ERE Fest 2023: Ft Dirtbag

[sodatrain]

Awesome! I will do what I can to attend. Love the idea of immersing myself amongst all this expertise! Trying to think about managing the travel to be balanced with cost/time/work obligations and desires to slow travel but cant really yet!

[ThinkingRachel]

I'm interested! I'm a fair piece away in Chicago, but I'd love to spend more time in the west and a roughing-it ERE fest sounds like a great way to do it.

[2Birds1Stone]

I am so sad we will be in Europe for this

[theanimal]

The Animal clan is planning on taking a few days off from the trail and will be in attendance if all goes to plan.

[Cam]

If I wasn't starting my speech pathology program right then I would love to come visit. Hope it's a great time!

[Stahlmann]

any affirmative action for sponsoring cost of showing up or scholarship from ERE gods?

[sodatrain]

Few random thoughts:

I imagine I'll be flying into LA and then possibly train to Bakersfield. Would be into finding more creative/efficent/interesting/collaborative ways to travel portions of that.

I'm also happy to cook and or wash dishes.

I work in IT (well, IT Sales now) so I have some (aging) technical skills and am happy to try and fix/setup/plan any IT/Tech related questions/ideas y'all may have.

I'm thinking I'll prob make a week or so out of it. Could be more. Trying to not just fly in / fly out and to slow down a little.

[Jin+Guice]

Very excited for this. I’ll be there unless tragedy strikes.

[AxelHeyst]

Last weekend I did my MMG Deep Dive on EREfest and got some great feedback from the crew. Many thanks yall (also to mF who I had a call with several weeks ago). Time for an update here:

I'm going to dig further into the mechanics of Burning Man, but I'm passingly familiar with the cooperative self sufficiency ethos and am looking to that as inspiration for the vibe for EREfest. In other words, this isn't going to be like a conference where 'staff' creates the whole program and you just check boxes next to activities you want to attend. It's going to be highly participative / co-creative. Some ideas on what that means specifically:
1) Potable water, toilets, electricity, and lots of land will be provided as a matter of course.

2) Every member is responsible for figuring out how they will
2a. shelter / sleep safely (bring a tent? take the van/skoolie/truckcamper/biketrailer? coordinate with someone else to share shelter?),
2b. food / eat and cook (we're definitely going to have group dinners at a minimum, but with people arriving early and leaving late at least some meals will be up to you to prepare and, depending on head count, you can't count on access to the house kitchen. Also, again depending on headcount, everyone should maybe plan on bringing e.g. their own cup and set of flatware. Specific details on what you need to bring will come later, this is just to get a sense of the vibe we're aiming at),
2c. transport / get to and from ft dirtbag (I expect some level of self organizing to happen wrt transport hubs and the like).

3) Structured activities will be on a volunteer contribution basis. We'll make this thing as a group. What I envision here is a group calendar and people who want to contribute a specific event at a specific time can take a slot. e.g. if Seppia wants to be in charge of dinner on Friday and Saturday he grabs those chunks of time on the calendar and he now 'owns' group dinner for everyone those evenings. It's up to him to communicate what he needs: 4 prep chefs starting at 1700, and 6 on cleanup afterwards; he might coordinate with me to ensure that the ingredients he needs are on hand at Ft. Dirtbag by the time he arrives. mF might grab an hour slot on Saturday 11am for a zine workshop and lead an early morning trailrun Sunday. Dancing lessons by Crusader at 1500, dance party at 2200.

With that said, I don't envision all of the days filling up with highly structured activities. There should be adequate unstructured time for people to wander, make serendipitous discoveries and relationships, etc. Not all things that happen have to be The Calendar. The aim is just enough structure to give some order to the thing, but not so much it becomes rigid and unfun.

As we get closer to the date, I suspect we'll benefit from a communications platform that we can be added to for purposes of coordination transport, shelter equipment swaps, etc. Discord is the top of my head, but open to suggestions here. It needs to be simple enough that the luddites and non-smart-phoners amongst us can hang, but probably needs more power than just a Signal channel.

I'm planning on making the event open to lurkers, with the caveat that they either send a link to their stuff if they have an online presence, or set up a video call with me beforehand. My last two podcast guests aren't forumites but are badass ERE folk nonetheless, and I'd love to make this event open to people like them. I welcome thoughts on this.

I'm drafting a survey questionnaire that I'll post a link to this month to get an initial rough headcount, which will inform much of the logistics planning going forward.

[Seppia]

Excellent. Looking forward to this.

[AxelHeyst]

Locking in the weekend of September 9th as The Weekend, with Friday night through Sunday morning being the Core Days.

The 8th-10th are the days that, if you can only make a couple days, make it those days.

However, consider Ft Dirtbag open to arrivals and departures without question between the dates of September 1st (labor day weekend) and September 16th, the following weekend. Anyone is welcome to stay during that window in autonomous mode. We can self-organize anything we like during that time, or just Be Here, as you like.

[sodatrain]

Sweeeet!

[Crusader]

I have created an information gathering survey for everyone who wants to come
viewtopic.php?t=12754

[mountainFrugal]

Watercolor of Ft. Dirtbag

[sodatrain]

Beautiful! I was surprised to see the mountains here (and in @AH's white rock roof YT video). I had imagined it much flatter and desert-ier.

[ThinkingRachel]

Hey, I'm definitely a lurker and won't know for sure if I can come for another few weeks, but I'm interested! Camping plus cool people sounds like exactly how I want to end my summer. Could I be "vetted" or is there something else I can do to get in the loop?

Thanks!

[mathiverse]

I'm definitely a lurker and won't know for sure if I can come for another few weeks, but I'm interested! ... Could I be "vetted" or is there something else I can do to get in the loop?

Yes! DM AxelHeyst.

Also fill out the survey: viewtopic.php?t=12754.

[sodatrain]

Hey, I'm definitely a lurker and won't know for sure if I can come for another few weeks, but I'm interested! Camping plus cool people sounds like exactly how I want to end my summer. Could I be "vetted" or is there something else I can do to get in the loop?

I'm pretty new and share the exact idea... Camping plus cool people sounds awesome. Hope you make it!

Curious to hear a bit if your story if/when you are ready to share!

[AxelHeyst]

...and to be be clear, 'vetting' isn't some kind of WL test, it's just a connection to establish a trust link. I want to have some kind of idea of the people I'm sending my address to.

Im about to be internetless for a couple days as I finish out my bikepacking trip but I'll be online no later than Sunday.

(Also for lurkers who don't have forum DM ability you can email me via my website tylerjdisney.com )

[sodatrain]

@AH - what is the current count of people you are expecting at this point? Feel free to share any other insights from the data gathered in the Google form!

Enjoy the end of bikepacking!