Basics

Burn After Meeting 2024 was held at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston IL USA, October 26–27.

115 people representing at least 19 entities participated.

Ticketing

There were two phases to the ticketing process:

• A crowdfunding campaign to meet the conference’s basic funding goals. These tickets cost $150.
• General sales after the crowdfunding campaign ended. These tickets cost $185. Buyers could either purchase a ticket for themselves or vouchers for others.

The crowdfunding campaign ran from Jan 24 to Feb 22. The campaign’s target amount was $13,500; it raised $18,600 (not deducting the Indiegogo 8% fee), for 122 tickets (plus a very small amount in donations below the price of a ticket). The goal of the crowdfunding campaign was to meet the conference’s upfront costs in advance, and it succeeded in that.

Backers of the crowdfunding campaign were sent vouchers that they could redeem for tickets. Vouchers were also available for sale during the general-sale period. There were a total of 135 vouchers (as opposed to tickets) sold, either during the crowdfunding campaign or regular sales. Of these, 91 were “group buy” tickets, where one person or organization bought multiple vouchers, anywhere from 2 to 10.

During general sales, an additional 32 tickets or vouchers were purchased. All of the regular-sales vouchers were redeemed.

31 of the crowdfunding-campaign vouchers were never redeemed, though for planning purposes, they were treated as if they would be redeemed at the last minute. Some backers let us know that they were treating their ticket as a donation; some had purchased vouchers on spec for members of their organization, and then had trouble finding anyone who could use them. For the most part, we never heard from the no-shows.

About five tickets were transferred.

Refunds were available until two weeks before the conference—this was the point when the catering order needed to be finalized. Two tickets purchased during the crowdfunding campaign were later refunded, not counted in the numbers above.

Programming

All of the programming was sessions proposed by participants; the organizers were almost completely hands-off in this regard, apart from suggesting to two people who proposed very similar sessions that they combine their efforts—which they did—and that a person with subject-matter expertise be added to another session—which she was.

One presenter had to cancel at the last minute for personal reasons. Conversely, we added one session after the program had been printed, and another one at the event.

The conference opened with brief remarks by Adam in the hallway outside the function rooms followed by an icebreaking exercise in which signs naming ten topics were taped up in the hall outside the meeting rooms, and participants gathered at the topics that interested them to meet people of similar interests. This was the same format as used in 2023, where it seemed to work well.

After that, Saturday had four sessions in parallel and three 85-minute time slots; Sunday was 4×4. There wound up being two holes in the schedule grid.

Sessions topics tilted toward event safety: out of a total of 26 sessions, five were focused on safety volunteers, and another three were arguably safety-adjacent. Three were by burners who own technology companies that provide services related to burn events (Dust, BRCvr, and Volunteeripate). Four focused on abstract, big-picture questions. The rest were more operationally focused in one way or the other.

Eleven of the sessions were explicitly roundtable discussions; a few of the presentations wound up being roundtable discussions, at least in part. All of the presentations included plenty of time for Q&A.

In addition, there were six “dine around” dinners, each with about eight participants. These were patterned after the dine-arounds at the 2024 European Leadership Summit. Each had a “table captain” who made dinner reservations and picked a specific topic of conversation for their table.

Communications

Pre-event communications between the organizers and participants were via e-mail.

The organizers set up a Discord server for use by the participants, with a general chat channel, a roomshare/rideshare channel, and separate channels for each session. None of these were used much before the conference, but they were used very intensively during the conference, to share documents mentioned during sessions, to share recordings that participants made of the sessions, to organize dinner outings, etc.

The organizers had a Signal group chat that was the primary medium for planning discussions.

Venue

The Orrington is a historic hotel in downtown Evanston, just north of Chicago. It is walking distance to a stop on Chicago’s El system, and is surrounded by restaurants, coffee shops, retail, etc. It is a few blocks from Northwestern University.

The conference occupied four rooms on the hotel’s 9th-floor conference center, along with a wide hallway connecting them.

Catering

The hotel catered breakfast and coffee both days of the conference. Breakfast was breakfast burritos both days. This was served in the hallway.

Financials

The financial statement for 2024 has been posted here.

TL;DR: BAM will have about $4200 left in the bank once all the bills are paid for 2024. The plan is to keep this as seed money for 2025, and to pay for some improvements to the BAM website.