If you run a returning theme camp that has been to Burning Man before, and you are hoping to get some of the goodies that the Placement team dispenses, like, um, placement, but also Stewards Tickets, you’ve got a form due January 18th:
Placement’s Statement of Intent (SOI) is due January 18 at 12 pm PT / 3 pm ET / 9 pm CET for all returning theme camps and villages planning to participate in BRC this year and request ticket access for the Stewards ticket sale (formerly Directed Group Sale or DGS). Log into your Burner Profile and navigate to the BRC Participation Forms to access the form.
from 2023 Placement Newsletter #1
Here are some FAQs for the newbies:
What are Stewards Tickets? Burning Man is limited to about 70,000 participants, but there are thousands more who would love to go, so the tickets in the main sale essentially sell out in a matter of seconds and many hopeful burners are left without tickets.
Back in 2011, Burning Man sold out for the first time. In 2012, they tried running a lottery to allocate ticket sales, which was, essentially, a fiasco. Suddenly theme camps, art projects, and mutant vehicles found that their key members – the artists, creators, organizers and builders, did not score in the lottery and didn’t have tickets.
(The whole story of the lottery disaster is covered in the documentary film Spark: A Burning Man Story).
To address this problem, the org decided to reserve a certain percentage of tickets for creators. Originally called Directed Group Sales, they were renamed Stewards Tickets in 2021.
If a returning theme camp is in good standing, the Placement team will allocate a certain number of tickets that members of that camp can buy without fighting it out in the main ticket sale (which is basically a lottery that sells out immediately). The exact formula remains a tightly guarded secret but many theme camps report that they get enough for about 1/3 of their campers.
What is Placement again? That’s the all-volunteer team that reviews applications from potential theme camps and decides where to place them on the map of Black Rock City.
Anyone can subscribe to the Placement Newsletter which is a good idea if you are involved in organizing a theme camp because you will find out about important deadlines, like this one!