The Burning Man Ticket Dilemma
By / On / In Knowledge
In case you haven’t heard, Burning Man completely mucked up their ticket sales this year. They have more demand than any server can handle, and there are so many people who want to come, that if you distribute the tickets randomly, there’s no way for the project camps to secure enough tickets to actually build the city everyone else is trying to come see.
Let’s solve this, shall we?
There are three problems that need to be solved:
- Ensuring project camps have enough tickets to actually build the city
- Ensuring equal and fair access to tickets to the extent possible
- Avoiding a first-come-first-served queue and resulting traffic jam
To pull this off, you have to split the tickets into two allotments, the corpus allotment for project camps, and the spirit allotment for general attendees.
Project camps will send in applications as usual, but in addition to their plans, they will include the number of tickets they will purchase at the group rate.
Once the city is planned, contact those camps and sell them their requested number of tickets.
The spirit allotment is then distributed using the standard lottery system.
Important: do not mess us this split. Overestimate the corpus allotment or delay the spirit allotment to after city planning if necessary.
For the current situation, the only thing that really matters is solving problem 1, because without that, Burning Man as we know it is over.
What has to be done, then, is to try to move things back inline with this general plan.
- Get the project camps to let you know how many tickets they absolutely require and plan the city.
- Use the tickets allotted for the secondary open sale (sorry holdouts!), and any tickets you can manage to buy back (if necessary), and sell them to the project camps.
- There is no step 3.
I hope they get it sorted, or ol’ “Pirate” Mike won’t be flipping breakfast your way at Pancake Playhouse this year, and that would suck for everyone.
Like this idea? Want some advice of your own? Hire me!