SSI Activities and rebirth?

Dear SSI,
I have been involved in the space colony movement since the publication of O'Neill's ideas in Physics Today, Sept. 1974, helped form the L-5 Society, still give several presentations per year on this topic, etc. A joke about being reborn is that it is easier to be reborn than to grow up. O'Neill's ideas are still exciting, but we have not been advanced much in the past few decades, perhaps because he did much of the thinking that could be done before implementation, and not much is happening in space that carries these ideas forward. I think many who join SSI are interested in new ideas, and get them when they first start thinking about orbital habitats, but soon know most of that, and so the influx of new ideas to those people's brains from SSI then nearly stops. I usually read for new ideas, and find it hard to read much of the SSI stuff, because there are few new ideas there. A lot of the e-mail traffic on the ssi-list, for example, is from people just discovering what us old-timers knew years ago. I am not sure how to keep folks interested beyond the introduction. I teach a course on this topic at the University of North Florida, and have students come to UNF just so they can take my course. That encourages me, but this term the course was cancelled to free time for me to work on a big research grant. No one else here could teach this course. If any of you have academic credentials, you might try offering such courses. But after a few years of being excited by these ideas, former students, still supporting in principle these ideas, go on to other topics. I am not offering a solution here, but hopefully an accurate statement of at least part of the problem, which I hope will be useful.
Sincerely, Jay Huebner