Finances

I mentioned a figure of €80'000 to run Kiez Burn 2020 in the post. This is based on the numbers from last year, but with €10k budgeted for additional First Aid instead of dreams. It's hard to know in advance what our real costs will be. There's a "final location" meeting on 28 Jan, so hopefully then we will have better information.

I suggest we set a minimum of €80k and a goal of €100k. That would give a little extra money for dreams, unexpected situations, etc. But if we do only get €80k, it's also very likely we can organise the event, just with less art grants.

If anybody else wants to decide this number, great.

Where did you find the numbers from last year that you based this on? Sounds way too high from what I remember. Also, we could radically reduce our budget if we didn't spend ~33% of it on Dreams.

Finance post-mortem for last year says: €76k of income, €44k of expenses, €15k of Dreams

80k sounds about right but for the budgeting we need also to consider week 51 (which is the spendings of the rest of the year). With being a verein now, we have financial liabilities we need to take care of throughout the year.

@niklas Allowing people to pay without attending is interesting. Might be a challenge legally speaking. If we try the "buy a membership" option, then what do you get if you give money but don't want membership? Maybe you just say "Here Kiez Burn e.V. have €20". Not sure how that works from the accounting, etc.

About the minimum, I suggest we structure:

• Generous: €140
• Standard: €100
• Low income: €40
• Choose your own: €_________

We can also preselct the standard so that's most likely the option folks will choose. But if somebody can truly only afford €5, then they can still participate. If they then ask 3 friends to pay €140 each, they've covered their own ticket!

Plus, we can show people based on their selected amount, whether Kiez Burn is currently going to happen or not. So we can say "You've chosen to pay €40, the average so far is €75, we need a minimum average of €80 for Kiez Burn to happen".

Question: Is there a way for people without credit cards to take part in this fun game. I, personally, do not own one and also do not currently wish to pay for one / have one.

If you volunteer to handle the bank transfer users, then yes, I'd be definitely happy to integrate this into the system.

Aye, I read that part. Still it strikes me as a bit exclusive to certain folks. Maybe it is because I am german and more used to cash than to credit cards and that's the other way around in many parts of the world.

I am aware, I can find people who help me out with that, I do get that. Hence, it is only theoretically exclusive.
I also get that having no credit card is a strange feature amongst travel-crazy burners.). So maybe I am the (almost) only one with this issue?

I do find the idea interesting and creative & would be very interested in seeing an experiment like this roll out. Have to think about it in more depth before casting a vote, tho.

If I was interested in volunteering:

How would 'handling the bank transfers' look like? Just a rough idea what kind of tasks this could possibly entail? Or would figuring out the 'how to handle bank transfers' also fall under the task umbrella for that volunteer?

I guess we'd need a policy on how people would pay by bank transfer. Do they say "I will pay €20" and we believe them, then they only pay later if the sale succeeds? Or do we give people 3 business days to pay and then we refund them afterwards if the whole thing fails? Then somebody needs to check the bank transfer list and update the system by saying "This person has paid X", etc. It shouldn't be so complicated, just a little bit of back and forth. Plus liaising with our finance master to get updated info from the bank, etc.

Thanks for clarifying, this is helpful information!

Maybe we can think about an PayPal Option instead an Banktransfer option, but we had to consider the tax for payments

Maybe there's an option people could send manual PayPal transactions. Integrating it with anything software wise is really, really, really hard... :-(

I think PayPal might be a feasable addition. If there is the possibility to set up a "pay via paypal" option in the portal/software, which then just creates an identifier in a database with the soon-to-be-member information. The generated ID then might be used in the PayPal transaction as a verification for the invoice. PayPal supports the generation/download of .csv fiels which contain all the transaction information, e.g. the ID, amount of money and apparently another unique ID generated by PayPal.
We would need a fresh paypal Account for KB and someone who is taking care of updating the csv on a regular basis - maybe every Wednsday and Sunday - and feed the data back to the database.
Just a thought that went through my head while reading this conversation, I hope the basic workflow makes sense to you ^{^}

"Or do we give people 3 business days to pay and then we refund them afterwards if the whole thing fail"

The bookeeper in me squirms at manually processing 10's to 100's of refunds.......

There is Paypal Plus. In which Paypal takes on the role as a creditor and pays the fee, expecting a repayment from the participant (by any paypal means) within 2 weeks. Also, because it's all handled through paypal, refunds become more self-contained, and easier to process.

Does anyone in the community know of a fairly priced/ethical payment processor we could outsource this to? Then, we can offer all kind of payment options to make this easier for hippies? Looks from the census that 85 percent (if I remember correctly) KBurners are from/based in Germany and Germany is definitely too old school when it comes to credit cards etc.

We already have an account with Stripe, and it's super easy to integrate technically. From my experience, it's only Stripe that I'd be willing to integrate personally. The rest I've worked with over the years are hell. :-(

Developer pains are known to this human here :) Understood.

I think having a lottery to deny people entry to the event after they pay for it because the org didn’t or couldn’t accurately determine the allowable number of people would be radically fucked up.

Sure, hopefully if location is locked in 1-2 weeks we could launch this after that is set, so ideally we will know numbers. I guess I wanted to communicate that "this is a community effort", as in, there is no "org", there's just "all of us", that was my intention behind the idea of asking folks to step out if there isn't enough space, and then using a lottery otherwise. But I'd be happy to support any better strategy on how to handle a difference between people who paid and event capacity.

fair enough... I should have said "... because the event team..."

I like the idea, it's pretty radical and scary from an organizers perspective =)

Some concerns:
1) lowering the entry barrier to Kiez Burn means that it'll be easier to just not go (i.e. a 1€ ticket has a higher risk of not being used). Might be just a minor effect
2) my guess is that kiezburn hardliners will tend to pay more, since they know what they're paying for and want kiezburn to happen, while newcomers will tend to pay less as they aren't that invested in the community/culture (plus they wouldn't care that much if the event doesn't happen after all). So the system of "pay what you want" seems a bit unfair towards those who already love Kiez Burn. I'm happy to read other perspectives on this.

However, I'd love to see how this turns out. If it works, it's another indication of the awesomeness our community.

Maybe there's a way we can share the link that will help with these concerns. For example we could post it only on Talk to start with, or send it to all volunteers from last year, and ask them to pass it on, etc. Some kind of simple viral system rather than blasting it publicly on all channels immediately.

I like this solution. It's not radically-inclusive on a broader spectrum, but allows for more financial inclusivity within the community.

Henrik echos my concerns as well, that newcomers would take advantage of this system, which will have ripple effects down the line that might damage the event/community on the long term.

I do like the idea of giving people who are already part of the community a little headz up. Verein-Members, Volunteers from last year, people who signed up for the news letter and who moved their ass to talk.

It will go viral anyways, news will spread.

Given that we might take such a radical route, I do think that we can justify choosing our own communication channels.

• I still refuse the notion that talk is more exclusive than freaking facebook. Convenience is not inclusivity.

1) I agree with @henrik here... people not very much involved will tend to contribute little. And probably get a membership, not participating, but being accounted on the total of attendants. Then the location we get, doesn't allow so many people, so we do the lottery, and people that paid more and even invested some time, might be left out (sad, but as well their money goes back to them, so we might go down on the budget too? how is that lottery gonna be? )
Then the people that paid 1euro is not even committed to the burn, so perhaps many of them dont even go! so we have less ppl on site

May be it sounds too negative the hypothetical situation and perhaps I miss read stuff from the proposal ?

2) I find great the initiative but i see too much risk in it if we dont have a plan B. Since well... this is event critical.
Considering last year we started ticket sales on 1st of April. You say you need a week to build up this one, and then 3 weeks to see whether it worked. If it didnt, How long would it take to get the previous ticket sales system up and running? or is it even possible? perhaps @janthomas can tell us?.

