Chip Conley

Burning Man, as a culture, now exists to various degrees from San Francisco to Singapore, from Korea and China to Israel, Africa, and Brazil.  Around the world, everyone is attracted to the same flame.

But what does it mean to make the most of these communities?  What does it mean, some 200 regional reps asked themselves in an afternoon session with Chip Conley, to be a leader in Burning Man culture?  If we don’t want to replicate the old “command and control” style of leadership, if we want to do better, if we want to be “servant leaders” … what exactly do we do?

Conley – an entrepreneur hotelier, bestselling author, and member of the Burning Man Project’s board – responded by telling us to look to American psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Conley has considered Maslow to be a blend between his mentor and patron saint for decades.  Conley ran his phenomenally successful business on Maslow’s principles, and was given access to Maslow’s diaries and papers by the late psychologist’s family when preparing his first book “Peak:  how great companies get their mojo from Maslow.”   He’s applied Maslow’s key concepts to everything from employee morale to finding personal fulfillment … and Burning Man.  One imagines he’d buy a used car based on Maslow’s notes in the lining of a Blue Book.

It would seem hackneyed if it didn’t work so well.  In fact, as Conley spoke about “servant leadership” in the context of Burning Man, I realized it’s hard to think of a more apt approach to what “leadership” means in Burning Man culture than Maslow’s. Read more »

We couldn’t afford a satellite map

If there was an underlying theme to the sessions I attended and the conversations I had my first day at the Burning Man Global Leadership Conference, it was this question:  “How do we welcome each other?  How do we keep ourselves together in a world that wants to pull us apart?”

There are some very good answers to this question, and I’ll address them when I write about specific presentations – but before talking about anything else I think it’s important to look at where these answers come from.

One of the purposes of this conference – which used to be the Regional Network Conference – is to offer the different regionals a chance to talk to each other.  And they do.  But I think there’s a common assumption here that most of Burning Man’s collective wisdom is to be found at the San Francisco offices, the administrative center of the Burning Man universe.

While that may have been true once, I’m not sure it is anymore.  I’m very sure it won’t be in a few years. Read more »

Burners love having their photos taken together.

If you want to know what’s on the cutting edge of Burning Man, the Global Leadership Conference (happening this weekend in Oakland) is the place to be … sort of.

It’s definitely where you can get the latest updates on what’s happening with the new Burning Man non-profit, or discover previously unknown issues arising at Regionals around the world.  The impact of new technologies is often acknowledged here first.  And – as a spoiler – I advise anyone who wants to see the future of Burning Man on video to stay glued to Saturday morning’s presentation on “Profiles in Dust”:  it’s amazing.

But to say the GLC is all about the future is to miss the fact that, in most cases, we’ve been here before.  What are the topics being covered?  Why:  ”how to fund-raise.”  ”How to get and keep volunteers.”  ”How to reach out to new communities.”  ”How to handle conflicts in our existing community.”  ”How to produce a really great event.”

New problems?  Hardly – they’re the oldest.  These are all topics that have come up before, and before, and before, and will come up again, and again, and again.  It reached the point this afternoon where I realized that I was in a session that was covering some of the exact same issues that were covered in a session I attended last year … that included one of the same panelists.  It was, to be clear, a good session:  but I can’t say we broke any new ground.

Novelty may be the fruit of the GLC, but the trees are evergreen. Read more »

Want to build this? Get your fundraising engine in gear! Photo by Gabe Kirchheimer, 2007.

If you’re dreaming about creating a large art project — and don’t happen to be independently wealthy — you’re going to need to do some fundraising to make your dream a reality. And fundraising is an art as much as it is a science.

The Burning Man Project, as part of its ongoing workshop series leveraging and sharing the expertise in our community, recently offered a workshop on Crowdsourcing & Fundraising for Art Projects. The workshop was held at Burning Man’s San Francisco headquarters on December 13, 2012, and was led by Will Chase, who brings to the subject 10 years of experience in arts management, art curation, event production, art creation, and fundraising for art projects.

We invite you to listen to the audio recording of the workshop, and to download the accompanying PowerPoint presentation to follow along with as you listen.

If you’d like to propose a workshop topic for the Burning Man Project, learn more.

UPDATE: I recently came across this great post on crowdsourced fundraising for Burning Man art projects, very much worth a read.

The Black Rock Design Institute Presents “An Evening With David Best”
Thursday, December 13, at 6pm
Nevada Museum of Art
180 West Liberty Street
Reno, NV

Temple of Juno by David Best and The Temple Crew, 2012

Internationally acclaimed sculptor and architect David Best has created seven temples for Black Rock City, including the first “Temple of the Mind” in 2000, and the “Temple of Juno” in 2012. With inspiring scale and intricacy, David’s architecturally and psychologically significant structures are striking on the vast Black Rock Desert canvas. More importantly, David’s designs serve as a monumental community touchstone for Black Rock Citizens, and for the lives they have touched, culminating in a serenely beautiful burn. As many testify, David often gives spontaneous, deeply insightful, and emotionally moving talks about the intent, meaning, and experiences of the Temples. This lecture will be a wonderful opportunity to hear David’s deeper insights and broader outlooks on these phenomenal works.

Temple of Juno, 2012

Kerry Rohrmeier, cultural geography researcher and urban planner, will also be giving an introductory presentation on “Welcome to Black Rock City”. In studying Black Rock City through varied cultural, geographic, and historical lenses, Kerry will share some emerging lessons for participants in the creation of our yearly ephemerapolis.

Museum doors open for the evening at 5pm with refreshments and socializing. Lecture begins at 6pm. Tickets are now available here.

