Notes from this year

[gbus]

2015 was my first year, so I am not really in the position to judge. I did, however, have a fairly different experience to what people have been saying. I didn't experience any lad-ish behaviour. It felt exactly like I imagined Burning Man to feel like, my experience was that people were following the principles and seemed respectful.

I was surprised by the ticketing and I fully agree with the OP. Coming from the UK and being a big football (soccer) fan, I was a bit confused at how things worked. I will try to outline the system my club uses and apply it to Burning Man

The club controls all ticketing and each person that buys a ticket is registered. This is very important for 'away' games when the club is travelling to another stadium. The amount of these away games you go to is tallied up and you are put in a category, eg. if you have been to all the away games, you are in the top category. What this means is that when a glamour game comes around that everyone wants to go to, people in the top category are offered tickets first. Each ticket has the person's name on it in a bid to combat the black market. My assumption before coming to Burning Man was that the ticketing would work in a similar way.

My proposal would be that, as the OP says, names are printed on tickets and attendance is registered. Once a burner has been 5 years they are put in a top category. When it comes ticket sales time, the members of the top category are offered access to one ticket each. (obviously this would depend on numbers and I would like to see a third or quarter of the total tickets being reserved for people under 5 years)

I imagine people would want to play around with the details of this, but i think the sentiment behind it is a good one