3) Are we gonna tell people that the membership/ ticket didnt go through, now go and pay your real ticket? why not...

4) limited to credit cards I find it exclusive ( I dont have one and I have traveled around for 4 years I assume there are more burners out there without a credit card. :slight_frown: )

Answering your 2) question... In theory, depending on availability, no longer than a week, 2 tops. But this highly depends on dates: if our burnertickets.org contact is unavailable or engaged, it could take longer, and unexpectedly so.

point 1) is a very interesting case, and a quite real one. Extremely volatile situation.

And more and more people talk about not having credit cards which is a very important part of the issue. @chmac I know Matt (burnertickets) tried to do SEPA uberweisung (bank transfers) with Stripe and it was not that easy.

I´m curious and a bit scared about the idea and would give it a go if we solve some of the valid points that have been raised here.

I also want to add another concern. In my case (I´d say I´m not the only one) getting holiday could become an issue if we change the date, which is still rather possible. Investing money on an evnt that I dont know yet when it will be without beeing able to transfer or get refunds feels like a shitty deal to me.

Fair points. If the date is likely fixed in the next 1-2 weeks, seems like it makes sense to wait until that is locked first.

Kind of a mixed bag to me. Here my thoughts:
+ It looks like this may help to avaoid some VAT stuff and thus solidifying the finances way before the event
+ I think the general thought behind this is a good and fitting one

• Credit Card only is an issue for a quiet some people here in germany. I just happen to have one by accident. After all this may be bypassed by prepaid Credit Cards or Paypal
• I think the one Euro approach is a bit too much I think that at least something like 40€ is necessary --> Maybe someone can have a look on how many low income tickets were provided last year to make a good decision on that part. If the membership is only a Euro I imagine a lot of people just get one, don't participate in any way and just block someone else. Chances are also that basically just a small amount of people pay the KB, even though they might not be on the "better earning" side, but just want it to happen really bad. This might also be the not so optimistic part of me speaking.

We always provide roughly a + - 10% of Low Income Tickets, depending on attendees, sales, and budget.

And last year KB was able to grant all low income applications.

Interesting idea! We've been receiving a good number of donations on top of the ticket price each year, so I totally see the potential merit in moving further towards a crowdfunding-like approach. Also agree that we need to offer another payment option in addition to credit card - for the past 2 years we've always offered credit card and Paypal and this has not raised complaints about people not being able to pay. Payment costs for both credit card and Paypal were around 2 Euro per ticket at the ticket price of 80 Euros.

I agree with all the comments about potential issues with this approach. A couple of thoughts:
* Maybe a minimum contribution could help alleviate the problem of people not paying enough / blocking spots? E.g. if it were at the level of low income tickets (30-40 Euros) this could be enough for people to commit...
* I understand that there should be a decision about date&location within the next couple of weeks... So it would seem sensible to wait with running any form of membership/ticket sale afterwards. This would still give enough time to push through a regular ticket sale, should this experiment fail by the end of February.

Waiting until the location & date are set seems like it could be a good idea. If that's due to happen in the next week or so anyway (I think I saw final location meeting 28 Jan somewhere) then this would be unlikely to be ready before that anyway. :thumbsup:

Credit cards

The question of only being able to pay by credit card has come up a few times. It seems like this is a real challenge for some folks. Perhaps somebody is willing to support on the bank transfer front and then we can add this option.

Firstly, when I wrote "only credit cards" what I really meant more accurately is "only cards which are cable of paying online". That's not quite the same. So anybody who has a Visa Debit or Mastercard could use the system. But I realise from the discussion that many people likely still don't have this option.

I'll try to explaining the reasoning a little bit to add some context. First, my thinking is that this kind of sale will require new software. I don't expect any existing crowd funding platforms are setup to have a limited number of "spots" available. As part of this proposal, I would build that software. I believe that Kiez Burn already has payment accounts with Stripe and with PayPal. I know from experience that Stripe is very easy from a software point of view, and PayPal is a nightmare. If we can somehow connect Stripe to PayPal (don't think that's possible), or if Stripe supports other payment methods, I'd be up for integrating those. I'd also be happy to coordinate with somebody who handles bank transfers. Bottom line, I'm happy to make this process as "payment method accessible" as possible, within the context of what is quick to implement software wise.

I support the idea to start with 40€ minimum. Totally reasonable for a festival

@Leon Noller we are NOT a festival - so our pricing COULD BE as radical as we want it to be ;)

Regarding the concept of "memberships" instead of "tickets"

==> YES! I love it :)

Regarding sliding scale donations instead of "normal price" & "low income"

I like the thinking to expand the idea of "Let fail what the community does not carry?" beyond volunteering, also towards money. We have seen how that works great with spending money: Dreams platform. Therefore, on principle, I like the proposal.

I have 2 concerns about this that could be useful in tweaking the proposal:
* I believe we need big donors to achieve our target budget. It is an easy argument to make that, given the amount of volunteering, one wants to pay less. Looking at myself, the discussions I have had in the past with people, and the general feeling about "money", I doubt we will have "good" median contribution levels. Maybe however, we can incentivize people to donate more? Or we can tweak the UI?
* I am quite afraid of the many discussions this would require about money. Last year, I personally reached my maximum in terms of efforts needed on transparency regarding money, within the context of the Dreams tokens. Money makes discussions quite different. Someone can have invested 100 hours of volunteering time, and no stress, but make that 100€ and the topic gets tense. If we go the ultra-transparent way with budgeting (which I see as an implication of this process), it would be important to have a person or team, who is willing to engage in the multiple public discussions surrounding the topic. Traditionally, we have followed a two-prong approach, with some budget decisions more private, and some public. I feel that the experiences of last year have thought us that finance discussions are hard to have completely public. It needs a lot of guidance or maybe a different approach?

So from my side, I support this on principle:
* but it would require a bit of forethought on who guides the online budget discussions & how that happens.
* It should not endanger the event, since we do have a ticketing system that works.

Just as a possible scenario:
- we "only" raise 60k€ ==> question is asked: is this enough?
- what do we cut? Do we need to spend so much on power, or welfare? Or should Dreams be cut? What about an external sound advisor?
- do we need to raise additional money? What is it for exactly?
==> all super valid discussions, but it demands a lot of open communication.

I love the general idea, especially with the option of being able to have a more traditional membership sale should it not work. It would be very interesting to see how it turns out!

What do we do if we sell 1000 tickets for 1€ each?

I quote from above:

" What if...

We don't get enough money
Then maybe there's no burn. Or maybe somebody else will run a more traditional ticket sale."

I think it is a way to over complicate things. There are already the full tickets and the low income ones. This will make almost impossible to plan and know how much capacity of people will be needed to get to the budget needed, for instance.

I still love the idea and would love to re-support it.
I think if it is the RADICAL membership sale, it has to be radical, as in, the payment scale from 1 to infinity. Adding any caveats to it (as in, a minimum of 40 etc.) makes it JUST A NORMAL SALE. The community experiment is out.

If this is run early enough and it fails, and @chmac is OK with developing the software with that in mind, I say we do it.

I do agree with the comments here, as in,

1. we need the dates+location+number of available memberships in place before the Radical Sale begins
2. we need to know the budget
3. we simply state the number of memberships available and the budget needed to make the burn happen - clearly on sign up/before purchase. We can all do the maths.
4. See what happens
5. Options for "after" the sale > Option 1. Run a normal sale if we fail > Option 2. Radically not have a burn if we fail miserably (say, less than half of budget achieved) > Option 3. Have a re-calculation of committed budget by those who commited to a certain membership price. This would mean communicating to members that we have not reached the budget and ask them to adjust their sliders to fill the missing gap. Repeat until budget achieved :D

Remember that the fear is a sign we should do this ;)

@Callum Macdonald curious - what is your status on this idea today? Once the location/numbers are sorted (meeting coming up tomorrow) this radical baby could get going. Are you interested in running an AP to solidify initiative?

