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BMorg email to Theme Camps

Feb 6th, 2012
by rich.
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For anyone who’s interested, just received this from the Burning Man Theme Camp Placement team.

Hello Campers -

The current ticket shortage has hit us very hard. We are writing to encourage you to register your camp, even if you are short of tickets. Thanks to those of you who have been sending feedback, suggestions, and hard figures and data around the current ticket shortage. What’s encouraging is the community is, after the initial “@$##!!”, pulling together, and some ticket needs are slowly decreasing as camps gage their own ticket inventories and work toward redistribution. Please ‘hedge your bets’ and register.

If you haven’t yet, please read the blog post from February 3rd here:

http://blog.burningman.com/2012/02/news/burning-man-addresses-2012-ticket-situation/

In a nutshell:

“Burning Man’s most important priority is to make sure the community stays intact in the face of the current challenges.”

The ticket shortage is impacting theme camps, mutant vehicle projects, and also Burning Man’s core volunteer infrastructure. The majority of our volunteer staff of our departments have always purchased their own tickets.

With that commitment in mind, we want to encourage you to register your camp, though it appears currently that you do not have enough tickets for even your core people. We do not want you to miss the opportunity to register your camp, should solutions to your ticket shortage appear after the April 26th Placement registration deadline. The Placement questionnaire goes live in nine days: on Wednesday February 15th at noon Pacific Time.

Finally, look for information on this list soon for how to RSVP and attend our upcoming our upcoming Placement Resource Forums
Limited seats in person, via phone and the web will all be options. For now, save one of these two dates:

Wednesday, February 15th, 6-9pm Pacific Time
Saturday, March 24th, 11am-2pm Pacific Time

Hang in there.

Thank you,

- Placement

Posted in: Hooping.

What to do? Burning Man 2012 Tickets

Feb 3rd, 2012
by rich.
No comments yet

Oh the places we’ll go… because we can’t all go to Burning Man.

Well said by Halcyon.

Just for the record… I’m not really sweating the Burning Man ticket situation. I’m fascinated by it.

I love Burning Man. It makes sense why the lottery was implemented. When the announcement was made that the lottery was going to happen, there was some grumbling but NO ONE expected it to go down like this. It seemed like a good attempt to solve the ticket shortage. Seems to be turning out that it wasn’t a good solution. Now we have to make the best of the situation.

I started the survey on Isopop so i could have more info. I want to know if I realistically will be able to get tickets for The Spin Cycle build crew. We’ve already started planning and some work to prep for next year. Should I put the breaks on that? We don’t have any tickets yet for the build crew of 10.

I’m confident that with some determination I can find a ticket for myself. But their is a team of people that need to be there in order for us to execute nearly a week of build and break, before and after the burn.

Given the current stats, it’s not looking super promising that we’ll get all the tickets we need. I’m going to give it through the March sale to make any decisions about attending this year. For the time being, I’m halting financial investment in this years burn.

That’s sorta liberating. I love setting up The Spin Cycle. It’s amazing and I hope it happens. It’s also a lot of work. We might have a year off… a year to devote that energy somewhere else.

I don’t think that all that many tickets went to scalpers. I think there is likely a massive influx of new participants. My challenge to them is to PARTICIPATE!! I’m thinking virgins are supplanting a massive swath of seasoned burners. It’ll be a different Burn and that’s cool, as long as the virgins own this, realize the opportunity they have, and step it up.

If this is your first year at Burning Man, create an art car, organize a camp, and definitely contact theme camp organizers.

Theme camps need fresh blood to fill the holes. If Theme Camp organizers get a flood of emails of newbie volunteers offering to fill the necessary roles, it’s all gonna happen nicely. Theme camps are in trouble without your support. If organizers get dozens of emails from people offering to show up early, rent a moving vans, hoist structures in the air, and do all that’s needed to build a camp… that will put the wind in the sails of all the theme camps. that’ll show that this year is still possible for all the theme camps.

Just my two cents.

Please fill out the Survey if you haven’t yet:http://isopop.com/2012/02/01/burning-man-ticket-survey/

Cheers,
Rich

Posted in: Community Events.

results so far..

Feb 1st, 2012
by rich.
1 comment

Well that’s a pretty resounding WTF.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AkytVXBS75t-dDdQaWFEREhzS2laTEI3VGY3RFVhMFE&output=html

Posted in: Community Events, Process.

Burning Man Ticket Survey

Feb 1st, 2012
by rich.
15 comments

This is a quick independent survey about tickets for Burning Man in 2012. There are only four multiple choice questions in the survey total.

