Bring Them to the Playa: BurnerSphere as a Window into Black Rock City
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 Training Channel and Burner Scouts
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.
Robert’s Rules for Small Boards
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!)”
Athena Demos
Athena Demos has been coming home to the playa since 1999. A South Texas ranch kid turned Los Angeles community builder, she produced LA Decompression for 15 years and grew it from 800 participants to 8,000. For most of that time she was Burning Man’s Regional Contact for Los Angeles.
Athena is co-founder and CEO of Big Rock Creative and BurnerSphere, an official virtual Burning Man experience created in collaboration with Burning Man Project. Through BurnerSphere she practices what she calls story living: inviting people into the culture, not just showing it to them. BurnerSphere won Experience of the Year (The Poly) from the Academy of Immersive Arts and Sciences in 2025. BurnerSphere, then known as BRCvr, and Athena were both featured in HBO’s The Man Will Burn.
Come take a stroll in the digital dust.
Debi “Crackerjack” Mansour
Crackerjack is the President of the Board and Founder of Not Your Mom Inc. the non-profit that produces Cosmic Burn and Burnal Equinox WNY in central & western New York. She served as the Secretary on the POrtalBurn Board from 2023–2025 and supports three library Boards of Trustees in her day-job as the Secretary to the Library Director of Rochester Public Library and Monroe County Library System. She has trained library trustees all over Monroe County, NY on using Robert’s Rules of Order to run their meetings. Crackerjack has been a burner since 2013 when she attended Burning Man (Cargo Cult) and fell in love. She was the head of a small theme camp for 10 years and started Not Your Mom Inc in 2019 as a non-profit to produce Rochester’s Burnal Equinox event. In 2020, she joined several friends who started Cosmic as a burning-man adjacent event during the pandemic. In late 2021, Cosmic was granted official Regional Burn status and continues to this day. She also co-organized the Cosmic Lounge theme camp that attended multiple regional burns for several years. For even more insight, check out her interview on the Shadow of the Man podcast (January 19, 2026, Season 2, Episode 39).