SideBurn is a regional burn in Ontario, Canada happening May 16-20 and is using dust.

SideBurn has 44 theme camps, 207 events and 25 art pieces.

unSCruz is a regional burn in California happening May 2-5 and is using dust.

unSCruz has 91 theme camps, 87 events and 70 art pieces. One of my favorite mutant vehicles will be there El Pulpo Magnifico, pictured below at this year's burn.

Gathering feedback on an app is an important part of the process of improvement. In a recent question posted up to the Blazing Swan Facebook group we received a lot of great feedback and have ended up implementing the first feature based on that feedback.

An Interactive Map​

The most requested feature was an interactive map showing all camps, art and points of interest and we've implemented and released this feature today. A point is placed on the map that can be clicked to see events at the camp or art piece or to see where restrooms are located (color coded as blue).

This works quite well for regionals. For Burning Man however, the sheer number of camps and art make it a bit unwieldy but it is interesting nonetheless.

Other Feedback​

Here are some of the features that have been put on the roadmap but have not been implemented yet:

• Dropping a pin - This feature would allow you to drop a pin on the map whether that is for where you are camped or an interesting location you want to come back to.

• Personal Schedule - Many users will use dust to favorite the events and camps they are interested in but then want to avoid bringing out their phone - and instead want a way to print out a schedule. Hopefully we'll be able to add this with an export to PDF from the favorites page.

• Configurable Reminders - dust gives a 15 minutes reminder before an event but some users want to be notified earlier. Making this configurable would allow you time to prepare for events that need a outfit change or are further away.

• Last Minute Notifications - Some users want to be notified of important events such as when a burn was going to start or be rescheduled. We'll take a look into this feature but in order to implement it there needs to be cell service at the event and it also means that the app registers the device for push notifications (we take privacy seriously and avoid tracking users).

At this point its worth noting that dust is an open source project and something I build in my spare time. PRs are welcome and if you have an idea please file an issue to discuss it and we can collaborate on getting it implemented in dust.

Saguaro Man is a regional burn in Arizona happening April 24-28 and is using dust.

Saguaro Man has 59 theme camps, 187 events and 33 art pieces. One of the unique aspects of Saguaro Man is they allow dogs and have a theme camp Dogville for dogs and their humans to hang out at.

Saguaro Man is also the first burn where dust introduced a new feature on the home page: a map button which shows all camps, art and points of interest on the map.

Speaking of maps, here is theirs: I ended up building it in Figma from scratch for dust as the original in PhotoShop had some pixelation due to raster based layers. If you are a regional reading this post then I would highly recommend using Figma for building your map - you can easily collaborate with others who will need it - in this case for different views for print media (posters and event guides), the website, for camp placement, art placement, dust and for permits.

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.