COMMUNITY
CONNECTION
EXPRESSION
Welcome to Melburners Inc!
Victoria has a strong and thriving burner community. We welcome all people with open arms and encourage participation and contribution to activities and projects within our community and beyond.
Who We Are
Melburners Inc is a volunteer run association supporting the Victorian burner community. Melburners is part of the Burning Man Regional Network and works alongside other Burning Man organisations and events in line with the Burning Man 10 Principles.
Melburners was formally established as an Incorporated Association in 2015 to run the annual Decompression fundraising event. This event was held in November following Burning Seed, Australia’s oldest and largest regional burn. The Melbourne Decompression event is the third biggest Decompression globally – after San Francisco and London – averaging 1,000 attendees at the event.
Proceeds from this prominent event are returned back to the community via an annual grants program supporting the projects and activities of theme camps, artists and creatives.
Melburners’ Purpose
Our purpose is to:
- organise, develop, and promote an annual arts, music, and cultural event which is inclusive, accepting, and safe and adheres to the 10 principles of the Burning Man Project, as well as smaller related events promoting self expression, identity and understanding
- foster and create new art projects in Victoria
- engage and include the Burner community in Melburners Inc
- develop and support workshops and training activities
- support and develop community based fundraising events to further the Association’s objectives
- train volunteers to facilitate the Association’s objects
- conduct the Association’s activities in an environmentally sustainable manner.
Melburners’ Vision
Melburners facilitates the growth and empowerment of a vibrant, expressive and artistic burner community in Victoria.
Events
Melburners is involved in 2 key activities: Raising and distributing funds for Victorian Burner projects, and hosting and helping Burner related events.
Having a dedicated and central space to promote these events gives an extra platform to our community so you don’t have to go hunting through your social media like a tall, hairless bloodhound itching for a party.
Make sure you come back and check in regularly to see what your neighbourhood Burners are up to! You can also sign up to our mailing list for deeper insights into Melburners, or head over here to become a member!
Communication
Discord
We have decided to use Discord to communicate with our community!
Discord is a free app that allows communities to create their own online space to talk and hang, allowing us to organise and streamline the ways in which we talk with our members, artists, volunteers, and community and offers a more direct way to access the Melburners committee.
To access discord you will need to download it to your desktop or phone from https://discord.com/download, then hit the link below to get talking!
Constitution
The Melburners’ Constitution is the document of our guiding principles and organisational goals. Transparency is one of our key principles being a community and volunteer run organisation and so we have made the Constitution available to anyone interested in reading it.
The 10 Principles of Burning Man
Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey wrote the Ten Principles in 2004 as guidelines for the newly-formed Regional Network. They were crafted not as a dictate of how people should be and act, but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed since the event’s inception.
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
Consent – widely adopted by the Burner community as the 11th principle
Respect the autonomy of the individual: every person has the right to make decisions about their own body, property, and personal space. Consent must be mutual, definite, and given consciously, and persons are free to change their mind at any time. Get consent first in all cases involving touch, photography, gifting, or food. Do not ever assume that you have consent based upon what a person is wearing or how they are acting. Remember that consent for one act does not imply consent for all acts, and consent given once does not mean that you have consent every time. No always means no.