Space Adoption

when lead & volunteer roles depend on the goodness of peoples hearts and social capital alone, you get either 1) people with sketch boundaries who are pressed beyond belief to the point of actual burn out and undue burden and 2) narcissists/people who hold social capital/power so dear that they are willing to do it in exchange for notoriety.... this has really crystallised for me this year in watching the organising play out

BMorg People Ops offers perk systems to recognise and incentivise volunteers including things like:

-DGS/directed group tickets (in a sold out burn having guaranteed tickets for those who are critical to building theme camps & art projects is a huge draw)

-camping benefits (at the burn this is special camping areas & showers, in our context this could be beds)

-commissary (free food on shifts)

-fluffing, mediation services etc to support leaders & teams

-swag (stickers, merch etc)

-special parties & experiences created for core teams such as an art car art tour ride, centre camp drag show in core teams honour, access to secret bars, things like that

-half priced or free tickets

Obviously these are all things that a much larger community with bigger needs does, and maybe some are innapropriate in our context. However it seems we may already be scaling 150% in 1 year alone, so now while we are small we might want to think about starting to get these systems in place. In the context of celtic burn & space adoption there are things we could do to make hard workers feel chuffed and seen, and also show up for their shifts! we could start with indoor sleeping/bed priority going to people who work 3 or more shifts on core teams, for example welfare, gate/greeters, and kitchen. This could help us ensure in the weeklong context that we are not struggling to get enough volunteers to staff our teams safely and support leads so that the bulk of the work on the ground can be thorough & reliable.

I really hear you not wanting fried friends. Burned out friends are not fun friends. Its kind of a Participation / ownership discussion? I also think the way UK burns organise is a bit gross with many energies/ power falling on a few.

I love the decentralised rabit hole/ keeping it really organic e.g.

• Train everyone that will listen and empower those to feel responsible for eachother

• Change the focus from "working" a shift to... being at a burn (prioritise the quality of the volounteer experiance rather than the structure)

• If a shift is really hard to fill then downgrade the service, e.g. if in a morning meeting no one wants to volounteer that day then people know that its going to be a more chill day.

Everywhere we can, steer away from a spectating festival where you can see the edges of the container, to a deeply participatory self owned burn where you can feel the power to make the container.

My biases are that I Iove this and can afford put energy into the system :D

Secret perks sound like a lot of fun though...

I guess in the sense that we are worldbuilding here, i want to be upfront & future-focused in terms of building sustainable volunteer structures within the new UK context which is moving further and further from EU utopianism where 1 ticket-1 person-no incentives is a realistic and reliable system moving into this recession & major economic changes. the reality is that there are many value exchanges within the burn, people pour various types of energy, resources & time in, all of which are valuable in different ways, and this mutifaceted value can be celebrated without being commodified.

not married to any of these ideas btw just thoughts I've been having over this summer :)

I like the lottery idea, with a with consideration given to those traveling from overseas, or any medical needs.

I also like the lottery idea for those who put their name in but taking into account what @Adele Meower has said, the bed spaces could be offered in the first instance to site leads etc as incentive. This wont really be that many beds though so maybe we will end up filling them and wont get to a lottery which feels a bit too hierarchical. So on that basis, I'd say everyone with a membership should get to opt for a bed, and the incentives for site leads should be something else- ( stream of consciousness there)

I think we did have a nice and simple experience last year regardless of wider UK context and that we should continue down the lines of decentralisation/ no incentives since it was always an experiment and I dont think its finished yet. Plus, last year was only the first time and now that the profile is higher and more people are interested there could be more input/contribution this year.

I do hear the awesome decentralisation benefits of a smaller and newer burn and as an american also tend towards libertarianism sometimes just kind of naturally. im not really into some of the hierarchical systems i see in some burns or in the real world.

I will use myself as an example however, last year i collected & stored a massive pile of shit to fluff out welfare, as well as helped organise it's staffing and a few shenanigans to roll out on site. for a few months before my studio in London was full to the brim with stuff haha and I had to ask my roaddawg to pack out his van with all of this shit which he mercilessly roasted me for. what did i expect he is a bunny after all...

I am not the most well resourced person there ever was in the world, I am single, skint, have some health issues and pretty time poor cos i work in a social enterprise in london. therefore i would say i can intersectionally represent of the socioeconomic circumstances facing different members of our community. i have an orchestra of tiny violins at my disposal and some good friends like my roaddawg who help cover me. without the yurt behind welfare which we used as backup/storage/radio space and housing, i do think there is no way that i could have prioritised bringing together all these collective things, because I would have been stretched trying to figure out how to survive in the wet & cold outdoors on my own, and would have had to prioritise my limited resources for basic self-coverage.

this is just to explain some of the meaning behind "perks" which are less about payment/commodification or nepotism and more about creating systems that bolster collective contribution. to me this is the basic concept behind places like scandinavia and the EU who help people cover their individual needs so that they then can have nicer collectivist things, creativity & innovation

Agreed- Fluff HQ was an amazing space and was really valuable to the burn.

I definitely also put in a lot of time and money to prepare multiple workshops/spaces etc. So I dont disagree with incentives but was just saying I dont think beds should be one of them and maybe a lot of people who are more involved/experienced already have a setup anyway. I think Sam's suggestion to put bunkhouse beds in the lottery is a good idea and keep the other spaces for camp adoption, including Fluff HQ!

And also maybe Celtic burn is not the place for trialling these systems that are meant for larger events with more need for centralised volunteering and instead is a place to trial more renegade stuff and that’s cool too!! I am just coming off of watching Decomm be a bit nuts so that’s where I’m coming from …. Also this is london which is a totally different environment