Come join the core team for 2020 and "share the love".

introducing any monetary payment is against the principles in my view, I am still amazed burning man does it. The entire hackspace movement runs without payment successfully too. Instead of paying people who work lots, how about we share responsibilities out more instead? It upsets me every time i head a core team member saying how they work more than would make it easy for them, that is a failure in management structure in my view (and one i want to help address for next year)

Tom, the reason we get burnt out has little to do with the structure and more to do with the fact we struggle finding volunteers to join the team and share the load.

Hackspaces suffer too from the burnout problem. I don't know that paying is the answer, but it surely needs a better answer than we've found so far.

id argue that one causes the other. having spoken to a few people who have considered posts at nest and not done so, and my own personal experience as well I would say that the current structure is putting people off and that causes the scarcity of human resource of which you speak. specifically only opening roles once a year (ive been told twice when offering, wait until next year) and also the attitudes of some people being very top down / i'm lead you have to do what i say / your opinion is just inconvenient until after you have done X hours of work has also put people off in large numbers. Also the idea that a lead must take on so much work puts people off too. I would be putting out comms inviting people to take just part of a role if that is all they had time for. in my experience in recruiting volunteers, saying the position is to be part of a team who share a role gets as much as ten times the response. asking one person to be available all year round is a lot. another point is the excessive use of meetings which require people to be available at certain times, i've found many decisions are best made over a focused week of discussion rather than trying to get everyone online at the same time for example.

There's some merit, I think, in considering smaller roles. Personally, I'm unwilling to respond to pleading for core team people as I know I couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery and don't want to contribute to a major failure. If I can help, I'd rather do it as an ad-hoc volunteer when I can : I'm sure there's still a need for that, too.

However, isn't the essence of a team leader that they pull the team members together ? So if you split jobs up you create a need for an overarching leader to keep them aligned. Sure, if some lead roles have become unnecessarily linked for historical reasons and could be broken up usefully, that would be good. But let's not introduce an extra management layer. That would be bad in every possible way.

in the organisations which i helped shape only five people have signed up for full time availability, everyone else is ad hoc, and we manage a much bigger process than nest which operates year round. we did it by not breaking up roles into smaller roles, but by taking away fixed links between a person and a role. each person takes a task when they can, and even splitting up work into tasks is one of those tasks.

That sounds very helpful if the main problem is dealing with tasks.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that a very significant part of core team's work is being available to be contacted, and in that respect having a face or name rather than a role to look to is a huge help.

As an example, every time I go to my local medical practice (previously known as 'doctor'), I see a different face. Record-keeping retains some semblance of continuity but it's very much inferior to the model where I saw the same person every time. Efficiency isn't everything, and, I suspect, inclusion isn't either. Or at least, it has more than one aspect.

and if enough people apply and have time to do so that can be done! having a team of people deal with incoming requests with a preference for repeated connection to the same person is totally doable! but if you want it all year round your asking that role to be someone available 365, which we don't seem to get many volunteers for yet

To be franck if someone want to fill in before the event, i don t see the problem, if there is a lack of, people joining in last minute are a great addition (example the fnugging leads gemma and steve who sort it just a few weeks before the event) after for big and cumbersome task like logistic or comm, at one point in the year before the evnt, this task are on the roll and seeing something not really working in your sense calls for more tact and cannot be fired or totally replaced like that, reinventing the wheel just before the car goes out the industry will fuck up everything ... ok you can say that the car will be a little bit wanky at the end of the chain but at least you can after work on the process without totally the first draft.
This year, I m sure with your experience and point of view, tom , there will be some improvement liek with all the other people who will have the curiosity to jump in the shark tank.
And finally, this year loomio is way more active than the previous year and implementing this tools allows to have acces to more point of view which in itself is already an improvement.

Hi Sarah, it's true that a core lead role takes a lot of time and effort. I've been in core teams for a couple of burns, got burnt out, took some time off to recover, and am now in a position where I'm thinking about throwing my hat back into the ring.
Nest is a pretty small burn as things go, and there isn't much money behind it. We are also a participatory culture - everyone contributes in some way to the community. Some people within the community choose freely to offer up their professional skills to make the event happen - we see this as part of our civic responsibility to the community.
Sometimes the essential skills we need can't be found within the community. Nest pays for qualified security and a paramedic on call at all times for the event. But core role volunteering is a year round commitment. Not only would paying core leads break the budget, but it would also dilute the principle of civic responsibility.
To put this in perspective, Nowhere (which has about 4000 people) pays only 1 person (I think) to do a full-time job, which involves liaising with the local authorities in Sarinena. But they are a much larger event than Nest, and most of the Nowhere core team do not live in Spain or speak sufficient Spanish to do the far greater amount of paperwork and stakeholder management required.
Nest is made by us. As well as civic responsibility, our principles include gifting, decommodification, and communal effort. The core team gift their time, skills and emotional labour without expectation of financial compensation, and work together to make sure that the event happens year after year, and I appreciate the authenticity of that in our community.

Volunteering does make you sexy though! ;)