Starting point
A deadline that could not move: a festival does not wait.
Many teams, many time zones, many interfaces, and a heavily promoted live event that had to run at exactly the announced minute.
Facts
30+
permanent team members in the core team, from various countries
4
countries with outsourcing partners: Ukraine, Croatia, Poland, USA
1 of 6
official worlds of Burning Man's Virtual Burn 2021
Context
When the Burning Man festival could not take place physically, The Infinite Playa was created: one of the officially recognized virtual worlds of the Burning Man "Virtual Burn", a photorealistic, freely explorable recreation of the playa of Black Rock City, accessible via browser and VR headset.
„The Infinite Playa is a photo-realistic digital simulation of the Playa that puts participants at the center of an interactive and social world of art, music, games, talks and performances. You can customize your 3D avatar and cruise the Playa with friends, interacting with fellow Burners via in-world text and video chat."
My role
I joined the project in a support role and grew into the lead over its course, not through a formal title, but because at certain interfaces nobody else was doing the translation between the teams. In the end, I was independently responsible for the part contributed by Adastra.
Approach
Coordination under pressure: keeping distributed teams across countries and time zones in sync, managing dependencies between internal developers and outsourcing partners, and translating between disciplines, from 3D art to the event side.
The last month was actually reserved for testing, yet stakeholders kept coming with new change requests. We drew a clear line and only implemented small, risk-free adjustments. With a festival on a fixed date, there is no second attempt.
Result
The live events ran successfully.
The platform existed beyond the project's duration and served further clients.
What I take away
In distributed teams, leadership emerges at the interfaces. Whoever closes the gaps between teams takes on responsibility long before it appears on a business card. This project showed me that this is exactly my strength.