Old news, just for the record

[mrplanet4]

I'd forgotten I had written this. It's old news but it came up as "Restore from saved draft?" when I logged in so I'll publish it. The main point is that I have been in the BMORG's shoes and have true empathy for them. Plus rage. As a business exercise I've tried to understand their decision to go lottery better and wondering if I would've

Comments

[amaniellen]

2.the system has also been skewed toward people
who could sir at a computer, hitting refresh for hours the morning of ticket sales. Flipside uses a lottery, to great success, so bm HQ thought it would work.
When way way way more registrations happened, the odds of getting a ticket on fact, went down.when pll double registered, add on both parties of a couple registered, they didn't realize they were diluting their ownodds of getting a ticket.
You can make a direct appeal to the org, they are saving the last ten thousands tickets forppl who are part of the fabric of brc, whatever that means. and there is STEP. I hope you get tickets!

[mrplanet4]

My immediate response to that argument (Skewed toward those who can sit at a computer in the morning) is "Saturday and/or Sunday" ticket sales.

That won't catch everyone but people would be far more able to sit and refresh on a weekend.

At this point I'm not worried about getting tickets but I'm academically interested in the decisions they made to go with the lottery. It seems there was no Occam's Razor applied. They trashed the entire previous system and went for something completely new. That very rarely works. Incremental change for complex issues is a far safer route. Changing the day tickets were sold to a weekend (has that happened? I seem to recall them always being on a weekday but I could be mis-remembering) or working on getting more stable ticket system infrastructure to handle the massive load look to be more sensible choices.

I have no idea what went into it, I'm just guessing and armchair quarterbacking, but it's intriguing.

[amaniellen]

'It seems there was no Occam's Razor applied.'

HAHAHAHAHAAa. haha. ha.
Whew! YOU'RE HILARIOUS.

It's Burning Man!
Here's the thing, after spending three years full time under that roof, I will tell you that keeping anything simple is simply not within the scope of anything Burning Man-related. Promise.

I love them, and am not bashing them. I am saying that simplicity loses, in the name of 'The Principles', and of being bopped around by its entitled constituency.

They are trying, they go to other big events and do research, but then they go down a rabbit hole of one thing that works, and apply it swiftly to a problem at BM, context be damned.

Their intentions are actually pretty good. The execution, not so much. I personally think the lottery could/may/will work, but needed a year or two's ramping up and publicizing and crowd-coddling before launch.

[mrplanet4]

I don't doubt your experience with them.

But on a serious note, I'm not bashing them either. I understand how ugly surprises can happen when your new system hits oxygen. And you have some good insight. I can just see the org getting focused on a "solution" and not gaming it out past the initial excitement. That's happened to us too.

And their crisis response has been pretty good. I like the messaging so far, they've mea culpa-ed and done some deep back bends to try and patch the holes.

I don't have much faith in the lottery, though. I fear they'll use their "get tickets to theme camps" stop-gap measures as permanent fixes. The lottery punishes the dedicated burners, their stop-gaps (while appropriate this time) would create a class system of theme camp privilege if continued, and all together it would water down the community.

Plus, I also think it should never grow past 50K (and might be better off if the population were dialed back) though I think that'd be contrary to some core philosophies.