1. The board I set up at http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/ was never intended to be or set up as a competitor wannabee for ePlaya. Look at the list of topics on the smaller board, and I think you'll see why not.
ePlaya is mainly about what happens once you get to Burning Man. My little board is about what happens along the way, the experience before the experience. While I suppose the ePlaya staff could create new topic areas to cover what I've tried to do with my tiny effort, and what others have tried to do with theirs, if they did we'd be looking at an ePlaya with maybe a few thousand sections. Imagine the joy of trying to navigate that.
Conclusion: Despite some of the ranting that occasionally gets hear on this point, having everybody (all of the over 30,000 currently active burners and maybe the hundreds of thousands of past burners) come to one place and one place alone to do their talking was never in the cards. This certainly is not how things have been done in the past, as one can easily see by visiting "Black Rock City Year Round" and wandering around. Considering the fact that Burning Man is supposedly an anarchist event running according to a DIY ethic, how strange it would have been to see that level of centralization, anyway.
But if somebody still really has a problem with this, may I recommend that he drop by 3Playa and ask those divisive fellows when they intend to close their board down and stop dividing and confusing the community and then stop by some of the camp and regional BBSes to continue one's good work. I don't doubt that one will get an interesting (and well deserved) response to such an effort.
2. Let's take a good look at the experiences of new people trying to establish presences for themselves on a board as heavily used as ePlaya. Some get attention by trolling ("Burning Man is for" ... ahem, "flags"). Some have gotten attention by being trolled, sometimes by some of the regulars, and gone on to tell some interesting stories about how they were treated. No need to name names, I'm sure that everybody here can think of a few.
But most of us will post a few times, and find ourselves wondering "does anybody even read this". This is inevitable when one has a few thousand users on the same board. One will have a few well connected people who've posted a few thousand times, and a few thousand people who'll post at most a few dozen times and give up, feeling that they were just talking to themselves.
Think of it as being at a party. If only two people show up, it's not much of party. Actually, it's kind of awkward. Then you have maybe a few dozen people show up, just a few. That's enough to create an interesting group dynamic. But then you have enough people show up to give the room the feel of a sardine can, and what you discover is that just because having a little of something is good, that doesn't mean that having a lot of it is going to be fantastic. The partiers find that they can barely make themselves heard over the roar, and many will find themselves experiencing the sensation of being alone in the crowd. More is less.
Some will "go out for air", and out there, outside of this huge party that has started feeling more like a meet market bar than like a gathering of friends, one will find the real parties - little pockets of a dozen or two, off away from the racket, in small enough numbers that people start noticing and reacting to each other as individuals again, because they are not so overwhelmed by the sheer mass of people to relate to, all at once.
A place like ePlaya can get to be like that huge party, with a few very loud people enjoying being "the life of the party", and maybe a few of them, drunk and belligerent, getting mad when they see somebody going out the door for a breather, because their audience has just gotten smaller. But that's not what a party is about, and it shouldn't be what a board is about, either.
Imagine what would happen if 2,000 users tried to become active users on the scale of some of the regulars. 2,000 users putting out 2,000 posts over the course of a year would produce 4,000,000 posts. Can you picture trying to get through all of that? When one has a few thousand users on a board, just like the guests at that huge party, most will end up getting lost in the shuffle and ignored, because if everybody tried to make himself or herself heard, there'd be so much pandemonium that nobody would end up getting heard at all.
No, I haven't set up "Travel to Burning Man" to be a competitor to ePlaya. It's just an improvement and expansion of something that I set up before I was sure that there would be a new rideboard section. But I think that there is a niche there for somebody to fill, and that somebody would be doing a real service by doing so. A good many somebodies, in fact. The ambition should not be to create a new place where another 2 or 4 or 10 thousand people show up, however many people this place is going to end up with at its height; that would not be a realistic ambition. The ambition should be to create some reasonably comfortable holes in the virtual wall, where people can experience more modest sized communities that actually function as communities. "A few of us talk and the rest of you sit down and listen, and maybe nod a little" is not the definition of a community.
As somebody else once said, a long time ago before young people thought that corporations were hip, "small is beautiful". Funny how many of us forgot that one.
I said it before, and meant it: I don't know if anybody will show up to this little party of mine. I'll be mildly disappointed if nobody does, but I'll live, as all I stand to lose is a little set up time on some free websites. Maybe somebody else will come up with an alternative meeting place that better meets the needs of burners, and if so, I wish that person luck. What would bother me much more would be discovering that burners weren't open to the idea of alternate meeting places, period, expecting to see everything prepackaged and controlled from on high by the Burning Man LLC. The day that's true is the day Dr.Cliff has a point.
To say "don't take the initiative, don't split off from the herd and don't make maves" is to take the regimented experience that is taking over a lot of city life, and transport it a few hundred miles out into the desert. There's nothing more bureaucratic than saying "don't gather together, except in officially approved locations"; it's alternative culture a la Starbucks. I'd hate to think that's what Burning has come to, but I guess we'll see, in the long run.
Here's my modest contribution to the cause:
A board, "Travel to Burning Man": http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/
Two rings, which you'll need to be an active contributor to the proboard I just mentioned, in order to join:
One for Burning Man Travel stories: http://i.webring.com/hub?ring=burningmantrip
and one for people who've enjoyed their trips with the Green Tortoise and have pages about their experiences:
http://k.webring.com/hub?ring=fansofthegreento
A yahoogroup for people who'd like to go to Burning Man using the Green Tortoise: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Green_Tortoise_Fans/
and a yahoogroup for those who'd like to go by any other means: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Green_Tortoise/
along with a small page explaining why I set things up the way I did: http://i.webring.com/profile?y=burning_man_traveller. (No, its not just a heavy handed attempt to plug for the Tortoise).
If anybody else has alternative meeting places of their own that they'd like to introduce, I hope that they'll feel free to mention them in this topic discussion. The questioning of my motives and outright flaming may now begin. No promises offered that I'll bother to read or respond to any of it, or take any of it seriously if I do.
Ready, aim ... fire!
