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

I totally agree that the UK is NOT Scandanavia and we're seriously lacking in deeply participatory, self organising culture. AND I think rather than accommodating that reality, we have an opportunity to change it within our teenie tiny Celtic Burn community.

I like the suggestion of the yurts being used for communal spaces and not sleeping. They're great spaces and it feels like a waste to just have them as a luxury bedroom.

In terms of making the decision of who gets to stay in bunkhouses, shall we consider the possibility of paying extra to do so? I know there was talk of not having different opt-in costs, but those of us staying in live-in vehicles will be paying a lot more in fuel than the travel costs of people staying in bunks.

The biggest problem is space. If everyone came in a live in vehicle, we simply don’t have room to fit them in, we fairly well maxed out the places we were allowed to put vans last year.

I’m also quite strongly disagree with the idea of people paying extra to get an inside bed, it feels very wrong. I’m not sure what you mean about higher costs for people choosing to come in vans? How people choose to travel to a burn doesn’t really have any impact on accommodation does it? And anyway, people staying in hunks still have to get there which will have a cost (probably similar to van travel costs?) Sorry if I’m misunderstanding you, but how people choose to travel to the burn doesn’t feel relevant to how much they should pay to be there.

I just mean that the fuel cost of transporting a live-in vehicle is much higher than other means of transport. The way of getting there is related to accommodation as people who don't have accommodation on site will need to bring their own.

I'm not saying this has to be the answer. It does feel fair to me that people offered beds pay slightly more, as those of us who need to bring vans have to pay lots more in fuel. It's not as frustrating as having a handful of luxury glamping beds covered by everyone though.

My view is no one group or person should pay extra unless they want to. I would rather offer an incentive to those that save space.

Sleeping accommodation makes up a large chunk of what we pay for the site and is not used by everyone. Few folk were talking about this last year and I understand the logic but not my view. I like the membership model where everyone pays the same and we manage the resources we have best as we can together. This gets tricky if we start charging more for one group over another.

The master spreadsheet contains sleeping preferences which will be useful for this discussion! Still another 45 memberships to be sold but currently there are 24 respondents who want a bunk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1auD-irDL0ubiOI588_rxKJNqkKovz7kCI2WjMyPxmjQ/edit?usp=sharing

Does anyone have a list of measurements for each space on site? Thanks.

I don't think there are any measurements. Pictures is best we have I think. What you thinking?

For a parachute activity ^_^

It’s more outside space I need to measure actually.

Hi! We like to bring a small version of Camp Costume Camp. Is there an obvious place for it in one of the spaces? I haven't been before, so not clear on what is there and what it looks like.

Hey Sabine! What is it that you'd like to bring, exactly? are you looking to host events?

It would be similar to CCC at Nest or Microburn. We could bring just lots of costumes and a make-up station. But can also expand to become a workshop space and/or bring speakers to organise a few parties. I guess it depends a bit on the space available. We could even build a structure outside, but I don't know if there is any space for that, or how that would pan out if it is very cold. For loud music and/or party space it obviously will need to fit within the sound restrictions on the site, which I also don't know anything about yet. So to summarise, we can make it big, we can make it small :).

there is space for sure to build a tent outside- next to the roundhouse last year we had a carport-sized space, for example.

i dont know of any of the yurts that would fit something as large as costume camp was at nest but maybe i am wrong.

It would be smaller then nest as we're less people in total and don't have a van for transport so we'll need to see what fits and how we can best pack.

Would one of the yurts be big enough for CCC?

I think that would if one if available.

please have a look at the trello cards 'camps/space adoption proposals' & 'Bed allocations' :)

Summarising this archival convo to move forward in actually claiming/assigning spaces..

Theme camps vs sleeping: decided

Thanks to foxy who seems to have well distributed the more sleeping spaces vibes from the more theme camp style structures on the 2 tabs in the main spreadsheet.

Bed claims: undecided

it seems like who gets a bed from the bunk spaces is still not decided, we could either do a lottery or see how many people claimed they needed on and if there might be enough room. we could have sleeping areas claimed by individuals or camps (i.e. gate crew had bunks in the cottage by gate last year). I think how people get beds is still a more open question, especially as their seem to be more people who want beds than have them.

Here is the trello card on that: https://trello.com/c/1hixMFwO/106-bed-allocations

Perhaps we need to check about ash's comment that there might be fire safety regulations in terms of how many air mattresses/ folks sleeping we can have in the bunk rooms?

My post-decomm reactionary ideas of beds as volunteer incentives were shot down by the renegade borderlanders and i put my swords down in respect & reverence to your decentralised ways.

The concept of payment for beds was unpopular.

Space Adoption: in process

*larch family yurt has been claimed as Bunny Circus

*Zen sauna has claimed the main sauna area so please collaborate with them for all your sauna based desires

*ye olde thirst trap/ oak family yurt (I believe it's called) potentially by costume camp?

*tipi by welfare

*Couples yurt by Beayurt

These adoptions have kind of happened naturally, between dreams and especially after the discussions at the meeting.

you are definitely able to contest those initial claims if you want one of those spots for your own theme camp by just popping on the spreadsheet and writing your name as second adopter, and perhaps contacting those who have already claimed it to give you rEaSoNz.

Pro tip: check out the dream associated with the space to learn more about what they plan to do with it: https://dreams.wtf/northern-regional/celts-dreams-2023

You can also collaborate with those camps if you want to run a workshop or event, either before the event or during.

Also, there are still 2 yurts to be adopted. Consider whether you and your crew, or a new crew of people who have shared interests as you, would like to adopt a yurt meaning being responsible for it's LNT footprint, caring for it, decorating it and filling it with life and magic.

I believe this is an adequate general summary of this thread and we can probably go ahead and close it soon! Please write here whatever i missed.

+1 for closing this thread. Please follow the 'Bed allocation' Trello card https://trello.com/c/1hixMFwO and give input on the pending decisions therein!