This month I had the pleasure to present at Burn After Meeting which is a conference for regional burn event organizers to share practical concerns and solutions, to learn from each other rather than learning the hard way, and to build an environment of mutual support.
I was able to run through a demo of the dust app and what it can do for a regional burn. All of this was in person, which makes a big difference as up until now the regionals I've worked with have all been achieved by coordinating over Google Meet, email or Messenger.
It may not be that helpful but here is the presentation from the session.
October Fixes
This month there have been a few fixes with dust including:
- When pasting descriptions for events from a PDF the text is cleaned up to remove line breaks.
- When imported KML files the pin for polygons is now calculated as its center.
- A new feature was added to delete all events.
- Fix for importing events via CSV where the start day is different to the end day (ie over midnight)
- Support for shuttle stops and other markers added for maps.
Upcoming Features
Work has started on new communication features for dust!
The dust app has primarily been used during a burn but some new communication features will mean that it can be used year round.
You'll be able to send push notifications out to burners interested in your burn!
This is going to be done in an interesting way: posting to social media. You'll be able post to Mastodon and your message will be sent out to all dust users who have accessed your burn in dust. They will also be able see all previous messages in dust.
This works a little bit more like email but as dust users will also be able to find previous messages in dust it means they won't miss any messages if they are a first time dust user.
The other feature this enables is that since you post to social media users can reply there.
It's still early for these features and development has only just started, so we'll see how this pans out over the next month or so.
Why Mastodon?
Mastodon is a radically different social media platform. It is more akin to email in that it is not in control of any one company. It is also open meaning that unlike Facebook etc it is possible to easily integrate into systems like dust.
As Mastodon has no advertising and selling your data not their motivation, it feels like it fits in a lot better with the 10 Burning Man principles, particularly Decommodification.