“Greetings and Welcome Home! Thank you for coming back to the Playa and well…occupying it!
My name is EmCee Widget. Everyone calls me EmCee. I am one of three Burning Man Regional Representatives to Second Life. Dusty and Danger Ranger are the other two.
If you have been coming to Burns in Second Life you will recognize Dusty (formerly Linden) Udal, who helped lead the BURN for many years. You may also recognize Danger Ranger as one of the founders of Burning Man, the Rangers, and a legendary Playa Shaman known for bi-location…being in two places at once.
I am part of a Core Team of People that work all year on BURNing events. We are called the Core Team.
This team includes
Ronon Carver – Rangers, Community
Doctor Gascoigne – Performance
Diana Renoir – DPW Department of Public Works and DMV – Department of Mutant Vehicles
Taralyn Gravois – Art Team Lead
Budster Bashley – Volunteer Coordinator
EmCee Widget – Communications
I want to give a special welcome to Marianne McCann and Rails Bailey who have come as Ops Leads within the Teams for Communications and DMV respectively. I also want to thank Shendara Destiny for stepping in to help Community reorganize. I also want to recognize the head of Lamp Lighters Zahra Ethaniel, and the Lamplighter Council of Elders. They will be here in camp drumming and lighting our slice of playa!
Working with this group is a dedicated staff of leaders and hundreds of volunteers. We love you all for the gift of time and effort you have put into making the BURN great!
This town continues our conversation about the future of BURN2. We want to revisit our Mission, Vision, and Goals. We want to get feedback from you in text chat. That way we can document it.
From some previous requests I will do this specific townhall in chat.
We will take questions during our talk. I will stop and repeat the question in chat and answer it or ask you to make statements. To request to ask a question, please type a “?” in chat. We will catch your name and call on you. Have the question all pre-typed in and ready to go, so you can just hit “ctrl-enter” and it will SHOUT out.
You can ask questions of me, or of Core team, or if we need an answer from Burning Man, we will ask them. If you want to make a statement, don’t just text it out..save it and do a “!” in chat. We will ask you for your statement. This helps us get all the statements in chat together for easier logging.
Let’s revisit our Mission and Vision. A mission is what we believe in. Why we are here. Our vision is what it all looks like when we are done accomplishing our Mission.
Our Mission: The Mission of the BURN2 organization is to extend the Burning Man cultural movement by facilitating the spread of the Burning Man ethos and values within the virtual world of Second Life.
Our Vision: Our work facilitates an active, growing virtual community in Second Life that upholds the 10 Principles and ethos of Burning Man through cultivated learning, civic participation, celebration, art and human interaction.
Goals:
To build a persistent and active community base on Deep-Hole during 2012.
To engage our Community in appropriate events in Second Life as active Participants to highlight Burning Culture.
To bring together a highly collaborative team that enables the community to participate, celebrate and interact, and ultimately to realize their vision of what the Ethos and Principles of Burning Man mean in Second Life.
I like to ask first…what does this mean?
How would YOU accomplish the Goals?
What should We…You and me and Us..do?
What’s does that mean to the BURN?
What could a Ten Principles event Be?
Let’s talk now a bit about How we as a Community can get things done.
Recall that Burning Culture always starts with a Gift. That Gift can be time, or art, or leadership, or creativity.
We are recruiting volunteers now and we have a volunteer kiosk in the info tent in the South East corner of Deep Hole that will take you to the BURN2.ORG webpage where you can fill out a volunteer questionnaire. The URL is http://www.burn2.org/volunteer-signup
Let’s talk about the changes that have occurred with Deep Hole. Look around and you will see things for the community. Meeting areas, chill spaces, stage areas, a gallery…and A Sand Box.
This is your sim to use! You can use it many ways. Casually by using these spaces, or more formally scheduling a meeting or lecture or even…scheduling an event!
The recent April Fools day event was a good example of an event that came from Dudarling Supermarine and exemplified how someone can energize all the volunteers to support pulling off a large event. Over 800 individual avatars attended April Fools over a weekend. Let’s give everyone who worked on that event, built for it (what amazing art!) and performed a big round of applause…
Thank you all…you did it the BURNER way and made your own event!
So to repeat myself from the last TOWN Hall…
There are NO BYSTANDERS FOR EVENTS OR EVENT PLANNING! This sim is here as a resource and our awesome departments and Leads and Volunteers are here to help you realize your dreams of having an event! Whether it is a poetry reading, Art show, weekend on the Virtual Playa, lecture, learning series…so long as it supports the 10 Principles, we want to bring it to the Playa and we will help you. We are your Playa Dream Enablers!
Grab an event planner here and submit it to info@burn2.org!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10crHs577hdDnNbtbB310EzjI67dq7612tiKziDeRWFU/edit
We hope to fill up Deep Hole with events and activiites, classes and art that keep you coming back and Pre-compressing until the big BURN event October 20 – 28!
We had a great small burn in 2011 that we created ourselves. We want to have an even better BURN in 2012 with your help. As you all know..the BURN is funded by….US..all of us. It was clearly a big expense for us to raise funds through selling camp plots for last year’s event, and it made the plots we had to charge for expensive, even though they just helped to cover expenses. We want to do everything that we can to raise money for a great burn, host our invited artists and camps, have a free camp lottery, and have as many camps as we can on the playa. And we want to do that and just cover expenses.
For 2012 we are starting early in our planning and looking for people to help support the BURN by loaning or donating full sims to the estate.
We are in some exciting conversations right now. If you have a sim or a few sims we could move into this estate for 90 days we would like to speak with you! email info@burn2.org
If you would like to donate money to support the BURN we are most grateful. There are donation kiosks around the sim and they pay to our fundraising avatar M2 Burner. You make the BURN happen!
Our theme for this year’s BURN still remains a mystery….but it will be determined with your input! We believe that Fertility 2.0, which is the Burning Man theme this year, may remain with that RL Burn event, and we should consider a theme that is the RESULT of Fertility that will be OUR theme. What could a theme be that results from Fertility? We are listening…and hope to announce a theme for the event shortly!”
