What is InterBECS?

InterBECS (international burn event coordinators) is a mailing list for burn organizers to discuss operational and policy questions, along with a document repository.

InterBECs was founded in March 2014, and has grown gradually since then.

Why is this useful?

All regional burns can benefit from the wisdom of each other. Volunteers in each burn are all working hard and doing the best that we can, but we are probably reinventing wheels and making mistakes that others have made, and not doing a good job of sharing our successes. Burn event coordinators already do share some knowledge, but it’s been mostly ad-hoc, one-on-one. We can do better.

As burner culture becomes better known in the world at large, younger burns need to hit the ground running with a relatively high degree of professionalism compared to older regionals, which had the luxury of fumbling their way to success in obscurity. InterBECs is one way to give new burns a leg up, and the success or failure of one burn can have repercussions far beyond the event itself. It can also help more established burns look at their own operations in a new light, and find better ways of doing business. And finally, it can generate more inter-regional liveliness.

Who is on the list?

InterBECs is a closed mailing list with membership restricted to currently serving board members of regional/community burns. Status as a board member is confirmed by sending a membership request to the list admin from an e-mail address that can be tied back via publicly available information (eg, the event’s website) to a board member, or via other publicly available information. A board can also nominate a non-board senior operational lead to be a member of InterBECs.

The group does not include members of boards for events that are not burns but are burner-ish, like Lightning in a Bottle or Art Outside. It does include community burns that don’t have official regional status, especially newer burns that are not well-established.

The list admin will conduct a sweep once a year, around the new year, to confirm via the mechanism described above that list members are currently serving board members. List members can also unsubscribe themselves when they step down from a board, or admins can be notified when a list member has stepped down from a board.

Who is running the list?

For now it’s one person: Adam Rice. I’m on the board of Austin Artistic Reconstruction, LLC, which produces Burning Flipside in central Texas. In the long run, it will need the involvement of people from multiple regions in order to live up to its potential, both as participants and as admins.

Is Burning Man involved in this?

No.

Aren’t there already discussion groups like this?

Sort of.

There is the Yahoo group “Burning Ring of Fire” (BROF). This is an open group, and discussions do not seem to be well focused on questions that are directly relevant to regional burns. Burn event coordinators need a forum where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, in which they can discuss sensitive topics. Preferably one that is not being run by a business whose interests may not be aligned with the desire for privacy.

There is the Facebook group “Global Leaders & Regional Network Hub )'(“, but it has a much broader membership and no clear mechanism or policy for vetting new members (it only recently switched from an open group to a closed group). And Facebook groups in general don’t work well as repositories of knowledge. See also the privacy concerns above.

Burning Man does operate a mailing list for its Regional Contacts. Sometimes RCs also serve on boards for regional burns. Sometimes they don’t. In any case, the RC list doesn’t fulfill the role intended for InterBECs.

Burning Man also recently announced the “Burning Man Regional Events Committee,” which apparently has a lot in common with InterBECs’ goals, but does not seem to be a roundtable discussion group so much as a “council of elders.”