Waiting to see what comes out of the location meeting today. I guess it's hard to sell "tickets" to an event if we don't know when / where. I guess for this to move ahead we need either a solution on the "let's sell memberships instead of tickets", or confirmation of a location and date. If either of those happen, then yes, I think this is ready to go! :-)

Hey @Callum Macdonald, the meeting happened yesterday - and we have a date set in stone now: 17-21 June. But the location is still not final and won't be for another 2 weeks. But the aim is to have a decision by 11 Feb, so it would seem sensible to try lining up the start of "a sale" ASAP afterwards.

The question is whether to move forward with the radical idea of the membership sale now, and whether to also line up a more traditional sales approach as the backup option to fall back to.

BTW another problem that will need a solution is the membership transfer. Even though we only sold tickets 3-4 months before the event, in the last years we still had around 25% of tickets changing hands, mostly in the last 4 weeks before the event. This created a huge amount of work when trying to handle it by ourselves, and was a big benefit of using burnertickets last year as it allowed 100% outsourcing this problem and not dealing with hundreds of transfers.

How will the decision about what happens next come together? The poll you created at the start doesn't give a clear picture unfortunately. Happy to support with my knowledge from running the ticketing for the last 3 years.

@Jan Thomas Awesome, a date is great. My original proposal is no membership transfers. I'm not signing up to do that work, so unless somebody else wants to do it, it ain't gonna happen. My view is that we're a community cocreated event, and transfers are hard. Do we transfer dream votes? If we use a lottery, how do we prevent fake names, etc, etc. I like what borderland is doing this year, with a 75% transfer fee in the last 3 weeks, so you only get 25% back, and no transfers, you can only give back your ticket and it goes back into the lottery pool.

Personally, I think having a date is enough to proceed with this. I'll aim to launch this on Saturday during the KB coworking session. If we can't sell membership by then, we sell tickets. No refunds, no guarantee of an event, etc.

I'm 50% expecting somebody to step in "on behalf of the board" and tell me "you can't do this" followed by all kinds of reasonable explanations. That or anybody who is willing to do a different style of ticket sale can also ask me to stop. Otherwise, I say it's time to rock and roll. Consensual doocracy babies!

I have a question to that: So membership means becoming a member of the eV. and therefore getting entrance granted to Kiez Burn right? I am not sure that it is in line with our Satzung and general Vereinsrecht to sell memberships. Technically the board needs to vote on each membership request. Which can be figured out but I think from finance tax and Vereinsrecht perspective we cant open a "trade market" where people sell memberships back and for. I think the transferring part needs more research cuz I dont think its possible.

If we we do a radical membership sale (which at the current outline I see absolutely no reason to support) we should already now have radically great ideas on how to make Kiezburn happen with a total budget between 1000 and 10 000 EUR.

A good first step will be to look at last years' budget, and calculate the total sum that's required just to make Kiezburn happen with absolutely nothing there. (=Property rent, legally required insurance, maybe toilets to comply with rental contract conditions). Eventually minus deducting last year's leftover profit. Once you know that sum, you could set that as a minimum membership donation.

And then you could look at other budget posts from last year, split those by 1000, and ask people in the sales process to tick checkboxes, which of last years' budget posts they want to include in their personal ticket price.

Example:

Do you want to support showers at the same standard than last year?

Then people can decide for each portion of the budget if they want to financially contribute to: no showers / same quality showers / factor X better showers than last year, and donate nothing, exactly what was needed last year, or much more to a certain budget post.

This way, people get a good feeling what their money is actually needed for.

I, for example, would contribute 0 instead of more than 10 euros (!) for electricity on site, hope that many more people will do the same, and challenge camps and soundcamps to finance their electricity needs in a sustainable way (solar, lithium batteries) if they need electricity, instead of 24/7 diesel generators. This way, I would hope we could allocate budget aligned with our members' priorities and hopefully also aligned with LBT.

@David how did you come up with these numbers?

I also strongly object to this membership sale. It seems reckless, without substantial benefit and with substantial risks and unanswered questions.

@David disregard my question... Talk wasn’t showing me the rest of your message, in which you gave ample explanation

Sorry, I added to the message. 1000-10 000: Minimum as per the proposal was 1 eur x 1000. And then to plan for a pessimistic outlook.

Another interesting thing in the sales process would be to let people put a price tag on their work hour, ask them how many hours they think they will put into kborg volunteering, and let them see how much they actually donate in time. Then also the 100(?)... euros for the membership becomes a much smaller number compared to that. Would also be interesting to know a total number of required volunteer hours for kborg for kiezburn to happen, and let people see (in many cases of people who volunteer only on-site) how few work hours they contribute in comparison to people who work tremendous hours before kiezburn. That can also be a motivation to donate more (euros or hours)

CJ, can you send me the link to the 2019 post mortem / googledrive with documents? I could not find it anywhere

@David Interesting ideas. To be clear, the proposal is to set a minimum budget. If we don't reach that, there's no charges on the credit cards, and no sale. So there is no option for 1'000 people to pay €1. The community can decide between themselves who will pay how much of the minimum €70k (or whatever number it is finally) that we need.

The idea of allocating money to individual parts is awesome, and even more radical. I love it! I personally won't include that in this year's sale, but would love to see it in future sales.

@Callum Macdonald I still see a few concerns that I would suggest the proposal should reflect in some way, before deciding to move ahead with it. From a consensual doocracy perspective I believe it's important to incorporate these:

• Payment options - If this is limited to credit card only it would be strongly going against the idea of being inclusive, as we know from experience that many people don't have credit cards and will struggle because of that. We have Stripe (which also offers SEPA Lastschrift from a bank account) and Paypal accounts for KiezBurn e.V. and I can share the credentials (securely, of course) to look at incorporating these. We didn't have complaints last year when offering these.

• Membership transfers - I would state that the purpose of any ticket/membership system is to enable our community to participate in our event. It's a service we provide, and I believe a critical part of that service is to give flexibility to people when things change. Our previous ticket sales via Burnertickets provided an easy solution for this which was much required, and I don't think a proposal for an alternative way of approaching ticket sales can simply drop this with a perspective of "it won't happen unless someone picks it up". How could this be handled in a better way? Ultimately it would only need to be handled should the sale reach the required minimum - and in this case a "membership transfer process" could be added later on. Maybe one of the participants of the Burner Tech Weekend would be open to working on that?

• Align the minimum the sale is configured to achieve with the minimum budget needs - i.e. at the current proposal of 39 euros with 1000 tickets this would make it a guaranteed budget of 39K. I don't think we could run the event with this, but also people will donate something so we should receive more funds than this. Could @Alexxx please help to align with a likely minimum required budget for a bare bones event?

• How does the sale incentivise people to donate more than the minimum? To use the crowdfunding analogy - usually there are some perks that get offered for a certain level of contribution. If we want this to have a chance of working out, might be worth considering? Also we should make it super clear that the minimum contribution means there would be no art grants / money for Dreams. So maybe we could create some form of tiers that encourage people to move to that level of donation? Afrikaburn does this quite nicely via their regular ticket sales, i.e. you have 2 ticket tiers above the default price and they describe what this money will enable. Maybe some of @David's suggestions could be used here as well, like "do you want nice ecotoilets rather than the cheapest PortaPotties"?

• Another element not brought up yet - We have traditionally used the ticketing process to collect some information about our population, and collect their interest in volunteering for roles and contacting them about this afterwards. So would be great to make some short survey part of the membership purchase flow, and I can provide the questions from last year as a starting point.

Thanks!!!

@Jan Thomas If we don't hit at least €60k, nobody's card gets charged, and the whole thing fails. So there's no potential to have 1000 x €1.

