Yay, you've already been engaging around Burning Man's Cultural Direction Setting project and you're intrigued. This next phase is a lot to say the least, so we’re breaking it down into smaller stakeholder groups that will focus on a particular topic and do the nitty-gritty work of turning the vision into processes, policies, guidelines, and educational materials where needed. Each group is being thoughtfully crafted to have different perspectives, opinions, and polarities. Many of these groups will do more learning and community engagement (surveying, interviewing, etc.) to guide their specific recommendations, whereas some groups’ topics are already very well covered in last fall’s 4,800+ survey responses. We have some open spots where we don’t know who would be a good fit – that’s where you or someone you know comes in.

GROUP FOCUS
The Open Camping group is focusing on the many uses of open camping - small groups, large groups, people who don't want or need formal placement, people who have been camping in open camping for a very long time, mutant vehicle crews who don't want formal placement, and Burning Man staff who prefer to camp in open camping. This group will be making recommendations on how the organization can improve open camping overall to better work for these different uses. They'll be making recommendations on how to change the conditions that cause land grabbing and on how acculturation can be facilitated in open camping. They will also be doing community engagement (surveys, interviews, on playa conversations, and more) to gather opinions and guidance from open campers toward these recommendations. This group will also include the head of Burning Man's City Planning Committee, someone from Placement and from Rangers. This group will have a facilitator guiding the process. All of the groups have objectives – important questions that need to be answered by this group in the form of recommendations for actions to Burning Man Project’s leadership who will be looped in throughout the group’s work.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
We are looking for 4 roles in this group to be filled: 1 Open Camper with a Mutant Vehicle that arrives early, 1 Open Camper on Burning Man staff that arrives early, and 2 Open Campers whose camps arrive when the Gates open. It is not necessary that you're going to BRC in 2019. You are also someone who can listen to and hold multiple perspectives, are aware of your biases, collaborates well within a group, are comfortable meeting and working remotely online, and are committed to figuring out the path forward.

TIMELINE/TIME COMMITMENT
This group will start meeting in December and will work through April. The group members will pre-schedule regularly set zoom video calls based on their schedules. The default will be a 1.5 hour call every 2 weeks. There will be work and/or community engagement between group calls. We expect it will be ~2 to 5 hours per week total for the months listed above. The group will break for the last two weeks of December/New Years.

NEXT STEPS
Responses will be reviewed and two people who seem like a good fit for each of the four spots will receive an email arranging for a 30 min interview by phone. A preemptive note – final decisions will be based on the overall mix of stakeholders (i.e. ensuring the group has diversity of experiences, backgrounds, expertise, etc). Thank you!