Community Meeting Transcript

Chris T O:(laughs) Oh, that was (laughs) emptier than I thought. Hey.

(Instrumental music)

Chris T O:All right. thank you, Daniel, for the track. welcome everyone to another community meeting in the Nobody’s Collective Association. Glad to see so many of you here. on the agenda today we have various bits of updates on tickets, websites recruitment, budgets, legal and we’ll get to those as as we get to them. but we’ll, as usual probably have a little Q&A at the end. but if you do have any questions to anything that is going on, feel free to put them in the chat or raise your raise your hand. Amazing. so the first item we have on the agenda is tickets, tickets, tickets. if Aaron is here and ready to do that.

Aaron R:Hello. hi, everyone. I’m Aaron and I, last week about this time, took on ticketing lead. So, I’m very pleased to say that we are now up and running. you’ll get some comms about it very soon, if you haven’t received them already. We have been selling tickets for four days now, and we’ve sold quite a few, which is fantastic. There is a ticket page that you will receive an email about if you are already registered on Humans. And that translates directly to a number of tickets that you can buy, including some very inflated prices which are the ones where you get absolutely zero benefit other than the feeling of generosity as you help Elsewhere... Nearly said a different name there, happen this year. And we’ve had a lot of people buy those tickets and extend beyond the normal selling price. So thank you to everybody that has done that. I think from a ticket sales perspective, the most of the noise we’re getting at the moment is around buses. And we should have some clarity on that very, very shortly. Buses have been arranged and will be happening this year. No doubt about that. I say no doubt about that. There’s always doubt about that. But in theory, buses will be happening this year and we will be selling those tickets at some point, hopefully next week. Daniel?

Daniel T:Yeah, I just wanted to say, like, you know, not understate, like, the huge achievement of the ticketing team. I mean, like, you know, we didn’t have a ticketing lead seven days ago and we managed to launch the tickets. Like, actually launching the tickets is super important to actually get people to be able to commit to come to the event and to create all like... It’s just such a fundamental piece. And thank you, Aaron. Thank you for the whole team, like, everybody’s been collaborating to make this possible. The low income, the bus the participant wellness, the recruitment. Like, as we’ll see in a second, Peter has, like, worked like about 15 people at the same time and there’s just so much energy going around. This is so, so, so cool. Thank you.

Aaron R:Thanks, Daniel, and completely agree. It’s been awesome. And thank you so much to the team as well there, particularly Peter who has made this so much easier. we are actually aiming to get back to all queries within about 48 to 72 hours. We have completely blown through our own SLA and we have replied multiple times to the same questions over multiple days to the same people. We will smooth all of that out over the coming days and we’ll take a little bit longer to respond, but we’re obviously as excited to come back to you on queries as you are to buy tickets. So, thank you to everyone there. any other questions, feel free to put your hand up now or I can pick them up at the end of the call. Back to you, Chris.

Chris T O:thank you very much. our next item is moving back to Daniel about updates feed.

Daniel T:Yeah. So I’m not gonna pin myself ’cause I’m gonna try and share a tab there. Like, so one of the things that you might have noticed if you tried to keep up with what the hell is going on with this thing that is, that there’s a lot going on. Every day, there’s like a bunch of things that happen. And so if you have a life, you might not be able to keep up and be on in the other 50,000 channels to like keep track of all the crap that’s happening. And all of it is really exciting and it’s like really great to know about. But, you know, it’d be... Like, I thought it’d be nice to have a place where you can check like, oh, what’s the stuff that’s been happening? So I went and created this updates part of the page. And so hopefully it’s gonna share the right page there. Are you seeing this? This is the Elsewhere homepage. And if you scroll down, you’ll see below these amazing designs that have come up recently, you’ll see this activity log. Which is not gonna be up to date to the minute and stuff, but it will be up to date. So if you’re like, what’s been happening the last couple of days, I was, you know, on a massive bender and I haven’t kept track with the Elsewhere news, which is the most important thing in my life and I want to catch up, you can look here and you can see, like, things that have been happening. And so, you’re not like... oh, like, you know, what is the, like, you know, why is this thing... Like, if you just glance through this, and there’s a few updates every day, you’ll be basically more or less up-to-date on what’s going on. And if you want to look at all the updates, you click on here. Or if you want to bookmark this page and look at it, you know, 15 times a day to see if anything’s changed, you can do that as well. But earlier items below around here were basically AI generated based on what Claude could pick up of what had happened, which is quite a lot. but from this point, round about this point onwards, it becomes manually updated. So those are also more meaningful, and I think probably a good place to find out about the latest stuff that’s happened. Probably this is going to multiply out of control at some point as we approach the event, but for now, just to be, you know... It’s also a good place to keep on top of, you know, what’s the latest that Peter has done because he probably is responsible for, like, half the items on there. But we’ll move that one to the next item to hear about Peter. Hopefully, this... Oh, and actually, just if you want to add an item to this, there’s an updates feed channel on the Discord underneath all the other areas. And if you just let me know, “Hey, can you add an update that says this? ’Cause I did this cool thing today,” I’ll get it added within, like, you know, if I’m around, it’ll be added within minutes. If I’m not around, it might take a little bit longer but, you know, it will be added. hopefully that’s clear. Hopefully that’s helpful. yeah. I’ll stop sharing now.

