We'd love to hear how your regional is handling ticketing. We'll discuss the following questions:
– How are you handling advertising or do you even need to advertise?
– Do you have a pricing strategy? Is your event responsible for funding the other 360 days a year?
– What policies do you have in place for critical staff? Theme camps? Returning volunteers? Other?
– Do you offer specialty tickets or add ons – dogs, vehicle passes, ice etc?
– Have you found a process to increase donations?
– What software are you using and how is it going?
– What policies have you implemented?
– Does your regional have a Learn & Burn plan?
– Do you have a refund plan for if/when your event must be cancelled (prior or during the event)?
And more!

How do you explain Black Rock City to someone who has never been? You bring them there.

BurnerSphere is an official virtual Burning Man experience, created in collaboration with Burning Man Project. No headset needed: participants explore art, camps, and gatherings together in real time from a VR headset or a desktop. It started in 2020 on AltspaceVR. When that platform sunset in 2023, we went looking for a new home and decided we needed to build our own: a home for Burners, by Burners.

In this session, we’ll bring BurnerSphere into the room with a live demonstration. Then we’ll go behind the scenes: what we film on playa, how we capture art installations, and how those captures become worlds you can walk through together. You’ll see how passive viewership turns into story living.

We’ll also look at BurnerSphere as an educational tool. For your first-timers and anyone curious about making the trip to the big burn, it’s a way to feel the scale of the city, meet the art, and get a sense of the culture and the 10 Principles before they ever pack a dust mask. We’ll close with an open conversation about what BurnerSphere could mean for regional communities, and we want to hear your ideas.

Come take a stroll in the digital dust.

Burner Bingo is our meet and greet icebreaker, and everyone gets a board full of squares like "someone who has led a department for more than five years" or like "someone who has been to a burn outside the US". Mingle, ask questions, and get people to sign off on the squares that apply to them.

How it works:

• Grab a board at from TaraByte
• Find people who match the squares and get their initials the squares
• Get a bingo and bring your board to TaraByte to claim your prize

Prizes:

• 🥇 First 5 people to get a bingo: [prize]
• 🏆 First person to black out their entire board: [bigger prize]

Each person can only sign your board once, so you'll have to talk to a lot of different humans. That's the point!

Burner Training Channel will host the best of the best recorded lessons for burners by burners. Burner Scouts is a crowd-sourced and modular system of patches for participants that anyone can use or add to. Whether you want to help build these systems or just tap into them, come learn more.

At a time when “everything is a lot,” burns are a shiny, “safe” space of community and connection. And regionals make burning accessible. When, in the default world, prices continue to rise, and communities are under attack, how can burn leaders nurture our events, our participants, our volunteers, our artists, and our organizations? We have some takeaways from our events, but come ready to engage and share your own!

Art and transformative experiences are central to Burning Man culture, and as event organizers, we work to cultivate opportunities for both. Yet balancing these creative energies with the practical needs of event management can be challenging, and the ways we approach that balance can have far-reaching impacts on our events and the communities that support them.

At SOAK, the Portland Regional event, we have recently concluded that solid-fuel fire is no longer a viable artistic medium given the location and season in which our event occurs. We are using this as an opportunity to reassess not only how we create transformational experiences that have historically centered around large-scale burnable art, but also what role event leadership should play in the artistic process itself. We'll begin by sharing our experiences from the past year and the questions that emerged from that work.

From there, we'll transition into a facilitated conversation exploring how other Regional communities approach these challenges and discuss topics such as governance models, resourcing, volunteer management, artist support, and artistic autonomy. Our goal is not to identify a single "right" approach, but to develop a broader understanding of the solutions being used across the Regional network and to expand the toolkit available to our communities as we navigate these complex and evolving questions.

Insurance is one of the least glamorous—and most consequential—challenges facing regional Burning Man events. What risks are we actually insuring against? What's the difference between general liability, directors and officers (D&O), and event-specific coverage? What happens when fire art, mutant vehicles, volunteers, or unexpected incidents fall into the gaps between policies?

We'll start with a practical overview of risk and insurance, explore the evolving insurance market from a regional organizer's perspective, and examine the exclusions and ambiguities that can leave events unexpectedly exposed.

Then we'll open the floor for a facilitated discussion about shared challenges, policy decisions, and possible collective solutions. Can we improve our risk profiles, establish common standards, or create more effective group insurance arrangements?

This is a participatory session for regional organizers, board members, safety leads, and anyone interested in keeping our events safe, insurable, and sustainable. Bring your questions, experiences, and difficult scenarios.

What do we do when something goes properly sideways? We'll walk through it from top to bottom, starting with immediate on-the-ground scene control and working our way all the way up to interfacing with local officials.

