. Zubrin’s webmaster prior to the founding of the Mars Society.
(Reference: http://web.archive.org/web/19981203132649/http://www.marssociety.org/taskforces.asp )

Our patch (seen on the top left of this website) was designed by James and represents the vision of an Earth-Mars “Interplanetary Internet”, which is a real concept that has been researched and developed by Vint Cerf (founder of TCP/IP) and is often referred to under the research terminology of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN).