In this newsletter:
- Announcement from Culture Committee and the Name Change Working Group
- Report from Technology Committee regarding voting process
- Upcoming Logo contest in the new year
Adieu, Burn in the Forest!
You may have heard that BitF 2024 was the last Burn in the Forest. After more than 20 years, it is time to give our event a bit of a refresh in the form of a new name. As a community, we voted that it is time to move away from “Burn in the Forest,” to something less… ummmm… forest fire-y. Although the name is beloved and has a strong, storied past, it has proven to be a hurdle in the search for suitable venues, event insurance, and fostering positive community relations. This marks the culmination of two years of deep consideration and thought…
The community was encouraged to submit name ideas, then a working group was created to manage the project. The BitF Name Change Working Group (NCWG) met in October and went through several processes, and workshopped a short list of names from the over 300 submitted by the community to come up with 7 names for the community to vote on. Voting was open to GVIAS members in mid-November, and the winning name was announced on Christmas Day, as follows:
Announcement from Culture Committee and the Name Change Working Group
Dear community,
We appreciate your patience while we were completing the final steps prior to announcing the winner of the Burn in the Forest renaming project vote.
Drum roll, please!
We are thrilled to introduce our fabulous new event name: What If
The name What If feels inspiring and perfectly aligned with the creative and imaginative spirit of our Burner community.
What If opens up endless possibilities for personal expression, dynamic and ever-evolving collaboration, and invites us to dream, create, and connect in new ways.
What If allows us to weave in a fresh theme each year, sparking new inspiration for participants to reimagine theme camps, art projects, and contributions to the community.
Once again, huge thanks to those who contributed to the project over the last several years, and to all who participated in the lively online and in-person discussions. It was a joy to see our community come together with such enthusiasm and care for shaping its future.
We look forward to witnessing the community’s creativity unfolding in vibrant and unexpected ways under our new name: What If
Website has been updated at: whatif.now
Happiest holidays and warmest wishes for 2025,
GVIAS Culture Committee (Laura Jay, Peter Bond, Tara Burkhardt at [email protected]) &
Name Change Working Group (squishelle, Laura Fauman, Sigrun Murr, Mike Funergy, Will Is-Burning, Lauren Ham, Nadine Wu, Brent Johnson, Juicy, Luna, and Dustin Quasar)
Report from Technology Committee regarding voting process
Ranked-choice voting is about determining which candidate has majority support. If no candidate gets a majority outright, the lowest vote getter is eliminated. Those who voted for the eliminated candidate have their votes redistributed to their next highest ranked choice in the following round. This happened five times in this election.
For single-winner elections, it’s all about getting to majority support. That means 50% of the vote plus one. Out of a total of 1,445 GVIAS members who were sent the email to vote, there were 459 voters in this election, so the number of votes needed to win a majority was 230.
On the linked page below, you can read more details about the voting for this election, and see a visualization of the 5 rounds needed, where What If maintained a lead and won this election.
https://app.rankedvote.co/rv/uv90jct94ukh19s157/results
We’ve had some questions with regards to the process taken to ensure the integrity of the election:
- How was voting limited to membership?
- Was there a way to gamify the system?
- How were biases eliminated in the process?
1. How was voting limited to membership?
- We limited voting to GVIAS members who had board approved accounts on our gvias.org backend.
- Tech went through and eliminated any temporary user accounts and cleaned up the member role to only include those who were known approved GVIAS members.
- We generated unique codes that tied to the email of the given GVIAS member on our member role.
- Each code only granted you 1 ballot.
2. Was there a way to gamify the system?
- We are unaware of anyone who could gamify the system.
- Each code only granted you 1 ballot.
- You could not recast your vote.
- There was no universal code that allowed you to cast a ballot.
- Each vote is auditable to the code and tied to the GVIAS member it was generated for.
3. How were biases eliminated in the process
- We turned on a randomize feature that randomized the ordering of the choices for every registered vote.
If you have any further questions, you may contact [email protected].
Arthur & squishelle
GVIAS Technology Committee
[email protected]
Upcoming Logo contest in the new year
Now that we have a new name… we need a new logo!
We want to create a new logo for the new name that captures the vibe of the community. As such, we are going to leave a bit of time for this new name to permeate our Burner-brains and then hold a logo contest early in the new year. Keep your eyes peeled and prime your creative juices!
We also want to make sure that lack of technical design expertise is not an impediment. If you have a great idea, we want to see it! If it gets chosen, we will provide design services to make it a usable logo across all marketing and branding applications.
SAM! Shoichet
GVIAS Board President
Events and Culture Committee Liaison
[email protected]