Hello friends!



Well, after a long and wet winter, things are starting to heat up (and dry off!) for Fly Ranch and for those of us working on the project. And just who the heck is “us” you ask? Well that’s a timely question, you clever person.



Just over one year ago, we bought Fly Ranch. The acquisition team, composed of Daniel Claussen, Bear Kittay, James Milner, and Katiyana Williams Kittay, worked for two years on the project to get us to the point of securing the property. This team worked closely with the Fly Ranch Workgroup, which is Burning Man’s Director of Communications Megan Miller, Associate Director of Event Operations Erin MacCool or “Playground”, Director of Philanthropic Engagement Theresa Duncan, Founder Will Roger and Zac Cirivello, who was then our Media & Communications Specialist.



As you may have seen over the Winter, we posted on the Burning Man job board for resumés as part of our first phase of building out a management team, and we’re now excited to share with this group the folks that have been brought on to help guide the Fly Ranch project forward. Our Team Matt Sundquist - General Manager

Matt has been a product manager at Change.org and Water.org, worked on the Facebook privacy team, and was a farm and garden apprentice at Green Gulch Zen Center. He studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he was student body president. Matt wrote for SCOTUSblog.com and is a co-founder of Plotly, an open source data science platform with four million users. As the Fly Ranch General Manager, Matt is heading up the strategic planning and managing the team for the project. See his talks, papers, and videos of him trying to jump things here.



Zac Cirivello - Community & Operations Manager

Zac has managed teams in Black Rock City since 2010 and spent the past three years with Burning Man’s Communications team developing the organization’s voice as a nonprofit and driving strategy behind key communications initiatives. He studied Environmental Science and spent a decade producing events and festivals focused on arts, community development, sustainability and food. As the Community & Operations Manager, Zac oversees Fly Ranch’s communications, community engagement, affiliations and site operations.



Burning Man Fellows Program

Since 2015, Burning Man Project has been investing in people and innovation through the Fellows Program. We are proud to announce that Lisa Schile, Scirpus, is our new Land Fellow. Lisa has been tapped to ‘listen to the land’ at Fly Ranch. Spending her days exploring the property, surveying the land, and taking inventories of flora and fauna, Lisa is helping us to understand the ecological systems at play on Fly Ranch. With degrees in Ecology and Botany, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Lisa is uniquely suited to explore and evaluate Fly Ranch property. So What Happens Now? We’ve now entered into a period of information gathering and assessment. Operationally, we’re integrating Fly Ranch into Burning Man Project’s operations in both San Francisco and Northern Nevada, while maintaining the ability to be flexible and efficient. Fly Ranch is an opportunity for us to explore doing things a little differently, and we’re excited to see where this leads us.



Matt, Zac, and the Fly Ranch Workgroup are ramping up by interviewing organizational and cultural stakeholders on the project and property. We’re also starting to assess the conditions of the 3,800 acres of the property. We’ve started laying the groundwork for comprehensive studies of the soil, water, environment, history, ecosystem, and wildlife. Once we have a good sense of what we know, what we don't know, and what opportunities and challenges lie ahead of us, we will share what we’ve found with this group and ask for some feedback.



To give you a sense of what some of this looks like, here’s what we’re up to this week: Right now we are cataloging stuff on the property. Most of this is, generally speaking, trash. We have identified over 60 items that will need to be either removed, recycled, or perhaps turned into art. We’re surveying the best web tools for us to implement for community conversations and project management. We’re compiling all of this information into a detailed overview of the current state of the property, project, and our anticipated next steps. In the coming months, we’ll share our report so community members can begin to give input and volunteer in ways that will help shape whatever this experiment becomes. Until next time, we’re happy to be here. And we’re glad you’re here too.