Invitation To Participate

The Flat Smiley Project is collaborative new media project and community building activity for Burning Man 2009 using Web 2.0 and social media tools. The project invites participants to send photos and videos of Flat Smiley's adventures in Black Rock City and regional burner events. It's like a postcard from the playa for many burners who are not able to attend the event this year due to the nation's prevailing economic downturn.

To participate in the Flat Smiley project each participant is asked to download the Flat Smiley PDF file and then color and decorate it in an effort personalize it with their own creative flair. Then, very much like the "traveling gnome" prank in the movie Amelie, participants will take Flat Smiley to the playa and photograph and/or videotape him at various camps, art installations and famous city landmarks. Finally, participants will upload the files to the Flat Smiley Flickr pool, Facebook Fan Page or YouTube playlist. Whatever method you use, be sure to tag them with the following tags: "flatsmiley" and/or "bm2k9" (or hash tags "#flatsmiley" and/or "#bm2k9" if you're using Twitter) to help us locate them in a search.

DISCLAIMER: While we hope that folks participating in this project will have a wonderful time we just want to clarify we are independent from Black Rock City LLC and the Original Flat Stanley Project creators who do not endorse this project. The Flat Smiley Project is simply a non-commercial interactive experiment in social media to facilitate connections with burners attending Burning Man in 2009 to those who will be unable to go.