Also, the poll around the €39 minimum was not posted by me. I will not set a minimum of €39. I'm not sure what the idea there was, but it's not a part of my proposal.

If the strip account will do SEPA transfers, then that's awesome, and I'll be happy to include that. Right now it's Stripe only (no PayPal) unless somebody volunteers to handle another type of payment.

On transfers, my feeling is that we make no commitment to it. If somebody volunteers to manage this, awesome. Power to them. I'll do everything I can to support them. But bottom line, people should not pledge to buy a ticket unless they are willing to lose their money if they can't go, that's what will be clear in the sale process.

@Jan Thomas PS> I could try to include the volunteer questions, good idea. Hopefully it's simple enough to do, would be great to get those ASAP to include in the process...

I'd like to quickly circle back to my 2 main points of concern:

Membership transfers - that's not an immediate concern for now, and i think we've reached a good compromise with putting it into the process as "membership transfers will only happen if someone steps up to do it" with a link to register for it.

Credit Card Only - how we sell the tickets is a core event function, and needs to follow our principles... inclusion being one of them. If this moves forward i would like to see it being a success, and it would be a shitty success if we manage to get to the funding target but people without credit card or easy access to borrowing someone else's can not be part of Kiez Burn anymore. So I would like to voice strong opposition to the approach of "it'll only happen if someone does it". I understand that this was not part of your original proposal, but I believe that this is a critical issue which needs to be addressed to fit within the spirit of consensual doocracy. I do know for sure that Stripe supports it in principal, and the question would be how to mimick the hold on the credit card. Conceptually it should be possible to receive the SEPA lastschrift mandate without immediately executing it - i.e. keep it pending until the sale has closed. But not sure whether/how that's doable with stripe. I appreciate that you created https://talk.kiezburn.org/d/yFDECcte/get-involved-do-you-want-to-support-a-non-credit-card-ticket-sale-option to call for volunteers to take this task, and maybe one of the awesome tech weekend volunteers will take it? ...BUT I strongly disagree that this is something that we can let fail if no-one steps up, as we would be fully violating our own principles by doing so. I'm sure with so many capable people in our community we can find a way to make this happen, without you having to do it yourself.

On the credit card front, I've reached out to multiple people and I've posted on the group. I'm 100% ready to support somebody taking this on. I hear you that this is a tough one. I'm looking into the stripe SEPA option, that might be a potential solution.

I hear that you don't think this is something we can "let fail what the community doesn't carry". I hope we can find a way to solve it.

Has anybody looked into this from a tax law and Vereins perspective? If we sell memberships then this is a one time Mitgliedsbeitrag? For this we would need to change our Satzung! This can only be done during a General Assembly who needs to approve it. What happens then? Do people stay members? Do they loose membership at the end of the year? I am confused.

Also, how do we run this from a Vereinsperspective? I am not sure if we are ready to run a Verein with +1000 people.

@Franzi Right now my understanding is that we're not ready for the "we sell memberships" option, so as of right now, I see that we sell "tickets", with the proviso (condition) that people need to accept there might not be a Kiez Burn event. I guess this was always the case, we don't get the permit until ~1 month before, and we always sell tickets before that. But my intention is to make it abundantly clear that this is a volunteer organised and run event, so folks need to accept that it might not happen and we might have spent their money by then.

Hey, I am wondering from an overall process perspective..what are next steps with your initiative ? Are you going to actively seek consent from all parties that are affected? I am mostly thinking about the core team for 2020 and probably the board. The core team cuz this change will a lot of the essence of whats happening - tickets, finance, communication, budgeting etc etc and the board probably from a financial and legal liability perspective .

I feel like I still don't understand what the detailed proposed initiative is and how it will look like end to end. But maybe this clarification and write up comes next? :)

@Franzi My plan is to launch! As I understand the "consensual doocracy" process, the requirement is to discuss and to listen to feedback, but no "consent" is required. I've taken onboard quite some points from this feedback, tried to genuinely listen to all the points, and now it's time to go live!

Thank you for all the valuable contributions.

Taking a step back, I still completely fail to see the advantage of granting access to Kiezburn for a small amount of people at 1 EUR or 59 EUR (any amount that is not covering the basic cost). Low-income memberships perfectly address the one valid concern of inclusion. Quite adversely, I see clear disadvantages of providing access below covering cost. One of which is, incentivizing people to join us, when in fact they can't afford to come, and would much better attend another year, when their personal finances are balanced. It also incentivizes people to be cheap - which I see as a completely valid course of action of anyone who buys a membership - because there are no obstacles and zero other incentives to do exactly the opposite: to give more. Last year's sale worked out well - why change something that does not need fixing? The only way I see a positive impact of changing the sales process is to 1. raise awarness for the cost of certain budget parts 2. give smart options how people can contribute more to exactly the part that they think deserves more funding.

One option to do this is to integrate questions and options regarding this in the booking process, another option would be to 1. let people donate more 2. give them the same amount of more tokens to spend on dreams and 3. maybe add certain luxury items to dreams, like eg. fridges for freecampers / a publicly available basic meal per day / the "3 big art projects" / etc. Essentially stuff that's fun to vote on, or, stuff that makes life at the burn much easier at a low cost, especially for the (hopefully) many people that arrive without cars.

Here's a sneak preview of what the process looks like. It's still very much a work in progress.

https://eloquent-fermi-85fbea.netlify.com/#/t/test

Also, the "Price" section won't actually appear until all the previous sections are ticked!

very straight to the point! i like the direction and will hold further feedback until you request it :-)

.....but.... ;-) where you mention needing someone to run membership transfers, could it link the direct ability to register interest to help?

Great idea! I’ll add a link to a talk thread where somebody could volunteer to manage this.

Thank you for sharing the form! From a legal perspective (since I now understood that this is not an actual Vereinsmitgliedschaft):

• I think you need to flag that you are not actually becoming a member but buying a ticket

• Where are the terms and conditions?

• We can't sell tickets and then say "oh but we cant guarantee the event & you don't get your money back" - this is not how German trade law work. This is simply illegal. We either have to make it donation based or we sell tickets but guarantee an event if we hit minimum funding

From a Vereins perspective:

• Not sure who set the budget and the minimum funding but it doesn't look right to me

• As far as I understand neither the event team nor the board has made any budget proposal for this year - I am really concerned about this! If we come out of this not being able to pay security (we don't know their annual price tag yet), first aid (we don't know their annual price tag yet), toilets or the Gelaende ((we don't know their annual price tag yet)

• Who decided on 1000 PAX as far as I understand the event team hasn't made this decision yet. We don't have a site and we don't know how many people we will be able to facilitate.

So when you say you wanna launch this? I don't understand what you wanna launch? Like a final plan that contains all of this data and is then discussed with the event team? I am not sure if we have anything ready yet that is safe to fail. Or a version that intakes the feedback (or not)? I am really confused.

I spoke to @Alexxx on the budget.

• We can't sell tickets and then say "oh but we cant guarantee the event & you don't get your money back" - this is not how German trade law work. This is simply illegal. We either have to make it donation based or we sell tickets but guarantee an event if we hit minimum funding

My understanding is that we sell tickets well before the event, but we only get a final "permission" from the local authority about 1 month before the event. As I understand it, if that permission was to fail, Kiez Burn e.V. would simply not be able to offer full refunds.

If you think there's a different way to word this which better reflects the situation, please let me know. My intention is to make it clear that nobody can claim afterwards that they thought they were buying a ticket for a festival.

The plan is to launch the live sale on Saturday 1 Feb.

Can you please also comment on my other questions.

Also, again, if we don't deliver an event we sell tickets for we are a 100% liable in refunding everyone. Fullstop. There is no wiggle room or "better way to word it". Its the risk you carry as an event facilitator.

The number of 1'000 tickets came from last year. If you think we should have a different number, by all means let me know. Happy to change it.

