2011 promised new adventures and the year did not disappoint. Unfortunately, when the event sold out in the summer, some camps had to cancel because a ticket was not purchased in time. In 2011, two placers took the new graveyard shift and were available to place camps overnight on Friday and Saturday pre-event. We had fun streets at the 15 and 45 minutes intervals from Liminal to Graduation. According to most reports this was a positive change and placing on and around these streets was successful. We marked camps with identifying numbers this year, instead of camp names, which was really useful in helping us make contact with a camp’s first arrivers.
How hard can placement be? Well, it is a year-round job to varying degrees. Most of us are volunteers and are managing family and full-time jobs and life in general concurrently. We all have learned computer programs and are tied to our computers, almost every night, once your questionnaires start coming in, and it is pretty much nonstop until we reach the playa. Our statistics reflect the quantity by the number of questionnaires that we reviewed this year: 36 Art Support, 49 Burning Man Department camps, 845 Theme Camps and 36 Villages (68 Camps let us know that they were going to be in Villages). We were able to place a majority of the requests, about 920 camps in total.
What is going to change in 2012, you may ask? We are going into “year two” tweaks to help the placement questionnaire process become even better. There may be a few more new faces on our team. 2012 is promising to be as much of an adventure as 2011.
To each and every member of the Theme Camps that we placed, and that brought so much to Black Rock City and left it clean – Thank you. You know who you are!
Submitted by,
Susan Bernosky