Chris T O:Okay. I’m almost disappointed that Claude isn’t just taking anything anyone puts in that channel and puts it publicly on the website. That would be much more fun.

Daniel T:We’ll get there. (laughs) Baby steps.

Chris T O:Okay. cool. That was even news to me. I’m on the board but I’ve been away for about a week and I didn’t know we had that, so thank you, Daniel. next up is Peter for updates on the Humans app, or the Mega App, as we’re calling it in the agenda now.

Peter D:Yeah, that was news to me. I just saw that a few minutes ago. all right, so since the last week camp registration barrio registration has been added to Humans. So that is at the top, there’s a Barrios button, you can create a new barrio. That’s with a brief approval, which is basically just me clicking on it to say, “Okay.” we’ll get a better process for that soon. becomes public. and there’s some changes in there, ’cause right now it’s publishing the camp’s email address. That’s gonna change today. But, so that’s a way for camps to register. Down the road, that’ll also be integrated with www guide and early entry tickets. so that’ll all be kind of rolled into one little thing there. second was email outbox. This is basically email marketing campaign type stuff got added into Humans. this was a precursor to the next one, which was ticket integration. and we sent all the codes that people got for being in Humans went out through Humans over the weekend. That started off the ticket launch. After that shift management, i.e. all of Fist, got put into Humans on, over Sunday, Monday. teams also became public or there’s an ability for a department, essentially, to become public on the website. So if you’re not logged into Humans, you can still see it. this Humans is not meant to be a CMS. It’s not meant to be the prettiest place to get things. It’s more effective than not, so some of these things could be pulled into other applications. but the at least the bare functionality, so if somebody’s wondering what departments we have, what shifts are available, those are all coming. I saw a thing go by from Daniel. yes. (laughs) That’s a good one. so we, this system gets smarter every day and things get added. Being the system does know already who bought a ticket internally. It hasn’t really published that out yet, but there is a matching between the ticketing site and the accounts on Humans. one of the things I dreamed about and, from other events and things like this, is to make the volunteer coordinator be able to see who has a shift, who doesn’t have a shift, who has a ticket, who doesn’t have a ticket, and can target their messaging more succinctly so we don’t spam everybody for, “We need a new War Zone shift,” or something. so yeah, those are all things in there. it’s getting better. Some things are a little rough around the edges, the first version, they get fixed. As a point, there’s a thing in the lower right corner, one of those little bubble guys. you click on that, get a pop-up, you can put in feedback that goes directly to me into my Claude to get things fixed. it does checkpoint things that didn’t come from me to make sure that they’re sane but that is a good way for people to, if they have a problem, to let me know. Somebody used that this morning and it’s already rolled out and into production. So that loop does work. any questions? Words notetaker doesn’t count. All right, I guess I’m done.

Chris T O:Cool. All right Daniel, I think you have... Sorry, Ant has a last-minute question here. will we use Humans instead of Fist, or is there another program replacing Fist?

Peter D:No, this inhaled what Fist was. Fist is about to be shut down. I think a few people managed to sign up there before we decided to go another route and those people are being contacted, and then it will go away. it uses way too much RAM on our server anyway, so we want that memory back. but yeah. And hopefully, I mean, it’s literally a three-day-old feature at this point, so some of the things are a little less intuitive as they could be. Bear with us. Let us know if something doesn’t work as you expected or you’re not permissioned right. Just, you know, ping somebody and it’ll eventually get to me, or just ping me.

Chris T O:Okay. Amazing. Daniel, you’re up next taking Pepe’s place. do you have the hat?