I spoke to @Alexxx about the budget. He said he thought that at an absolute minimum, with €60k we could have an event. I'm happy to increase that number. The goal is to raise more, not to focus on the "minimum".

@Franzi If you feel like any other questions are not addressed, please share exactly what those are and I'll be happy to address them.

Yes, I think the number needs to be discussed. Usually, this decision is taking by the core event team and the board. Taking into account site, requirements to get a permission, costs, budget etc.

I can't give you another number because it would just be another random number that is not coming from a group conclusion. And I am super uncomfortable with this.

I understand that the focus is to raise more money. But at this point we truly dont know what the minimum is. Its depending on which site are taking, what are the requirements from the Amt (they change by PAX but also random we have little control there)- which ultimately translate into cost, do we need to move all the stuff from the storage, which medics will we be able to sign, which firemarshalls etcetc and this are all big cost brackets. Again, I am uncomfortable in just pulling out a random number as a minimum

Also, I dont understand this tremendous time pressure. Why cant we take the time to do this right and think it through, get all the data and do a solid job and then launch in three weeks?

My other open question where (copy paste from earlier):

Where are the terms and conditions?

I understand from @Alexxx that you @Callum Macdonald are now committing to build in a refund policy to take care of my major concern I raised above. Is this correct?

I'm looking forward to see a plug & play camp that only accepts members whose payment is among the top 10% 😆 💰

I really appreciate the energy and initiative.

To the practical part:

You warn people that they will not get a refund, then you warn people that there will not be transfers (25% of people directly affected, as per last year) and directly after that you give them the opportunity to buy a ticket for 1 EUR.

How foolish economically thinking do you expect people to be?

And zero incentive on the other hand for giving more - no practical advantage, no fame, nothing.

So far, the initial idea is backed by 5 agree votes.

Further on the practical side: Where is the login for the script, so that each one of us who is part of the doocracy can start to adjust the text?

Hey there - so, I have some feeling regarding this --> first, I think that this process that will include around 1000 people is being incredibly rushed - and I don't think there has been enough input from the community thus far esp. only in 10 days. Second, I would say that I don't feel like ANY input that has been given by countless people here has been taking into consideration, since there hasn't been a single update to the initial post... meaning that the original idea is just being pushed through (from what I can see).

I 100% think that a radical "pay what you want" model cool, and I do not want to see it fail. To make something work, it does take input from the community and response to very valid concerns like:
- how can I pay without a credit card
- what happens if I want to transfer my membership
- how will this be executed/enforced onsite (e.g., volunteer instructions, etc)

In response just saying "there are no transfers" is not even engaging with a valid concern - it's just brushing it off to "let someone else do it". If Transfers are an important enough concern - then the idea is to get someone to pick up this concept and figure out a way to make it happen (or to modify the proposal), not just ram the proposal through as is.

the whole process seems really demotivating - someone is stepping up to create a half process to sell tickets, doesn't want to take on the responsiblity of what happens later on down the line, and won't engage with people who have valid concerns to modify the proposal?

+1 on what Remy said

We are working on an Advice process template that might help in restructuring the proposal (=the thread post).

And indeed +1 on what Remy wrote. The advice process details clearly that stakeholder impact mapping and a deep discussion on who should be consulted is an essential part of the process.

We need to think through all aspects of this proposal. The easiest example is refunds. Who really wants to volunteer for gate (let alone a camp would want to take on this responsibility), if people were not able to transfer their ticket? You will get a shitstorm online and at the gate with loads of people who want to transfer a ticket. This proposal needs active support from the people who need to execute it.

Other topics that thusfar were not addressed: who communicates, writes FAQs, transfer of memberships, newsletter signup, T&C, integration with Dreams, integration with volunteering, what if this proposal fails (backlash from community), what if we have only 70k€ who engages the community in budget discussions)

Hey @Remy Schneider and @Franzi

As a member of the community I wish to feel supported in my initiatives. As I read your post it seems like you're only criticising without offering any constructive input. It feels like I'm being condemned for pushing forward an idea that I think is within our values.

I understand that ticketing is a sensitive topic. As I mentioned in my original proposal, if this fails, there will still be time for a regular ticket sale afterwards.

Is Kiez Burn actually a consensual doocracy or not?

Does the Kiez Burn e.V. board plan to support this initiative or not?

If you feel like I have not lived up to any of the consensual doocracy process, please tell me exactly what that is. I have shared this proposal, I have taken onboard feedback, I have offered to cooperate with anybody who wishes to get involved.

I feel sad that the @Remy Schneider and @Franzi as members of the board are criticising rather than supporting me while I try to participate in what I think will improve Kiez Burn.

@waldo I'm sad you also +1 on a post which contains, as far as I can see, only criticism and zero actionable, tangible suggestions. Again, I wonder if we truly are a consensual doocracy or not.

In terms of the advice process, I'm not sure if you're sharing that you think I somehow missed part of this process. Do you feel like I didn't address the topic of "stakeholder impact" in sufficient detail? I can expand on that topic if so.

You mention some topics which were not addressed. Are you genuinely wondering about how this will happen, and what we will do, or are you trying to assert your authority as a board member to block this initiative without actually explicitly saying so? I'll add some points to the original post which address some of these.

I am sorry you feel that way! thats not my intention. I was hoping Remy's clear statement on "hey thats a cool radical idea lets see how we make it work" is clearly expressing support and the desire to make it work.

So let me iterate: I think its a great idea and I love a lot about it and I appreciate the form you put together. My concerns, I have shared them, are still there and I myself don't have a solution for you other than we need to commit to a refund process. Also, I am concerned that the numbers are not diligent enough because the different teams haven't made this decision. My advise: talk to the teams.

Here's the specific topics you raised as I understand them:

• who communicates

  • The ticket sale is being communicated, I suggest to create a group here on Talk for FAQs and where members can share questions, etc.

• writes FAQs

  • I'll create a talk group with a ticketing FAQ. Everybody can participate.

• transfer of memberships

  • Somebody can volunteer to do this, potentially later. There will be a link to the talk thread in the checkout page if people want to volunteer.

• newsletter signup

  • We can add a "Do you want to sign up to the newsletter" option in the checkout if that's desired.

• T&C

  • Same as last year. This is a standard ticket sale with a choose your own price.

• integration with Dreams

  • There will be a list of emails of people who have tickets. This should be just as easy to integrate as any other ticketing platform. Easier because we'll have the list in advance.

• integration with volunteering

  • I'm not sure what this means. People can volunteer. We'll have their email addresses and can send them event critical messages under GDPR without any explicit "opt in".

• what if this proposal fails (backlash from community)

  • Covered in the original proposal. Lots of ways this can fail. Worst case, there might not be a Kiez Burn 2020. Or somebody does a regular ticket sale. Or, or, or.

• what if we have only 70k€ who engages the community in budget discussions)

  • The budget discussion can be taken on Talk. As per the "let fail what the community does not carry", as with toilets, gate, security, first aid, etc, etc. If somebody doesn't volunteer to allocate the budget, then it won't be allocated, and the event will be cancelled, and all tickets will be refunded.

thanks for the detailed response. That is already a very clear path towards getting a resolution for everything. Thanks! I will add this to the proposal thread and add further questions for people to answer. I will try to tag the people who will likely volunteer for certain lead positions impacted by this ticket sale.

@Callum Macdonald I get that it's coming off as criticism - I am going to be critical of a process that I think is too rushed - I think the process is challenged, I won't be afraid to stand up and say so. Kiez Burn is practicing consensual do-ocracy, but I again I don't see this actually manifesting in this post. If no consideration is being taking for criticism from people who are directly impacted, then no, that isn't the process.

I am not criticising the actual initiative - and I do think that it has a great chance to succeed if consensual do-ocracy is actually applied. I think Waldo's post the process is a good start.

