The mornings at ELS appear to be conference style auditorium speaker slots. The event opened with the Burning Man CEO, Marian Goodell, giving a talk. I found it pretty alienating as the language was very much reinforcing their views that real burning happened at Burning Man and the regionals were like burning for kids who haven't graduated to the real thing yet. One line was "and there are some of you here that have never even been to Black Rock City - you should be so proud carrying on the culture without having experienced it". I've got so little interest in Burning Man - it seems so corporate and culty. And the American Burner scene seems so different to the Euroburner crowd. I honestly think they need to be looking to the regionals for culture & ideas. The fundamental problem is they see us as children rather than siblings. This trend carried on during the deep dive sessions where Burning Man type humans seemed to be saying that the reason that problem x existed at a regional is that as a younger event, they've not had time to implement Burning Man infrastructure / processes - but had an obliviousness that we actually want to do things our own way and sometimes explicitly differently. Our group was focused on "How to establish rules for acceptable behaviour (while allowing people to be free and self express, etc)". We got into interesting discussions about Implicit rules vs Explicit rules: Culture vs Values vs Guidelines vs Rules and how they interact.