#4 The Heroes Edition In this edition
Saunacious Spa this sundayDarling don't you cry over the past Kiezburn summer haze. 🧜♀ ☝️ Saunacious Spa offers you the kind of heat that will grill your bones and calm your running mind. 💆 🙆♀ Come for the Aufguss and stay for the community. 💦 ❤️ 🧚♀ (also leave a donation since this is secretly is a fundraiser event 🤑 ) When: Where: What: Bring: Leave:  Survey results and MogliI’ve been struggling to write something about the survey for weeks now. Part of that is that the results are so aggressively unsurprising. That’s a success for this new survey. If we manage to capture something real about how things are, we can repeat the survey next year and see how it develops. That it’s unsurprising to me doesn’t mean that it’s unsurprising to you, so I invite you to take a look at the results for yourself. During the General Assembly last week, I chose to highlight the following:
The data is available in five parts:
A good example of several of the issues mentioned came up on our Discord when the crew behind the Mogli art car posted an apology on Instagram. This isn’t a place to relitigate whether or not Mowgli as a story is problematic. That was done copiously in the media a couple of years ago when Disney decided to slap a content warning on their movie. The book is worse. It’s also not about burns being sanitary places free of uncomfortable, controversial, or provocative art. They are not and should not be. Being any of those things clearly wasn’t the intention from the artists behind Mogli. It wouldn’t have been difficult to tweak a cool art car with a waterfall to avoid the association. Mogli was funded with a large grant from Kiez Burn, and on our side there were definitely people who knew it could be problematic. I don’t have any inside information about how that happened, but to me it signals a cross-cutting structural issue in how we’re organizing. We changed our art granting scheme this year. I personally have a long-standing beef with “Dreams”, which we used previously, having contributed code and time to the Borderland project behind it. “Letting the community decide” by clicking a button meant a beauty contest where nobody really took the time to understand what was being funded, and the effect at scale was largely the same as giving everyone who applied an equal share of the pot. Supporting artists building a yearly event means more than throwing them some money; it requires building relationships. It means not funding the crew that hasn’t delivered for the third year, providing resources and oversight to make sure people succeed, matchmaking people with different skills, and giving feedback. Especially when the artist is about to inadvertently not hit their vision of an inclusive, fun art car. Us being able to do that requires robust departments of people inside Kiez Burn that know what they’re doing, with a manager you can speak to. Kiez Burn is relying on single people acting as heroes to pull off things that should be communal efforts, and we’re reaching a point where they burn out. That’s an inevitable function of growth. Kiez Burn is at an inflection point right now. At 1500 people, the legal requirements regarding security, traffic management, and on-site infrastructure become stricter. Similarly, we can no longer rely on leads having the technical know-how to pull something off; we need leads that can organize groups of people with technical know-how. That we’ve made it to this size with a skeleton crew on the production side is a testament to how great our camps and artists are. That we can keep the ticket price down so people can allocate money on their own, and that we from this side of things stick to making a frame for all the weirdness to organize itself in. Still, it’s a curse of success that we need to keep growing. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of the event, making it more exclusive and based on invites, we need to make space for a sizable proportion of the people who want to go. If we were to drop down to 1000 participants now, many people who make Kiez Burn today just wouldnt get a ticket. Nothing about this is particularly dire; it’s a challenge for us to grow up and solve, and we’re doing it together. A problematic art car is a good signal that it’s time to shed ourselves of our heroes. (Opinions are my own, I do not work for or represent Kiez Burn. If you want to have your own opinions reply to this email with it). K |
.gif)