Here are my tangible recommendations -listen to what others are saying, update the original proposal to reflect those concerns/compromises/learnings, engage rather than reject suggestions, collaborate with those who are trying to step in rather than brushing them off.

@Remy Schneider Your suggestions are:

• -listen to what others are saying,

  • Done

• update the original proposal to reflect those concerns/compromises/learnings,

  • Done, after you mentioned this the first time.

• engage rather than reject suggestions,

  • Done

• collaborate with those who are trying to step in rather than brushing them off

  • Who is trying to step up? I've actively sought people who are willing to support, and have repeatedly stated that I'm 100% ready to collaborate with anybody who is willing to take action.

some concrete advice from my end...

1. There are 3 "Open Questions" in the current proposal (at the time I wrote this) without answers (in the proposal) as far as I can tell. I personally would not consider a proposal fully baked if there were unanswered questions, so my suggestion would be to put the answers to those questions in the proposal.

2. There's also a bit about "legal uncertainty" selling tickets. That also seems not fully baked, so I would suggest to resolve that uncertainty and replace that bit with the findings from making it uncertain.

Hey @Callum Macdonald, not sure about that. I have shared now a list of concerns at several points in this discussion and haven't received an answer on them or neither see them reflected in the proposal as an edit.

@CJ Yetman Which are the open questions?

I don't see any legal uncertainty about selling tickets. This is a ticket sale, plain and simple. It just happens earlier than usual, and participants choose their own price. That's the only difference to any standard ticket sale on any other platform.

Super cool - my biggest argument was that this was a rushed process and I didn't see any input that people are given being reflected back into the proposal, but seems like it is. I really how that this proposal succeeds - I think its a really cool way to try a way to do this - and in general I think it's only getting so much attention because it's on such an important part of the burn. My frustration comes only through the process, not the idea of the proposal.

just reading the propsal now -mapping out who does what and making it super clear in here is helpful. There are still some major missing responsibilities, etc.

@Callum Macdonald The proposal above has a section literally titled "Open Questions" with 3 points listed underneath of it. I presume you wrote it/them, but I guess I can't know that for sure. To be clear, when I say "the proposal" I'm talking about the editable text at the top of this page that is the starting point for this conversation. When I say discussion/thread/conversation, I'm talking about all the comments below that. Sorry if I'm using improper terminology.

If you don't see any legal uncertainty, than I would suggest removing that text from "the proposal" above... but since it was there and there has been a discussion of it, I would strongly suggest that rather than simply removing it, you replace it with an explanation of what the resolution of that was.

Gotcha. Good call, I missed updating those questions. I've done that now.

The draft of the checkout page has been updated with some changes:

https://eloquent-fermi-85fbea.netlify.com/#/t/test

Changes included

• Added a "newsletter signup"

• Removed the "no refunds" section

• Added longer intro text with links to talk, etc

• Price option only shown after all consent boxes are checked

If anybody has feedback on the specific text of this page, happy to incorporate that. Perhaps easiest in a separate thread to keep it out of this discussion.

Since you mentoioned that ticket transfers is still a possibility, would you consider updating the text:

I understand this is a volunteer run event and that so far nobody has volunteered to handle ticket transfers. Therefore I fully and gladly accept that if I cannot attend the event FOR ANY REASON AT ALL, I will not be able to transfer my ticket.

To something like "as of right now ticket transfers are not possible" - and mentioned that it's still an open role or potential role if people want to influence it?

Just an idea -sure you have already thought of it.

Are these all the terms and conditions that are needed? Not an expert here, so not sure, but I think we had information about where the payment was going, like Kiez Burn E.V. @Jan Thomas or someone else might know

Where did the 60K€ come from? Not sure I saw this in the post, it's pretty long so perhaps I missed it in my search. I guess this is the number with basically no art grants?

@Remy Schneider The minimum €60k was a figure from @Alexxx on the absolute minimum required to make a burn happen. I'm happy to change this based on feedback. These numbers are entirely movable.

On the topic of text, I'm 100% happy to update it. I didn't fully understand your proposed new text. I've updated it based on your feedback, but if you want to make any other changes, just post the text you'd like instead and I'll drop it in.

I added a section in the original proposal thread mapping the advice process among Needs & people. I would suggest we work on this going forward. The purpose would be to get an all green on all, or have the confidence that we will be green later to not cause unexpected issues for leads later on. I hope this will be useful in coming to a consensual decision. I will reached out to @Julian Finn for Monkey Kiez input.

Btw, 2 questions not related to process, but to your proposal:

1. how do you make sure people do not buy a whole lot of 1€ tickets for people who might not come? Or is that possible in your system? How many tickets can people buy per email address?

2. Are the contributions people made public?

==> maybe we can add the answer to the thread post as well?

Proposals:

• Add a "Generous ticket" at 298,-- at the top. It might be little money for someone who flies in from far, compared to the rest of their cost.

• Name the current "Generous ticket" "Supporter ticket"

• Change the "low income ticket" suggestion to 80,--. In their own mindset, a very big group of people could align with the thought (or fact) that their income is low, compared to the German median salary. After all, there is no submission of proof or checking, and if people want to pay less, they can easily use the box below and enter 40,-- or 1,-- themselves.

Given there is a need for input from the board, below the my input as a member of the Kiez Burn e.V. board:

following the responsibilities mapped out in the advice process thread on top

• budget: we have not had the time yet to discuss the budget for 2020. We started putting the 2019 budget into a structure we can use to take a budget decision for 2020 YESTERDAY. We need more time to give valid input. The number Alex mentioned was a first guess and not a board decision. We are doing our best to do this as fast as possible, but this is a volunteering position. Again, we do our best.

• legal: some concerns were raised by Franzi regarding this kind of ticket sales (no refunds). We need some time to talk through the implications and evaluate things.

wow! quickly responding regarding volunteers:

Te questionnaire was very much useful. When we were short of volunteers I would go through the whole list of people and contacted the ones that were interested in the roles that we need to fulfill. I do have my template of the questionnaire but it got modified by the tickets team afterwards, so I dont have the ultimate version.

Realities is less than half way, im working on it but @Callum Macdonald so you know, Tickets/ memberships is already there, shape it out as you wish, I added some responsibilities but I see there are more positions available within the whole membership Need. So go ahead an add what you need to make this happen.

Ill give more attention to this whole thread tomorrow; I need more time, is super long! Thank you all for all the participation and opinions this thread esta caliente caliente!!!

Being this threat already very long, I will try my opinion as member of the community, not an expert, nor a directly-affected as short as possible:

• I'm amazed, Callum, with your proposal. It's interesting as fuck and radical to the root. An impressive community-meter. I particularly see a great potential in accessibility regarding ticket prices (we are likely a wealthy group of hippies) Zusammengefasst: Great job!

• But I still have some concerns as well, which have actually appeared already, and are still open:

  • I still quite don't see the "tension" in the ticket selling process in the first place (why changing sth that works?) Mostly when it brings big critical risks. Maybe we just go for the experiment...? if everything is settled and the Plan B is ready. Maybe I'm being reactionary.

  • Before it goes online, I believe all the numbers mentioned above should be fixed, so we really know what are we dealing with. This and the other payment options have being commented sufficiently. I subscribe.

  • Being the transfer tickets as much as 1/4, I believe this should be a priority part of the proposal. It's mention "if someones takes care of it", but, what does it mean in terms of tasks? (IT illiterate here)

  • If running a "normal ticket sale" is part of the proposal, or rather will take care of it if it fails (Dios no lo quiera) maybe it'd make sense to have it clear and a fixed team willing to take care of it from the beginning? Not to throw the hot potato in the last moment.

I still love this radical proposal and see it as a positive experiment with virtually no risk. No minimum budget achieved? Full refund. Somebody else can run a normal ticket sale.

I do not agree with all the tweaks and proposed limitations of budget or proposed donation levels. Again, this takes the radical out of the sale.

