BMorg to personally select who is “in” and who is “out”. The World’s Biggest Guest List.

http://blog.burningman.com/2012/02/news/ticket-update-rebuilding-black-rock-city-2012/

We have made the difficult decision to take the 10,000 tickets that were slated to be sold via the Secondary Open Sale and manually redirect them to some of the vital groups and collaborations that make up Black Rock City: volunteers, theme camps, mutant vehicles, art installations and performance groups. These groups already have a relationship and contact points within the organization. We’re in the process of proactively identifying and reaching out to the established groups that fall into each of these categories, and offering organizers access to purchase enough tickets to provide for essential crew members.

[Update 1, 7:24pm]

It seems that these tickets are on top of the 43,000 that have already gone out (see Exploring the Other, Part I for the maths). In addition, they will still be doing STEP, in case anyone who got tickets in the lottery doesn’t want them and doesn’t want the profit from selling them on the secondary market. For some mysterious reason, they won’t start STEP for another 2 weeks.

In general, I like this idea, I think this goes a long way towards insuring that some of the key infrastructure of Burning Man will be returning this year. The proof is in the pudding, and it remains to be seen if this new plan can be executed well by all involved.

One paragraph in particular raised my eyebrows…

We are working with staff, external experts related to this field (including game theorists, sociologists, statisticians, festival producers, ticketing companies, software developers, widely-read bloggers, and more) and an advisory council made up of representative members of the community to determine what works best for Burning Man in the future.

’twas Groupthink that created this mess. I’m no expert, but my gut feeling is that adding more members to the committee does not fix Groupthink, no matter how good they are at game theory.