After years of organizing The Spin Cycle Camp, I did not receive a ticket in the 2012 lottery system. Grant and the others who build our camp didn’t receive one of the first 40,000 tickets either. In fact, so far I’ve only heard of a handful of people who received tickets out of the 100 people who camped with us last year. This survey is really just for my own curiosity. I’ll post results here and on Facebook.

Detailed Real-Time Survey Results
(Go to Form>Show Summary of Responses for graphs)

Here is a formatted PDF of results, as of 1:00 on Tuesday February 2nd, 2012.

I’ll be updating the PDF in the next day.

Posted in: Community Events, Process.

HOOP HIGH – Choreography Demo SET 1 AND 2 – Basement Jaxx Music Video

Jan 19th, 2012
by rich.
1 comment

Malcolm and Beka are awesome. Okay, they have me hooked. I want to see the rest of this.

Posted in: Hooping, Process, Video.

My story with GradeCam

Jan 18th, 2012
by rich.
1 comment

Many know I’ve left architecture for the time being and work full time at a education start-up. My role ranges from strategic partnerships to marketing material to user interface design. I just finished this animation about out new free product for teachers. With a bit of sweat, I think we’ll replace Scantron forever.

I’m proud to be working on a product that can actually improve the quality of education. When teachers get instant feedback in the classroom, they can adjust teaching based on what the students do and do not know. This makes a huge difference.

The two main types of tests are “formative assessment” and “summative assessment”. A summative assessment (assessment = test in this context ) is a test you receive at the end of a learning period. This is the tests we’re all familiar with. You get a grade and your grade in the class reflects the score.

There’s a big push in education now for formative assessment, although the term is often misused. Formative assessments are given on a regular basis and are used so that the teacher knows what the students know. The point of a formative assessment is not to give the student a grade, it’s for the teacher to keep their finger on the pulse of the learning process. If everyone already knows ‘x’ but doesn’t know ‘y’, then the teacher should focus on teaching ‘y’. Without formative assessments, a teacher has a hard time keeping track of where students are at.

But here’s the tricky part.. testing means taking the time to grade and means data entry into gradebooks. If a middle school teacher has 6 classes with 30 students each, grading one assignment per day would mean 900 pieces of paper to grade in a week. And to make that worse, if you want to add that info to a gradebook, that’s 900 pieces of data entry to put in a spreadsheet. This creates an untenable situation for the teacher.

That’s why my mom came up with the idea for GradeCam. She was teaching 7th grade at the time and overwhelmed with data entry. She went back to college as a non traditional student to leave secretarial work and become a teacher… only to spend her weekends doing tedious data entry. Luckily my brother is a programming genius and wrote the software.

Now I’m working on making GradeCam available to all teachers everywhere.

We’re releasing a free teacher edition next week and a new website will be launching in just a few days.

Posted in: Process.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go at Burning Man!

Jan 7th, 2012
by rich.
No comments yet

Made me tear up. This was shot by Teddy Saunders who’s associated with the Firegroove folks.

Posted in: Community Events.

Trembling Hoop

Dec 19th, 2011
by rich.
No comments yet

I love the intro and the environment. This is beautifully shot and the hoop movement is great! I always love seeing uninhibited movement that feels authentically expressive.

Posted in: Video.

Burning Man art across the Bay Bridge!

Dec 13th, 2011
by rich.
No comments yet

Leo Villareal has created some of my favorite LED art from Burning Man and has been attending since 1994. The installation all burners know immediately is the Disorient sign.

Here’s an article from c|net on Leo’s work: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20017310-52.html?tag=mncol;1n

Next up:

The Bay Bridge, which links San Francisco and Oakland, celebrates its 75th Diamond Anniversary in 2012. To commemorate this auspicious occasion, Leo will create an installation that will turn the bridge into a light sculpture of epic proportions: The Bay Lights Project.

The plan is for Leo and his team to secure arrays of 25,000 energy-efficient white LED lights to the vertical cables of the west span of the bridge, and create elaborate computer-controlled light animations to delight visitors and locals alike.

-Jack Rabbit Speaks V16:#7:12.13.11

The Bay Lights from Words Pictures Ideas on Vimeo.

To learn more and see a video simulation of the project in action, visit www.thebaylights.org. To support the project, please visit www.causes.com/thebaylights.

I love seeing Burning Man art emerge into the main stream sphere! This will be an internationally prominent art installation emerging from our little subculture. Sweet.

Posted in: Hooping.

Araab Muzik! This is sick!

Dec 13th, 2011
by rich.
No comments yet

Damn.

Posted in: Hooping.

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