Daniel T:Yes, so Pepe is... And I don’t have the hat, unfortunately. no, no, sorry. No hat. but I do have an update from Pepe who’s at an ecstatic dance, which apparently is more fun than a community meeting, but fair enough. and basically, quickly, there’s... So, on the asset transfer, substantive terms are... I’m reading the notes basically. So substantive terms are largely agreed. There’s a couple of remaining blockers. Completion of the asset, one of which is completion of the asset inventory, and a final alignment on some... Oh, okay. There, I do have a hat. Thank you. It’s a slightly different hat, and it doesn’t fit on my headphones. There you go. I’ll switch my speakers instead. so completion of the asset inventory and final alignment on some specific language points, but once those are resolved, we’re ready to move forward for signature. and we recognize there’s still a main critical path dependency. Then, on intellectual property, we can confirm that we have done full external IP validation of the name Elsewhere. It’s viable. It’s usable. There’s only minor non-conflicting references and additional legal views confirm that there’s no added risk from our current usage approach. on ticketing legal infrastructure, which is something that Pepe spent a lot of time on this week, we have the privacy policy, media policy, participation agreement, and supporting legal framework all in place, so that this is all solid. On privacy and GDPR, Pepe is working, and like, this is still ongoing, but there’s a first structured risk assessment that’s been completed based on detailed questions from the consent team, and currently it’s being validated with an external specialist, and there’s an implementation plan being built. A key focus is handling of, obviously, sensitive data, such as consent related cases. and finally, on labor and volunteers, we’ve engaged an external Spanish labor lawyer to validate the current approach, then build a robust framework for both year-round operations and festival-specific... Event-specific volunteer staff and setup which is helpful to have this additional backup, because Accountax, our lawyer, is good, but they’re not very fast, and sometimes we would like to get a quicker answer. So, overall, things are progressing well and moving into execution. This seems like really amazing progress, and I’ll try and hear your answers, if you have questions. I mean, I don’t know if I can answer them, but I’m glad you’re doing an ecstatic dance. Anyone got any questions?

Chris T O:All right. Doesn’t look like it. Okay. Thank you, Daniel. and the next item on our list is key recruitment needs, and that’s over to you, Frank.

Frank F:Thank you very much. yeah, before I get to key recruitment needs just wanted to jump on top of Peter’s announcement of Fist doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is on Humans. Today, we tested with some coordinators that they can set up their own shifts for, you know, setup, event, and strike in the same ways that you were able to do it before in Fist. because we’re trying to do a push for the tickets, it would be super helpful if all the departments have a thought, and put in at least the most critical shifts that they need, because once the people start coming in we wanna make sure we mobilize that momentum and fill up the shifts while people are on that high of just getting a ticket and getting super excited. so please register on Humans, if you haven’t already. have a look in your department. If you need any assistance with creating shifts, let me know. I’m here to help. Now, moving to the weekly announcement of the Role of the Week. The Role of the Week is Cantina Lead during Build. We currently don’t have anybody who can come Build, especially for the early Build, and lead the kitchen, so if you or somebody you know who is interested in coming, has experience cooking for large crowds, and has time to come early and help the event out, that would be super amazing. Also, honorable mention, Strike Lead. We’re still looking for Strike Lead. you will basically be taking care of everything that happens on site post-event and making sure people don’t throw themselves at work too hard. if you want more details, let me know. We have quite detailed job descriptions. any questions?

Chris T O:All right, thank you very much. amazing to hear. we are going over Daniela or Peter, do you have a budget budget item to talk about? Peter?

Peter D:I can speak to this. I should turn my camera back on. my dog wants to play but yeah, things are progressing as we would expect from the ticket sales. We’re having more cash than we need for immediate expenses, which is great. we still need a bank account, which is even more important to be quite literal. as a side project or as the thing that comes up when we have any extra time, we’ve been flushing out the expenses expected, i.e. the things budgeted over the next couple months into weekly budgets to come up with a very granular cash flow statement. and that’s just been a thing that kind of got delayed a little bit this week, so that’s going to get more time in the coming days now that the majority of responsible things that had to happen for ticket sales to start are done. and we’re moving more into execution mode, so we’ll have a lot more detail for next week.

Chris T O:All righty, cool. So unless there are any immediate questions on that, we’re looking forward to budget details next week. and we are actually on the last item of my agenda, which is the website, updating website and public website. Daniel?

