Caveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs)

“If….the conditions that make our volunteering what it is, that helped create do-ocracy, in our organization culture are based on do-ocratic volunteers at every level, then leadership in burning Man culture does not involve being a manager or a visionary but instead being a person who helps encourage, and distribute relevance, agency, competence, relatedness, and engagement. That's what our leaders do. They create the conditions in which our volunteers and teammates can have that experience of intrinsic motivation, developing social capital, using ther skills to the fullest, having a meaningful place in our community, where they do work that is meaningful to them and are able and encouraged to express their own voice and self.”
― Caveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs), The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us about Building Better Communities

“The way to increase diversity at Burning Man is not to sell Burning Man, which actually violates a number of our principles—it commodifies Burning Man—but to build relationships. It is to create communities. It is to do what we do so as to let people decide for themselves if they want to do it with us. Creating communities with marginalized people, where we live, where they live, and doing the work we can do without expectation of reward or compensation.
At a practical level, this is in stark contrast to the way many of the efforts around diversity are currently conducted, which are attempts not to create community but to get the language in which we describe diversity issues right. The focus is on precision of language, not meaningful action. This may or may not be helpful in other contexts, such as academia, but it is fundamentally incompatible with Burning Man culture, wherein action is the fundamental unit of meaning…. Making correct language the determinant of success likewise relieves the individual of both the opportunity and the burden of participating in a way that is meaningful to them.”
― Caveat Magister (Benjamin Wachs)