I have not been to Burning Man, and have always been curious. Kevin Kelly’s post on the event has given me a couple more reasons to check it out. The Burning Man event has evolved from a small gathering of people to an enormous congregation of over 40,000. The event as a forum for self-expression, art and community is well documented, however the scale of the event provides a medium where one can explore the dynamics of community, economics, and city planning. Kelly sums this up nicely in points 2 & 3 in his post, where he discusses the logistics and planning of the ‘city’ created for the event, as well as the gift-based economy that prevails during the six days. When the number of attendees was less than 5000, it was easy to discount the lessons presented by Burning Man on these topics. However, with numbers over 40,000, I imagine there are a lot of people taking notice, even if they are not as interested in the artistic and spiritual aspects of the event.

“Every new rule is resisted fiercely, and chaos has been embraced. Burning Man is what happens if you have only a few fundamental rules and allow disorder to self-assemble the rest. So far it has worked brilliantly. In part this is because Burning Man has a delete button. Every year the entire city is deleted and undone. Erased. Gone. And a new city is rebuilt from zero. This gives this particular city — alone among all the cities of the world — a fantastic learning rate. It can implement what it learned last version and make changes in the next updated version. Black Rock is the eternal beta city, an urban center (Nevada’s third largest city) run according to software logic. “

CT2: International Burning Man, 2008

FYI: Wikipedia has a timeline showing the growth of Burning Man.