Part of what one has to do in order to join this list is come up with a proposal for a camp, installation or happening that one is willing to be responsible for creating and running. While one might find a few interesting ideas in the listing of theme camps that have been to Burning Man, for most of those considering joining this list, setting up a theme camp is probably a bad choice. Let's think about why that might be.

For one thing, this will not save you any work, at any point of this process. Just bringing other people together who do something creative is not enough; we're going to want to see what your creative contribution is and really, so will everybody else. Have no doubt about it, running a camp is a lot of work. It is also difficult in our area, for numerical reasons.

Burning Man itself covers an area miles across. No Chicago area burn could ever even remotely approach that size because of space constraints. More realistically, let us consider one possible gathering point: the peninsula to the north of the mouth of Belmont Harbor. We might be able to fit 100 people in there, but it would be tight, and the Park District might not like the idea because of safety concerns. If we go a little further out, maybe we might find space for a gathering of 200 people. Compare this to the event near Gerlach, which is pushing 36,000 people, ie. 180 times larger. The issue becomes one of percentages.

Let's say you want to create a small camp of ten people, really not large enough to do some of the more involved projects. You aspirations are modest, but they may still be unreasonable. To assemble a camp of that size on the Playa, assuming that you're on the map, you need to appeal to 1 in 3600 visitors. This is not an impossible thing to shoot for, which is why one sees such a diversity of camps in the archives. But suppose you try to assemble a similar camp at home. At our proposed Lakeview microburn, you'd need to appeal to over 10% of the attendees; even at the slightly larger backyard burn further out, you still need to appeal to 1 in 20. That's 180 times the fraction of the entire population that you'd need to appeal to out on the Playa. This is not absolutely impossible, but it is certainly very difficult, and a very rough challenge to set for yourself if you're just setting out, as really almost all of us are at this point.

Our thought, and at least a few camp directors we've spoken with agree, is that creating an installation is probably your best choice. Think of the whole mini-event as being one large camp, and just do your own thing, something that you can enjoy doing on your own that others can enjoy with you. This listing of past installations might give you a few interesting examples of what can be done, and a few concepts to play around with, as one thinks up a few of one's own.