AfterBurn
For the last two years we have held a Town Meeting in the December after Burning
Man. These have taken place in San Francisco. About 200 to 300 people attended
last year's meeting, and some of them came from outside the Bay Area. It was held
at
CELLspace, a local community arts facility
that could not have accommodated many more people. We still intend to hold a spring
meeting in 2002, but this winter, we've decided to break out of the box. Our Winter
Town Hall meetings lasted only 3 to 4 hours, scarcely enough time to answer everyone's
questions. And it certainly wasn't enough time for us to describe everything we
had done during the year. Instead, we've elected to write a year-end report that
is addressed to every Burning Man participant wherever they may reside. A web-based
document such as The AfterBurn Report can be visited by many more people. We hope
this will supply a context for the questions that follow.
This is a big departure for us. During the many years that all of us
have worked on Burning Man, we have concentrated most of our attention
on describing the experience of our event, but the organization of people
behind this event has remained something of a mystery. This is mainly
because we've always been too busy doing Burning Man, continually reorganizing
and planning for the next year to illustrate the architecture. But now
we feel it is time to turn about and introduce our organization to participants.
The Burning Man Project includes the small group of our
full-time
staff, a much larger group of
part-time
staff and the many hundreds, indeed, thousands, of volunteers whose
responsibility and dedication make Burning Man happen. This report will
explain what our various departments do, why they do it, what changes
have been made in 2001, where Burning Man's money goes, our successes
and failures, and our vision for the future.
We currently divide the Project into several departments, and members
from each of these departments have written this report. We intend for
the reader to see how all of these interdependent groups work together
to produce a city in the desert and a community that lasts year-round.
This includes the work of Burning Man's Senior
Staff, and our administration department in San Francisco that runs
our business office, our accounting
and our box office and ticket process.
It describes the many tasks confronted by our art
department, which places art in the desert, develops our annual art
theme, aids many artists with their work, maintains our archive and
sponsors the Fire Conclave. It
details the functions of our media
department and its responsibility for public relations and media relations,
print production, the Black
Rock Gazette, regional
groups, our computer technology
and systems administration
our website, and several
other endeavors. We explain our services, such as the organization of
our Café, our ice
concession, and workers commissary,
and we describe how our community service
department works in support of our Lamplighters,
Earth Guardians, Greeters,
Playa Information, recycling,
theme camps and their placement
our bus service and Burning
Man Information Radio. This outline will also portray our two largest
volunteer-departments, the department of public works known as the DPW
and the Black Rock Rangers. It
will describe in detail how our department of public works creates our
city's infrastructure and has developed
and maintained our operations base at our work
ranch in the desert, and it will explain how the Rangers operate our
gate, provide emergency
services, volunteer Ranger training,
DMV, and Event exodus, and interface with county, state and federal law
enforcement.
Burning Man in 2001 was, in many ways, a very significant year for us.
We worked harder to provide more training and share more information resources
within our organization. We developed new technologies and utilized the
skills of more volunteers than many organizations can even dream of, and
we worked with local law enforcement, exchanging information and philosophies
in order to protect our citizen's rights. We feel the net result of all
this effort was a much better experience for participants and ourselves.
We were truly ready when our gates opened (perhaps, for the first time!).
During the event, our portable toilets (long a scandal among participants)
remained clean, and, when everyone departed, exodus was smooth and we
had to clean up far fewer burn scars and trash. From our own unique and
personal perspective, however, the best result of all was that our organization,
as intricate and complex as it may seem, came together as a real community
united in a single spirit. People say that Black Rock City is their home.
Ironically, for many of us who work year-round to create that city, we
spend much of our time at the event working there also. For us, our true
home has become one another and the work that we do together. Now we would
like to invite you into it. Welcome to our home. 