The million dollar question is should your organization Buy land or Rent/ Lease it to hold events on.
There are a # of things to consider prior to making this decision.
Aquisition of… locating land that works for you
Considerations:
Zoning
Permitting
Cost/ Cash or acquiring a loan
Fitting in & acceptance by the neighbors
Governance:
Legal entity of ownership
Taxes
Insurance

What makes you feel vulnerable as a burner leader? In this circle we will take turns sharing our stories before any cross talk, and we commit to keeping what is shared by others confidential. Past sessions have revealed to many folks that they are not alone in facing their challenges and they may have learned more than they even realized. This is a participatory session and the facilitators role is simply to ensure everyone has a chance to share.

(Note: This idea taken from unknown contributor at a participant-lead Burning Man GLC session and brought to the mid Atlantic leadership conference (facilitated by me) twice)

Robert’s Rules of Order is the most widely used parliamentary procedure in the United States. Most non-profit organizations use it, and unfortunately, many don’t use it very well. This session will walk you through the basics in plain language and show you all the acceptable shortcuts to help make your Board Meetings and Minutes compliant with your bylaws—they likely specify Robert’s as your meeting standard. If you want to use Robert’s but don’t want your meetings to be stuffy and pretentious, this session is for you.

Previous participant feedback: “It was a fun and informative session.  Fantastic presentation.  Surprisingly, I really enjoyed it.  Thank you.” “Very informative; thank you!” “Thank you again for a really wonderful presentation (full disclosure- I’m a nerd for this stuff!)”

Small events are the beating heart of community building and offer an opportunity to go deeper with people you meet. But getting started can be so challenging. Small events often face different challenges than events in the thousands and at a different scale. One size does not fit all! Let’s learn from each other and work through what is important to focus on when hosting more intimate gatherings.

The discussion will be facilitated by two members of Burning Man’s Regional Event Committee who will share a few tips harvested from the trials and tribulations of other events over the last 20 years. The majority of time will be meeting and sharing other producers who you can strategize with long after you leave BAM!

Every year, Regional Event organizers answer the same long survey (thank you!), and the answers add up to something none of us can see from our own corner of the network. This session puts it all together in a quick snapshot.

In 2025, 94 official events across 18 countries welcomed nearly 110,000 participants, powered by 18,000+ production volunteers and backed by $2 million in art grants. We’ll dig into the numbers, then cover what keeps us up at night. You’ll also hear the out-of-the-box fixes organizers came up with, from Legacy Mentor programs to Silent Discos to effigies that burn through projection mapping instead of fire.

Presenters, who helped gather this data, will share findings from the official Regional Event Annual Recaps, then open the floor for Q&A. Come ready to compare notes, borrow ideas, and see how your event fits into the bigger picture.

We're all volunteers here. None of us are getting paid. This presentation will start us on the topic of treating our volunteers (and ourselves!) with curiosity, empathy, and thoughtfulness. We will discuss why appreciation and gratitude matter.

We take for granted that we will burn the man and a temple on the playa each year. Many of the regionals have also taken this for granted but things are changing. What does your regional do and what are your future plans? If we can't burn shit a lot of people get very disappointed and feel the regional leadership has let them down. How do you replace a big old fire and does it work? Is it as good as something with embers blowing in the wind? We would like to discuss this and more. No two regionals are the same so lets see what we can come up with so burners feel good about what will replace the big fires. We will all miss the big flames but do we have a choice?

If you would like to help with this session please feel free to upload images of your current burnable structures or replacements. This will help others understand what regionals are doing as we discuss options. https://discordapp.com/channels/1181684857705873408/1565463080207519795

You volunteered to run the group or page. Now it’s 11pm, a thread has gone sideways, and someone is demanding an apology from the whole organizing team in the comments. Sound familiar?

Your regional community’s online space is the year-round heart of your community, and it takes real care to keep it that way. Join social media and communications leads from Regional Events as they share stories of online chaos and what they did about it. Then bring your own thorniest situations, and we’ll workshop them together: how they might have handled it, what the room would try, and what you can do next time.

We’ll cover the basics that keep communities healthy: a clear purpose, a code of online behavior, a team of moderators (because no one should do this alone), and knowing when to log off and take it offline.

You’ll leave with practical ideas, new friends who understand your pain, and a chance to shape a shared tips guide for organizers and community leaders across the Regional Network.

Let’s chat about Volunteerism at our regionals.

• How are you recruiting people?
• Do you have a volunteer policy tied to hours and ticketing?
• Do you have SOPs?
• What software are you using? Is it working?
• How are you ensuring follow through and that people stick to the timeline?
• How are you motivating people?
• What about burnout? Do you have a system for delegating tasks?
• Is your burn growing? If so, has this overwhelmed your volunteers in leadership?
• How do you address shortages?
• How do you deal with volunteers who don’t meet expectations?

You can have all your processes and knowledge perfectly documented, but it won’t help successors if they don’t know what’s in those documents or where to find them. How do we help orient our successors to the historical resources they have available?