If we want to walk the talk, we have to support this proposal that is run according to Ap principles. Otherwise it's radical talking, not doing. As far as I can see, @Callum Macdonald has done his best to integrate all necessary caveats (as in, legal and minimum viable budget).

Let's keep it simple. 88000 Euro, 1000 people. Freely name your price (no limitations) = we can all do simple maths here.

I gather so far that the Board would agree that 88k gives us an event?

Let's play, watch and see what happens.

I did like the suggestion of showing the amount raised so far, a bit like the Wiki banner - to anyone engaging in the sale.

The sale ends, 88000 not reached = sale fails, do your usual thing.

maybe I overread, but is there a deadline/ way of a decision being made? unfortunately the poll was only open for 2 or 3 days and only a handful of people voted. would be interesting to get a broader scale votes. but also i havent manage to get through all comments yet so maybe its been discussed.

OK just got more through the whole discussion. I also sent it to the monkey camp who are likely to step up for gate and greet again. at least we had an internal poll for it and tendencies were positive to d this again. and also a lot of its members being involved in other lead roles of kiez burn and might pitch in here. but also i feel it does actually not matter so mcuh because somehow a decision has been made (of which tbh I did not really understand the process so much and did not find the process itself very inclusive/ intergrative of perspectives of people directly affected by it (consesual doocracy) and there is not much time for anything. But in either way I have send this thread to our group. thanks for connecting @waldo

I suggest leaving this thread open to collect more feedback, also for the future. I imagine that many people only heard of the discussion in the last days, if at all ( I know most of us monkeys did; but then, of course, we are monkeys...). And since ticket sale affects everyone, I'd say that feedback is important, even if you go forward now.

My feedback:
- I very much appreciate the attempt to make Kiezburn more inclusive
- I think it has a great symbolic value to be able to say that if necessary, you can be part of KB with as little as 1€
- I don't think this process will make KB more inclusive, especially if we first only commicate it the "viral way" indicated above - if more inclusive means attracting more people who are not yet part of the community. My guess is that some people might buy a ticket who wouldnt have bought it because they cant affort it. So: More inclusive. At the same time communicating first only through "core community members" makes it more exclusive. And I guess the effects might just level each other out. That doesnt mean dont to it - I dont see a big danger here, just limited possibility of progress. And I'm very open to be prooved wrong.

What would interesting for future ticketing: To actually measure if this process makes us more inclusive.

For that it would help to specify a bit what "more inclusive" means. More people who have never been to a burn, as in, new people for the comminity? Making it easier for people already in the community to attend?

My intuition is that our biggest barriers for more inclusion are not fincancial issues but rather complicated cultural issues.

Pause

I'm taking a step back from this for a while, I've posted the full story here:

https://talk.kiezburn.org/d/I2bGpV09/pausing-the-radical-ticket-sale-initiative

Hey, so I've read over it all and here are some of my thoughts. I helped champion the process for Nest and learned a lot along the way.

One of the biggest issues for me (and seems others) is getting clear on what the current situation or plan was, and hence why I think there is loads more comments (and work) in here than it needs to be.

I completely agree that getting memberships on sale earlier is better, but there are some benefits to getting it right.

Having a fair idea of numbers is super important. At nest we initially looked at the previous budget and started working from there but once we talked to the leads and some of the projects we were looking at doing it was clear we needed at least an extra 10,000, which made a difference of about 20 per average ticket price.
Also knowing what the event can support in terms of participants on site is very key, I am not sure where is the overall consideration for that but the people working on those needs should have some input

I like the idea of everyone being able to choose their own price, but in an application sometimes that doesn't work out. This year's borderlands sale is a prime example of that, all of the low-income tickets (10%) sold out super fast and a lot of people on a low income we're not able to get any memberships because they could not afford the higher tickets. I am not sure of the best way to do it but at Burning nest we held 20% of memberships aside for low income and they were done by application. We also did our budgeting and setting the price on all of those going and nobody paying extra.

I think transfers are a must, I completely support you not wanting to take it on but I think it is a role that should be filled before the sale. I might be harder for somebody to take on this role because it is custom dev, so even having an idea of what could be involved for somebody to take this on would be useful, for me the idea of signing up for transfers is scary and could be a hugely time-consuming process.

I do think there should also be at least a 2 week comms period before the sale. Even if it just starts out with this is the date, the rest of the details are still being confirmed, follow here! It just gives the community time to plan, make sure the are available etc. Especially with the rate burns are selling out at this stage, people need the time to make sure they can do it. I only heard about this thread today and I would have completely missed the change to buy a ticket if it sold fast, like I can see it doing.

Not sure if this is correct but just from what I've picked up, I think that the sale should keep going until all the tickets are allocated, even if we meet our minimum (so it's not capped by how much we raised), so someone can spend 80,000 on a membership and then imagine how great it would be if the rest paid at an average of 88! It would be one of the most epic burns everywhere and I fully support that person thinking about doing 80,000!

Someone mentioned overselling, I do not think this should be done at all! This could lead to many issues.

I know there was a lot of concerns about credit cards but I think this might be a bit of misunderstanding as it anyone with a debit card etc as well. I would like to know how much that changes for people. Most people these days should have a card they can make purchases with online correct?

Another thing, is there separate kids/carer memberships? Do they count toward total headcount etc? I know this was an issue at Nest (and borderlands you could add an under 12 onto your ticket for free) but I am not sure how it works at Kiez burn.

My last bit, I am happy to put my hand up to make the "normal" ticket sale via quicket if this goes ahead and fails or if this doesn't go ahead at all!

Also happy to jump on a call to discuss this further and see how I can support to make this happen, I would prefer to see this tried if we can!

Hey all, I forgot to put in here that I have done a big update/proposal for this over here: https://talk.kiezburn.org/d/2AZBFu8y/radical-tickets-request-for-changes

1. If we will not have ticket transfers, we can sell 1333 tickets, as 25% of the people will not come. Flight tickets are sold exactly the same way.

2. To make contributions public, highly visible, online, can be a very powerful tool. It also fully aligns with transparency. Maybe with shortened surname. The text in the sales process must clearly and boldly mention what will be made public. Also "public after login" is totally enough, as in, public within our community, but not public as in "findable with google".

@waldo Only 1 ticket per email. Legal name required, and cannot be changed. No transfers.

My current thinking is that the contributions are private, not published. I'm open to feedback on this point, but I'd favour keeping the contributions private unless there's overwhelming feedback on this. As of right now, the total number taken, and the total amount pledged will be shared.

@waldo I've updated your new section with comments and clarifications. I currently don't see anything that's a hard blocker on launching this.

@Callum Macdonald I understand you want your baby, your proposal pushed through. The goal of the advice process is not that leads are pushed to just accept things. The goal is to gather advice and come to a decision that is carried by a the people implementing it. I wanted to help by mapping who should give advice that would be interesting in making a better proposal.

Things like:

are not super helpful. I brought forward that we should ask them, because I see a potential issue because of the not-guaranteed ticket transfer, and it would be good to get their advice.

Cool that people can see the number of tickets taken. I am undecided if it is good that people can see the amount pledged to date. It constantly changes obviously, and thus it also constantly changes how it influences each buyer's decision on how much to give. Which I think it clearly shouldn't. People should decide how much they want to give assessing their own situation, and not be influenced by a number and its quite random value at a certain point in time.

Yeah, that’s a good point about the numbers changing over time. I was thinking it’s helpful to the community to be able to see the current level so people could revise their pledges amount, encourage others to do the same, and so on. I also like your suggestion to make it all public but I feel that’s probably going a bit too far for the first sale of this kind!

I’m definitely open to suggestions on how best to show these numbers. Hopefully I’ll have the draft updated with some sample data soon so we can see exactly what it could look like.

