Burning Man Cultural Convening Update

Just before last year’s Black Rock City event, we announced our plans to bring a new kind of convening to life a gathering of more than 2,000 innovators, leaders, doers, activists, social change makers from across the Burning Man community and beyond in Reno in the spring of this year.

Since then, we’ve received a tremendous amount of interest in this event. We are excited and inspired by the passion, ideas, and contributions pouring out of this community. While we have past experience hosting gatherings such as the Global Leadership Conference, the European Leadership Summit, and the Theme Camp Symposium, and have cheered on the continuing growth of the Regional Network and Locally Organized Leadership Gatherings, the potential for this new event is even larger and more important than we could have predicted. 

We’ve come to understand that with some additional time for planning and for incorporating your great ideas, we can make this convening truly successful and effective in bringing people together to connect, share, and catalyze lasting cultural change.

To that end, we have decided to launch this event in 2021. Taking more time will allow us to produce more valuable content, more pathways for community development, and more fully-developed tools for connecting and collaborating beyond the event itself. The results during and after this convening promise to be stronger and more productive. If you want to stay informed and hear the latest as this evolves, please sign up for our mailing list here

Thanks so much for being on this journey with us. We’re excited to see what we can do together and look forward to sharing updates with you soon.


Top photo by Burning Man Documentation Team

About the author: Burning Man Project

Burning Man Project

The official voice of the Burning Man organization, managed by Burning Man Project's Communications Team.

10 Comments on “Burning Man Cultural Convening Update

  • Ronal Taniwaki says:

    So that’s it? You’re going to leave us high and dry for 2020…… not even considering a smaller scale event???

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  • Wovoka says:

    Probably a good idea, considering how we’ll be forced to deal with all of 2020’s socio-politico-environmental changes…

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  • Markus Mukenhirn says:

    Ich finde die Einstellung sehr gut. Veränderungen wird es immer geben. Der Grundgedanke darf jedoch nicht abweichen. Lässt euch nicht aufhalten. Macht weiter so.

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  • tony says:

    Prettty sure nobody cares……

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  • jack cat bitch says:

    i said “Boouuurrnnss”

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  • SinglePly says:

    Sorry to read about your leadership is having issues with leading.

    Concerning Black Rock City and Burning Man 2020, when is your leadership going to disclose how the new BLM mandated entrance searches will be conducted*? Or are we leaderless and we need inquire to the BLM? Your leadership made this entrance search issue a big deal last spring and since then you sure have been silent about it. I think we are all interested in, and have a need to know, about what the entrance search plans are whether your leadership agrees with them or not. Will the BLM third party security contractor use drug and gun/ammunition sniffing dogs or will every vehicle be unloaded and reloaded at the gates? Are you going to sue the BLM about their conducting unconstitutional entrance searches? My guess is you are not suing because you have already conducted mandatory entrance searches for stowaways at the event for many years and you don’t have a case. It would be pretty hard for your leadership to convince a court that mandatory searches for stowaways are okay because you need the cash but, searches for illegal drugs and weapons are not okay.

    Bottom line is will I need to leave my stash and AR-15 at home or will I still be able to sneak them in?

    *Burning Man Event Special Recreation Permit, Final Environmental Impact Statement-Volume 2, June 2019, Appendix E. Mitigation and Monitoring, Public Health and Safety, PHS-1: At all portals of entry into the Event, beginning approximately 14 days before Labor Day, BLM will contract third-party, private security to screen vehicles and participants, vendors and contractors, and staff and volunteers entering the Event. Third-party, private security will report banned or illegal contraband or significant concerns directly to law enforcement as violations are observed so that law enforcement can respond.

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  • People are not going to take their experiences at Burning Man for granted and we’re going to see a lot more super wealthy people on Segways.

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  • Steve Hunt (Pine) says:

    Could you be more specific about what caused the postponement?
    1. Arranging logistics in Reno
    2. Event organization
    3. Event content
    4. Lack of interest (I know this is not it)
    5. Staffing priorities, competing activities that might suffer
    6. Other, please clarify

    Would stronger volunteer participation contributed to avoiding postponement?
    Would forewarning that the event was in jeopardy for this year allowed the community to come together to avoid postponement?

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