Daniel T:Yeah. So, just, like, the way that people might be used to website updates happening is that, like, there’s a small team that has access to a CMS and like, you know, you say, “Oh, can I have this page?” And there’s a kind of process, and people are going to spend a while and eventually, finally, there’s an update that happens. the current nobodies.team website is a static HTML site, it’s on GitHub, it’s hosted by GitHub Pages. That means it’s super fast, it’s super easy to make changes. the process is really simple. If you want to make a change to the website, you have two options. If you know how to use GitHub and make a PR, maybe use Claude Code to make a change, all that sort of stuff, you can make a pull request against that repository and push a change. That’s what Laura from Comms is doing at the moment. Once we’ve done that a few times, she will also have maintainer access and be able to do direct changes to the website. The other one is you send me whatever you want to have on the website, like obviously as long as it makes some sense. Could be a Word document, a PDF, something scribbled on the back of a napkin that you’ve taken a picture of, whatever. If you need it on the website, share it with me, I’ll find a way to put it on the website. Within like a few minutes it will be up on the website. So, putting stuff on the website should not be a bottleneck. If you’re saying, “I need to publish the link to a form on the website so that people know where it is,” share it with me or share it with Laura and it will go up there. so hopefully that helps unblock in case anybody was waiting to find out what the process is for the website to be updated. That’s the process. It’s really simple. You just say, “Hey, I want this on the website.” And pretty soon afterwards it’s on the website. There may be glitch animations added to it that you may not have expected, but that’s just the price of having me involved. (laughs) anyway, the other item I wanted to mention similarly around the public pages for the teams, if as a team, like say the consent team decides they need to have a page to talk about the team to recruit people or something like that, just tell me, “I want to add a page. I want it roughly here.” You create it on the Humans app, you give me the link, and I can figure out a way to add it onto the website. So that’s the way you make your pages more public on the nobodies.team website. Hopefully that makes sense, but if it doesn’t because I went very quickly, I’m happy to answer any questions about the website and the public pages on Humans. Or no, I’m not gonna answer any questions about pants, but thank you Anna.

Chris T O:Okay. Cool. Well that’s the formal agenda, which means we’ve done this very quickly so we can move into the Q&A section. But let’s also, if anyone has anything they want to share from their teams, their barrios, any exciting news, any giant piles of friends they’ve convinced to come or anything like that, feel free to raise your hands. And as always, questions, either raise your hand or put them in the chat. Aaron, I believe you can help out given we have a couple of questions about ticket numbers.

Aaron R:So ticket numbers, the absolute ticket numbers at the moment, we’re not publishing just because they’re changing and evolving so quickly. And as with anything in life, it gets more exciting the fuller we get rather than the emptier we are. but we’ve had a lot of sales at the moment. And the number that’s come up on the screen, I cannot confirm or deny, but yeah, you’re pretty much spot on. (laughs) But it is fits and bursts, so I expect it will change significantly the moment that we make the public announcements on all channels. I think it is worth noting, just as a point, everyone on this call that would have been registered on Humans, you would have received a voucher code. In telling other people that you’ve got voucher codes, two things happen. One, the ticket email address gets flooded with “How do I get a voucher code? I tried to register, the website didn’t work. My dog ate my computer cable and I couldn’t register in time,” et cetera. Which then creates an overhead here but it also, much more importantly, impacts revenue. So wherever we’re making large scale public announcements, we try not to mention the codes that have been and gone for everybody who has registered before the 14th.

Chris T O:All right. Any questions other than that?

Daniel T:I think Azzurro has his hand up.

Chris T O:Azzurro, yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

Azzurro B:yeah. I heard that the... I was in a previous event 17/18. I know... I’ve heard that the free camping water project is still running and coming. Do you have any information about that? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Chris T O:Yes. Frank?

Frank F:Yeah, I think I heard some rumors so we’re trying to reach out to them. The barrier support crew is trying to reach out to them. they haven’t been responsive yet but supposedly they’ll be coming, maybe? (laughs) Yeah, that’s all I know.

Chris T O:All right. CLM asking about the access to the containers. we are, so this is me just taking Daniel’s update where it was mentioned. we are close. What did you say, Daniel? There is, we’re trying to get an inventory together.

Daniel T:We’re waiting for the inventory, and there’s one, like, small point that we’re discussing. Like, one point around something to do with liability, and that’s it. So it’s very, very close. That is the view of Pepe, who’s been handling those negotiations and doing it really well.

Chris T O:Yes. So yeah, I think the answer to the question of do we have a plan if they are not handed over for build, I think we are very strongly hoping that they are available and much sooner than that.