Please don‘t confuse me with @Juli Finster ;)

The "Generous at €298" is a great idea. Also came up tonight in conversation. Will do that. 👍

Low income to €80, that's also interesting. Wow. Yeah, sure why not, interesting idea. 👍

I've posted those changes on the demo, should be live in ~2 minutes or less...

@waldo Thanks for making a statement on behalf of the board. I want to clarify a couple of points.

• Legal - I think this information is outdated. There is a refund option now. If the event is cancelled, then people get refunded. Just like every other ticket sale. No change.

• Budget - The point here is to crowd source our budget. For the members to actually decide what budget they want. Not for the board to decide.

As I understand your post, you are formally blocking this initiative on behalf of the board until such time as the board approves a budget. In my opinion this directly contradicts the explanation of the consensual doocracy process as I understand it.

I understand and will respect the board's decision to block this, but I will not accept that the board is doing anything other than exercising that authority, without following the conflict escalation process, and 10 days after I raised this proposal.

I'm sad that the board seems to have produced complaint after complaint, and put up barrier after barrier. It appears to me that the intention is simply to drown this in challenges, and then ultimately to block it, rather than to genuinely work on supporting this. I stand by the position that this initiative could go live 1 Feb, without any valid objection standing in its way.

I understood à minimum was going to be set for which kiez burn can happen. There was no decision from the board on that minimum yet. Given no minimum was decided, I would advise against launching this on saturday as you communicated.

You seem to say we now just see what budget comes out of the ticketing sale and then that means that is the kiez burn budget,even if that means we have huge issues in funding. What is the point here? To make the organization of this event super hard? I like collaboration and co-création. Not this.

My advise as a board member is not to go ahead with the ticketing sale on saturday because we have no decision on budget yet. Are you still honestly listening to the advise of others?

The proper launch has been delayed to align with the location announcement. That’s been posted a few times on this thread already, but it’s very hard to keep up with all the changes. It’s also updated in the description.

Thanks for the update @Veroca R. Sala. It looks like this is getting blocked, so I guess it'll come to nothing. I'm still optimistic that the board will issue a "we support this, and apologise for blocking" statement tomorrow, but at this point it seems unlikely. :-(

Hey @Cris, thanks for the post. I'll respond to your concerns.

I still quite don't see the "tension" in the ticket selling process in the first place (why changing sth that works?) Mostly when it brings big critical risks. Maybe we just go for the experiment...? if everything is settled and the Plan B is ready. Maybe I'm being reactionary.

I see this as an opportunity to improve, to boost our budget, and to have more money, and a more engaged community. It's not about solving a tension, it's about dreaming, thinking big, and being ambitious, risky, and radical in our application of our values.

Before it goes online, I believe all the numbers mentioned above should be fixed, so we really know what are we dealing with. This and the other payment options have being commented sufficiently. I subscribe.

I respectfully disagree. I understand that you wish to have all the details in advance. I wish to launch, and to launch early. I wish to experiment, to see how motivated our community really is. I wish to see our community rally behind the event and contribute more than we've ever dared to ask for.

Being the transfer tickets as much as 1/4, I believe this should be a priority part of the proposal. It's mention "if someones takes care of it", but, what does it mean in terms of tasks? (IT illiterate here)

It means, "let fail what the community does not carry". I don't have a plan for ticket transfers. I believe that it is not necessary to support them. I believe either somebody will choose to make an awesome, potentially radically awesome, ticket transfer process if we create a supportive community in which people feel empowered to do things that are new, things that are ambitious, and things that are potentially wonderful.

If running a "normal ticket sale" is part of the proposal, or rather will take care of it if it fails (Dios no lo quiera) maybe it'd make sense to have it clear and a fixed team willing to take care of it from the beginning? Not to throw the hot potato in the last moment.

It's not part of the proposal. It's to show the risk. What's the worst case scenario here? What is it we're really scared of? That our community is full of people who take advantage, don't pay their way, don't want to contribute fairly? That's not the community I see. I see people ready to commit, ready to cocreate, ready to support, and I believe what these people need is just the space to actually do that. I do not currently think that this organisation, and especially some members of this board, truly do support new members being empowered to take actions.

Herrooo @Callum Macdonald

As @waldo said, this is his opinion and actually not in fact an official block on behalf of the board. The board itself has many opinions and things to consider and this initiative is challenging us, but in a good way. To my knowledge we have not yet had an official discussion about our unified voice. As he said, we are volunteers also and are trying to coordinate as we speak... or type.

As also a member of the board and a member of Kiez Burn, id like to voice i am in favour of this initiative from a values stand point.

In light of all the technical reasons and details on why this is a complicated topic and more time is requested, I’d like to offer a strategic reason.

As a member of the social comms team i wish to support. Launching Saturday would not give the community adequate understanding of this new radical venture we are embarking on. Kiez Burn loves a countdown (just throwing in an example) and looking at last years comms around tickets, it was really an engagement piece to get the community excited. I love to see the same excitement around this initiative. Id like to support in educating our community on what this is and why its important. Its hard to place a value on our community (where can i buy a ticket for 1 million dollars!???) but having those understand how this affects everyone is a powerful thing. This could be super beautiful and not thrown to the sharks.

(I've just had a laugh to myself that maybe I'll buy just 1 ticket for 80,000 euros and no one goes to Kiez Burn but me, fully funded!)

As a member of the burner tech mission, which you also led alongside me, our social crowd fund campaign is due to launch on Saturday. Alot of work has gone into this and i wish to see this be supported by the community too. Our tech mission allows us to have these conversations and enables our decentralisation. With the division i see around this sale, i imagine the mission would be drowned out. I propose a strategic delay on radical tickets to allow communications on the tech mission to lift and hence give us a little more time to iron out details on the tickets and gain further support from kb comms. I may be pushing my luck but maybe there could be a way for people to support Kiez Burn tech when they support Kiez Burn event linking to our campaign... something to further discuss.

I hope you consider this before deciding to launch this weekend.

Thank you for taking the time to respond to every response on this thread. I can see this is challenging to not only get over the line but simply maintain from just an admin perspective. It would be sad to see ( and i hope that it doesnt happen) someone having to give up on an initiative from exhaustion. Your contribution to Kiez Burn is valuable.

To take actionable points away from this long post:

1. I'm committed to supporting from a comms standpoint along side anyone else who wishes to help. We could create an adequate campaign to run with the launch. We could put this together in a 7-10 days, which would give a little time to launch. but maybe we could work together for a shorter time... open to suggestions

2. How long would we need to run this before we decide it be a failed experiment?

3. How long would we need to org actual tickets if this fails?

4. How would we communicate failed tickets and make sure those who bought tickets know they may need to re-buy elsewhere, so they dont miss out? Could we send out a text message?
   

Thank you for your answers, Callum. I like the first one particularly :)

As for the last one, watch out for toxicity. Being cautious and questioning is legitimate, and doesn't change the fact that we share the same vision about the community.

Why does anyone “have to support” any proposal? Isn’t that the point of the advice process, to get advice and actually integrate that advice into your proposal and progressively gain support by genuinely hashing out all the issues. I for one definitely do not consent to being required to support proposals that I do not support.

Thanks for the post. I've had a long chat with @Alexxx and read the post by @Erin Jeavons-Fellows on timing. We're settled on official launch 14 Feb, same time as the location decision. In the meantime, @Alexxx will investigate the budget so we can present more information and people can make a better informed decision regarding how much they want to contribute.

Radical inclusion is the first principle on the burning man site, and arguably the most challenging. Attendance is dependent on visas, travel, and all kinds of other requirements. Personally I don’t see inclusion as including people who have never been before, rather I see inclusion as “accessible”, which means people who want to come can do so. But not that we actively seek to have more and more new people. Anyway, that’s probably a topic for another thread!

Yes, I’ll leave the thread for future, it's just very hard to see new comments now and so it takes me a lot of time to follow up on them.