Black Rock Design Institute, the host for the evening, is a not-for-profit 501c3 comprised of Reno-area designers dedicated to improving our urban environment. More on the Black Rock Design Institute can be found here.

(Content generously provided by Nathan Aaron Heller and Kerry Rohrmeier.)

On the night before Halloween, Burning Man ate our brains.

Ticket maven Nimbus and tech wizard CameraGirl gathered a group of Burners into a room in San Francisco and asked us to brainstorm about that bugbear, that boogeyman of challenges we face as a culture: Group Ticketing. The meeting of the minds included game theorists, theme camp leaders, artists, volunteers, families, senior staff, and ticket industry experts.

Braaains!!! Photo by Leori Gill

This wasn’t a meeting for hashing out the details of a ticket distribution process. It was a way for the people who run the ticket process to harness some of the energy and ideas of a diverse bunch of Burners (as described in the “WHAT DOES THE FUTURE OF BURNING MAN LOOK LIKE” section of “Rebuilding BRC 2012″).

By the time we were done, our brains were literally gone, eaten from our heads by zombies. In case you didn’t realize it, Burning Man ticketing is HARD.

Now that Burning Man tickets can be expected to sell out each year, we need new, creative solutions to address the challenges of ticketing. Burners are smart people, by and large, so the organization figures we’re the right people to ask.

This wasn’t the first such salon. They even held one on playa this year with a bunch of techies. The conversation started in January, right after IT happened. The lottery had unintended social consequences — the fear-driven ticket orgy at the beginning of the process left organizers of key groups without tickets. Even if some group members did get tickets, the groups couldn’t pull off their projects without every key member present. Since they didn’t all have tickets, planning became really difficult.

Even though it all worked out pretty much okay, thanks to Burning Man’s decision to carefully delegate 10,000 tickets to camps and other groups, this uncertainty and the shift from how things had always been caused fear and anxiety in our community.

In the good old days, we could just sell individual tickets and be fine. But now that everyone and their stepcousin wants to go to Burning Man, we have to plan for the inevitability that tickets will be scarce. We have to find a way to make sure that the groups who make Black Rock City what it is — theme camps, art teams, mutant vehicles, families, what-have-you — get their people to the playa, or else they may not be able to make their contribution at all.

We considered many thorny dilemmas. How do we preserve groups that form the city’s institutions, like the Temple crew or your favorite art car, while still allowing for the evolution of new groups and the entropy of dying ones? How do we quantify the merit of a group? Do we ask its neighbors? Track it on the MOOP Map?

How do we make sure groups are taken care of as well as individuals without groups? Do we even need to protect groups, or can we just go back to individual tickets and trust that new groups will naturally organize and take care of themselves?

When you dig into it, and we did, you quickly come to realize that there ARE no easy answers. Like I said, this stuff is hard. But it’s good to see the hard work being done, and it’s reassuring that Burning Man’s picking our brains as part of the process.

Join us!

WHAT: “People in Motion” Screening plus Q&A with the Filmmakers and Artists, Cedric Dahl, Lonnie Tisdale, Brian Orosco
WHEN: Thursday, October 18th, 6:45PM-9PM
WHERE: Burning Man HQ, 995 Market Street, 15th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103

Those familiar with the training discipline parkour–or “free running”–know that its push to move creatively and freely throughout the world is more than an exercise routine, it’s a philosophy for life.  “People in Motion”, in its focus on parkour, showcases the potential people have to move through time and space.  Shot along the West Coast and in Black Rock City and using an original score and composite editing, the film inspires viewers with its fresh perspective on how the individual can move creatively through a number of environments.  Just as Burning Man’s Ten Principles inspire Burners to come together as a collaborative community in the face of the harsh Black Rock Desert, parkour’s philosophy of overcoming obstacles is about defeating and adapting to both the mental and physical barriers which surround us every day.

The ninety minute film will be followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers and parkour practitioners Cedric Dahl, Lonnie Tisdale, Brian Orosco.  The film begins at 7:30p.  Light appetizers and a wine and beer bar will be open during the first thirty minutes of the event.  Q&A to follow the film.

To learn more, check out the film’s website at https://peopleinmotionmovie.com.

The Burning Man Project is proud to support Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) in their collaboration with Intersection for the Arts (IFTA), IDEO and Rebar, as they produce the Urban Prototyping (UP) Festival. The festival takes place on October 20th on the blocks around 5th and Mission Streets in San Francisco.

Here’s an excerpt from their press release, describing the purpose for the festival:

The past several years have seen a surge in new forms of civic engagement, with teams of citizens joining together to build apps and projects that use technology to address contemporary urban issues. Now, a new initiative is bringing this same open-source “hacking” mentality to the physical realm. Building on the parallel rise of “tactical urbanism”–the use of small-scale, informal designs to seed long-term changes to the city landscape– the Urban Prototyping (UP) Festival aims to support new design and technology projects that improve the urban environment by creating more inspiring, livable and engaging public spaces.

The San Francisco UP Festival will take place on October 20, 2012, and will feature over 20 model projects set up in streets and parking lots in a 3-block area around the 5M Project at 5th and Mission. Each project embodies the concept of open source and will be documented so that they can be replicated in any city worldwide. Model projects range from the whimsical to practical and include outdoor gardens, urban playscapes, glowing crosswalks, public urinals, urban parasol structures, and much more. The projects will give everyone the chance to see firsthand how these rapidly prototyped urban interventions can change and challenge the way we use, share, and contribute to our public spaces.

Urbanist-minded Burners are encouraged to go and participate in this innovative festival about creative use of public spaces — your experience with Black Rock City surely has given you an idea or two to offer in that regard!