The Post playa report is now sent to Burning man. Here are some highlights from Nordic Paradise’s report 2023.

Camp Highlights What were your camp/villages’s main highlights this year?

External: The inviting public space with an amazing bar that served cinnamon buns, ice coffee and awesome drinks. The workshops, music and all the great and interactive parties; Regional Contact mixer party, Mythical creature and Queer Viking party. 

Internal: A developed organisational structure “the snowflake” that was an engineered solution, deriving all the functions and needs and systemizing them into a flat organisation, to meet all the needs we have as a camp to make our camp as including and our space as safe and welcoming for everyone as possible. 

We also implemented a lead and a team for our sustainability work this year and integrated sustainability into the strategic work with our theme camp.

Camp Challenges What challenges arose and how did you address them? This could be about your build, your strike, neighbors, working with Placement, etc. 

The biggest challenge this year was caused by the rain/mud creating an uncertainty regarding time for exodus. A lot of members had flights booked and they didn’t know when they were able to leave BRC. We got help from neighbours to connect to the default world and were able to solve most issues. 

A big challenge in the planning phase that was ongoing for 11 months was all the uncertainties with receiving or not receiving enough tickets for our members. Strangers had to rely on each other as we needed to take deposits and work hard long before being able to guarantee the burning man tickets to our camp members. The work with finding tickets for the core leads was demotivating, we would rather spend the energy on our creative work.

Camp Lessons What would you do differently in the future based on what you learned this year? 

We will probably work with fewer teams with a couple of more members in each team to improve the flat organisation and decisiveness, apart from making the work on inclusion and integration of new burners and members even better.

We also learnt that planning for a sustainable energy solution is not easy, we calculated carbon emissions from a solar panel solution compared to our generator and next year we will need to find a solar panel solution that does not need the same amount of transportation. Would also be great to collaborate more with neighbours on this matter.

For the workshop and events we need to think through how to plan and distribute the workload among members in a smarter way. 

Last but not least, we also learnt that we need to work on building the “work is play” mindset for everyone, to build a camp and to take on a shift shall feel easier and more fun!

In addition, we need to build the camp so we can handle rain/mud in a better way. 

For all theme camps and villages: the Statement of Intent will be open in November and camp standings will be supplied in January. You can complete the Statement of Intent before receiving your camp’s standing. Placement is looking forward to building Black Rock City with us again!