Power to the people! Let donors choose which camps get recycled Burning Man STEP tickets

Scanning the Interwebz in our quest to bring you all the latest Burner news and thoughts, we came across a great idea from emerging artist Burner Margeaux.

Let’s say you have an extra ticket or two to pass on (and by some miracle don’t know some friend who needs one). You go on Kickstarter-STEP and in addition to being able to sell to an individual buyer, you can browse about the different theme camps which are in need of blocks of tickets. You pick the one you most want to see there, and PLEDGE them your ticket. If they get enough pledges to fill their stated quota, they get/buy them all. If they don’t within a stated amount of time, they get none and YOU still have your ticket to sell to someone else if you like, just like on Kickstarter.

For those who don’t know, Kickstarter is a revolutionary new way to fund early-stage ideas. People register projects with Kickstarter, the funding is crowdsourced via the Internet, if enough people pledge the funding then the project gets off the ground, if they don’t get enough support then no-one pays anything.

Financial guru Max Keiser, creator of the Hollywood Stock Exchange which he sold to Cantor Fitzgerald for $20 million, has also created a similar type of project for crowdfunding movies under the Creative Commons license, PirateMyFilm.com

What a brilliant idea. Let the Burner community vote on the allocation of tickets – it is them that are “giving back” after all – they are choosing to sacrifice what would be a 400+ % profit by selling their tickets on eBay,  Stubhub or Craigslist, in order to support the community.  So let them choose the camps and art projects to support, not the BMorg.

BMorg even has the audacity to ask the vendors to pay a ticket exchange fee – not the new purchasers! That’s right, it’s not enough for you to make no money off your highly valuable ticket to help the community, you must actually lose money if you want to donate your ticket to BMorg via STEP. The community’s not about money, it’s about gifting. Yeah right – gifting your profits to professional scalpers with insider connections. And generously choosing to pay for the admin costs of STEP – after all, according to BMorg it’s the community that fucked this up, by ordering more tickets than they really needed. Burning Man now has to incur extra expense to implement their ticket lottery, and if you are selling your ticket via STEP, well, you didn’t really want to go anyway did you? So only fair that STEP donors pay the price for how they’ve dicked our whole community around. NOT.

What do you think about this idea?