Daniel T:Counting rather than very strongly hoping. (laughs)

Chris T O:(laughs) Yes, yes. Counting. We’re counting on Pepe’s ability to get that sorted soonish. Arizona?

arizonadeux (Jonathan):Hey, that’s me. Jonathan. I forgot to change my name. Anyhow, I thought I’d ask this question here in case it’s relevant for other people organizing shifts. You explicitly mentioned, for example, like, if people in consent wanted to arrange some special shifts. One of the issues that actually came up on the Discord just like an hour ago or so was that we want to make sure we need to actually select specific people for these shifts. So, I wanted to know if it would be possible to use this normal shift plan but have to, or be able to only approve certain people for the shift, so it’s not like a free sign-up, like an open sign-up thing. But to still use that infrastructure so I don’t need a separate shift plan.

Frank F:Yeah. That functionality I think exists already. You can set up if your shift is approval or anybody can just sign up. And then, if it’s approval, you get to reject or approve.

arizonadeux (Jonathan):Okay, okay. That’s good to know, and I probably have some other questions but that can wait for a later time.

Daniel T:I want to share something about these meetings. Like, right now, the agenda is still driven by mostly me scrambling to put together an agenda on the day because I’m like, “Oh, shit. We need an agenda because we have a meeting.” I’d love for this to be more driven by other people. If somebody wants to take on the role of being the person who thinks, “Oh, shit. I need an agenda on Thursday morning,” you can do that. Or, if you just want to tell me things you want to share on these calls at any point during the week, I can make sure there’s an agenda item for you since I seem to be the one who puts that list together at the moment. So just open invitation if you have a thing that you think needs to be on the agenda for these community calls, please step up and bring it on.

Chris T O:Yeah, absolutely. And we had a question from Sakolo Sakolo. I don’t know if you want to give any more detail to what you asked, but if we can discuss an outreach and attending effort to AfrikaBurn. I mean, if you want to be responsible for that, that sounds amazing. I think you will have the support of everyone here if you want to do that.

Sakolo S:Yeah, hello. That’s me. How you doing? yeah, so I think it’d be great just in general to think about ways to engage people beyond who we can reach with emails and website and all that, and at other festivals. And I’m gonna be going to AfrikaBurn. I found this guy who runs a camp kind of pro bono. He used to run the airports at Black Rock City and Africa Burn, and we can get tickets easily. All logistics can be sorted out smoothly, and it’d be cool if a couple people came and spoke positively and enthusiastically about Elsewhere. That’s how you’re gonna draw in different people and get a buzz going. I think it’s good to cover all bases but I’m happy to help lead up this, at least for Africa Burn. But we should be doing this for Waking Life and all the other sort of festivals where people that we want to draw in are gonna be at. So, it’d be good to have like a part of the Discord or something where people can coordinate on this, like, “Hey, I’m gonna go to this festival. Who wants to join me?” If you have two or three or four people, it could be really effective, I think, and not a serious deviation of effort or anything. So, if anyone wants to get in touch with me, I’m Octoprop on Discord. I’ll put it somewhere if you tell me where I should put it, and then people can contact me directly to see how to get a ticket, how to get on the camp and everything.

Chris T O:Okay. How about we create an ambassadors channel on the Discord, and you can post the message in it and we’ll have a start from that.

Sakolo S:Great. Okay, thank you.

Chris T O:I think we can do that within the next five minutes.

Sakolo S:Yeah. Just for Africa Burn, if you wanna go, it starts like the end of April, but you really should arrive by the 20th, 23rd. So, it makes sense to get moving on it now for each person to actually make it there. All right, thanks.

Chris T O:Sounds amazing. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. I love that suggestion and it’s a really good idea. And yeah, we could all be doing better jobs at spreading the word when we’re in other burns, which I think a lot of us are doing. anyone else? CLM, are we gonna have a Facebook page? I don’t know if anyone on comms is here who knows anything about the plan for that. Doesn’t sound like it. I would suggest go on the Comms channel on Discord and ask that question. All right. Anyone else who have anything they want to ask about, share or anything of that nature? All right. Looks like we’re pretty much done. That was a very efficient meeting. Thank you everyone for showing up. Thank you especially to people like Frank and Aaron, giving your updates after stepping up and doing the things that you’re doing. Absolutely amazing. And with that, I guess I will say thank you all for coming and we’ll see you next week when the communications go out about tickets. Remember to tell all your friends.

Daniel T:Yeah. Remember, tell everybody we don’t have a massive mailing list. It’s gonna be word of mouth. Tell everyone. Wear placards, whatever, you know. (laughs) Thanks.

Chris T O:All right. Good night, everyone.