Last year, BMorg announced with their usual great fanfare that they had raised $6.5 million from wealthy private donors, some of them anonymous, to purchase Fly Ranch.
A Permanent Autonomous Zone. Or, rather, a Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zone: SPAZ.
What were they going to do with the SPAZ? They didn’t know, but they were going to consult Burners.
Our process will require a balance of playfulness and seriousness, planning and spontaneity, group work and individual contributions. As you may notice, every time we learn something, it usually leads to several more questions. While we discuss our values as part of a long-term vision and project, our current planning is focused on the short term. Many of our goals are things we hope to achieve in the next 12 months. We need to focus on gathering and sharing valuable information and developing the tools to support a long term planning dialogue. Once we have reached that point, and are equipped with the tools we need, then we can begin a conversation about what Fly Ranch will become.
A quick summary of what we’re hoping to accomplish within this 12-month timeline, roughly in this order:
- Spend time on the land and in Gerlach and Empire, surveying the environment.
- Establish security plan and protocols for the property to dissuade trespassing.
- Begin small nature walks in partnership with Friends of Black Rock High Rock.
- Develop ‘Town Hall Kit’ for community leader hosted conversations and feedback sessions.
- Engage with the community online, on calls, in person, and in Black Rock City.
- Write a series of posts detailing our planning and ask for feedback.
- Develop project management software, community engagement tools, and interactive maps.
- Establish a Fly Ranch mission statement and concrete operational goals for 2018-2019.
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Well, it’s been 14 months now of playfulness and spontaneity. How much of this has materialized?
Series of posts:
We Bought Fly Ranch June 10 2016
What’s In A Gift – The Making of Fly Ranch July 21 2016
Making Sense of Fly Ranch Aug 9, 2017 – Part 1 of 5-part series
Town Hall Kit: nothing comes up in a Google search for this
Mission statement: not on web site (but a Donation button sure is!)
Concrete operational goals: unknown
There have also been a couple of private posts from BMorg Board members Ping Fu and Chip Conley.
Yep, that’s it. A few blog posts. Even I have done more than that to advance the philosophical values of Burning Man in the world over the past year, and nobody donated $6.5 million here.
400 acres of the 3800 were 3-d mapped by a volunteer with a drone:
No offense to the video maker, but this doesn’t exactly seem like an enormous contribution to the future of Burning Man culture all around the world. Whatever happened to Burning Man Earth?
All in all, this is not very much to write home about. I thought Burners were creative and self-reliant, that this was an experiment in new ways of living together as a community – A Permanent Utopia made up of the best and brightest of tech, the arts, advertising, and finance industries? Sadly, the most recent post (last week) still says absolutely nothing about Burning Man’s plans for the site. There’s fences, there’s deer and rabbits and coyotes, there’s hot water from past drilling explorations, there are signs of people using the hot springs. OK, cool – glad we could work that out in 14 months. How are we making the world a better place?
3000 people have signed up wanting to get involved. Most of them are interested in the Arts and Events; the smallest participation category is Philanthropy.
In the coming months and years (because honestly, projects of this magnitude take time), there will be many opportunities to participate in visioning the future of Fly Ranch. We will need your time, energy, expertise, and ideas. Of course this project will also need financial support to realize and explore new ideas, if you feel inspired to contribute to Fly Ranch, you can always donate to the project.
This project will unfold over a long timeline, but to give you a sense of what we re working on these days, we’re currently:
- Mapping out what limits our Ag Zoning sets on our activities and the process for changing that
- Researching the impacts of federally protected horses, two dams, and limitations with our water rights
- Hosting small trips for our office staff who have never been, and doing three community events on the playa
- Researching tools for decision-making and collaboration and making a more precise roadmap for 2018 and beyond
- Researching and building mobile composting toilets
- Discovering and cataloging all man made (and left) objects on the property
- Doing important outreach and relationship building in Gerlach and the surrounding area
As of June 2017, we’ve had almost 3,000 people sign up to get involved with the project through our Participation page. You can see a breakdown of their areas of interest here:
Surely SOME of these thousands of Burners might have had ideas about what we could do with the SPAZ. If they did, I guess none of them were worth talking about. Maybe that will be “coming soon” in the next 4 out of 5 posts in the series.
According to the official Flysalen web site, as “early” as Fall 2017 (ie. next month), interested Burners will be able to go on nature walks with the Friends of Black Rock in groups of up to 20 at a time. There is nothing about this on the FOBR web site, so like everything else in the BJ, we just have to take BMorg’s word for it.
Their newsletter editions are confusingly detached from their publication dates – is this by accident, or design? 6 months ago they said:
We’re also getting ready to expand on the Community Engagement Conversations that we held at Red Lightning camp last year in Black Rock City, and will be engaging in the next phase of community dialogue at both the European Leadership Summit in Stockholm and the Burning Man Global Leadership Conference in Oakland.
We’re planning to take what we learn from these facilitated public conversations and develop a toolkit for Regional Contacts and passionate community members to begin holding their own conversations to explore what people find most exciting about the endless opportunities of a year-round venue for Burning Man.
A Toolkit to have conversations about what people find exciting! Wow. Of course, they’re still working on it. Either they didn’t have the facilitated public conversations, or they didn’t learn anything from them, or they weren’t able to encapsulate that learning in a toolkit. Whatever the reason, we’re not yet ready for passionate community members to begin holding conversations on their own about the SPAZ.
How long does it take for a Silicon Valley organization to research collaboration tools? Installing Slack takes a couple of minutes. You need help, bra? Isn’t Burner Billionaire Dustin Mosckowets part of your brains trust? HOW CAN WE COLLABORATE WITHOUT SOFTWARE FFS!!!!!
Image: Sabo
In the past, videos from the Global and European Leadership conferences were shared online. No more. I guess Radical Community Engagement works best when the dialogue is hidden from the community, without any opportunity to comment. Or maybe they’re still getting ready to have the conversations, 14 months just wasn’t enough preparation time for the Org to talk to Burners.
Ahhh, yes. Transparency. Wouldn’t that be nice!
Fortunately, last year’s sessions at Red Lightning camp that left everybody engaged and inspired were filmed, so they could be shared.
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That was last October. We were in luck! Did the luck run out? Maybe nobody applied, or maybe nobody on the 100+ year-round Burning Man staff is able to edit videos and upload them to the Burning Man YouTube channel. You’d think with $40 million of Burner ticket money every year, and 80,000+ devoted Ten Principles followers looking to participate, they could find a way.
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Governmental agencies. They’re focused on listening. Got it.
Last year, they took a small number of hand-picked groups of ultra-VIPs on private tours during the Burn:
All together about 250 guests visited Fly Ranch before, during, and after this year’s event, and were careful to tread lightly on the land. Groups remained small (fewer than 20 at a time), utilized only pre-designated walking paths, and upheld our community ethic of Leave No Trace every step of the way.
One of them was Burn.Life’s Dr Yes, who reported that the project is being heavily influenced by Esalen and Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation. They also took Burn After Reading mag’s Jesse “Sprocket” Janusee, who was moved to tears by the experience. Halcyon was so shocked by the journey that it turned his famous “Pink Jesus” hair white:
If you’re not one of the lucky VIPs to get a naked hot springs dip as a reward for your enthusiastic servitude to the Org, perhaps you might like to attend these sessions on-Playa this year and report back to the group. Or just donate: $6.5 million goes pretty quick in the remote desert. We need more to fuel this amazing vision, we are making the world a better place nobody has ever seen anything like this TRANSFORMATION Project. 3 blog posts, wow. Send money now!
