Emergence is a regional burn in South Carolina happening April 18-21 and is using dust.

Emergence has 61 theme camps, 99 events and 19 art pieces. One of Emergence's beautiful features, that is often overlooked, is the map. Check it out in all its glory:

March has been a big month for dust with some important new features.

Art, Art and More Art​

To help support artists better and highlight their content the art section of dust has been enhanced with:

• The ability for artists to be manage their art content.
• Events can located at an art piece.
• Artists can manage those (in a similar way to camps).
• Regional organizers can onboard artists by inviting them to manage their art in dust.
• Regional organizers can enable and disable whether art can be edited.
• The Dust app now lists events that are located at art.

Printing​

dust now has a printable event guide! This is great for those who prefer to leave their phone at home but its also great for organizers to place printed guides at the event or make it downloadable on the website.

To try out this feature you can click ⋮ (in the top right corner) of your event home page and choose Print Preview. Click the Print button and you can then save the printable guide as a PDF.

Emailing Camps​

Emailing theme camps is a necessity, so a new feature is the email address export. To try out this feature you can click Camps then click ⋮ (in the top right corner) and choose Export Email Addresses. You'll get a downloadable CSV of just the email addresses of theme camps.

Blazing Swan is a regional burn in Western Australia happening March 27-April 2 and is using dust.

Compared to other regionals there was a big adoption of the self-management features of dust that allow camps to manage their own events and music. As part of this several features needed to be added including:

• Multiple theme camp owners
• Sending notifications on camp registration
• Additional moderation features before publishing
• An overview video for camps on how to manage their camp
• A walkthrough video for regional organizers on how to manage the event
• Addition of Art management
• A rework of the home page of the dust app to make sure the regional closest to you shows first

As well as making a lot of happy blazers, it was also a great learning experience in developing the dust platform.

The one and only time I got to go Blazing Swan was in 2015 and some day I'd like to make it back there...straight to the pool room ;)

Love Burn has hundreds of theme camps and 7k+ attendees, so in terms of scale it is about as big as regionals come. Happening February 15-18, I made the decision to make dust available for Love Burn a week beforehand based on the fact that I could see enough data to use in the app.

Radical Inclusion is a Burning Man principle and it seemed to me that regional events were lacking the tools needed that were available for the big burn. Including all regionals by providing a tool like dust would be a wonderful gift. I needed to make sure make that dust would scale so that it could be used by any regional.

SNRG is the Burning Man regional event for Southern Nevada (essentially Las Vegas). In 2023, SNRG was happening at the start of October, a short month or so after the burn. I was asked if I could help out with the "What Where When" as software for managing this in previous years was now costly and there wasn't anything viable that could be used. Dust was a perfect candidate for SNRG as it had worked well at the Burn. However, it was designed for just that: the big burn and not a regional....

So, it was time for an extremely quick rewrite: I needed to create a backend for dust capable of managing camps, events and music. In a few short weeks that is what happened I had used various technologies to create a data store and backend application.

I used Cloudflare and some of their services like R2 to store camp and event images and JSON files (the final output for events, camps and art), KV for temporary data storage and Workers to manage the service that allows camps to register their events and me to publish approved content. I used Netlify to store the admin web app and build it from source code.

By the time SNRG happened in October dust was rebuilt and allowed theme camps to add and edit their events. It was rough and a bit buggy but it worked and the groundwork was there to use this for other regional burns.

I've been going to Burning Man since 2007 but much less frequently in the last few years. 2023 was the first time back after a 3 year hiatus.

When I've gone to Burning Man i've always brought out some art, helped with a theme camp etc and for 2023 I decided to merge my work with my fun and build dust for Burning Man.