Communal Effort

This is a project of BWB/SF. This repo renders from the Github repo via Github Pages to the public website at communaleffort.org.

Project Purpose

Communal Effort is building a practical map of Burners Without Borders chapters and local collaboration opportunities. The goal is to make it easier for chapters to find relevant community partners by region and by type of work.

What Burners Without Borders Is

Burners Without Borders is a decentralized civic-action network connected to the Burning Man ecosystem. It supports volunteer-led projects, chapters, working groups, and community efforts around disaster response, resilience, mutual aid, public-space stewardship, education, sustainability, and local civic needs.

Why This Exists

Local BWB chapters often work best as connectors and volunteer mobilizers rather than standalone service providers. This project is meant to help chapters identify existing local organizations with trust, infrastructure, expertise, or resources that can strengthen chapter-led or community-led projects.

Collaboration Categories

The research organizes potential collaborators into practical categories: neighborhood leaders, mutual-aid groups, nonprofits, local government, schools and libraries, environmental organizations, arts and culture groups, makerspaces, local businesses, labor groups, direct-service providers, funders, and fiscal sponsors.

Chapter Inventory

The next major step is to compile a complete list of BWB chapters. Each chapter profile should include its location, official links, activity level, known focus areas, recent projects, existing collaborators, and source links.

Local Partner Lists

For each chapter, the project will build a local collaboration-opportunity list organized by category. Each opportunity should include its organization name, website, geographic area, relevant category, reason for fit, source links, and any known relationship to BWB, Burning Man communities, or local civic projects.

Background Reference

The longer background document lives in README.background.md. It explains BWB’s history, structure, chapter activity patterns, collaboration principles, and the framework for building chapter-by-chapter partner inventories.

Website Sections

• Chapters lists chapter research pages using the continent-to-metro/region taxonomy.
• Collaboration Categories defines the partner categories used across chapter inventories.
• Updates will publish collaboration announcements, chapter updates, research notes, and calls for partners.
• Sources describes the source standards for chapter and collaborator research.