Humans
Free & open source · built by burners, for burns
What is Humans? Your whole burn, in one place.
Humans is the membership platform that runs Nobodies Collective, the Spanish nonprofit behind the Elsewhere burn. It manages the full lifecycle of a burn organization — from a volunteer's first signup through teams, shifts, tickets, governance, and money — with GDPR built in and an audit trail the Board can actually read.
People
Everything starts with a person signing themselves up. From there, the system runs the paperwork so nobody else has to.
Sign in with Google or a one-time email link, fill in a profile, sign the required documents, and you are in the Volunteers team. Admission takes a name and the required consents; nobody has to notice you first.
The legal documents live in the legal team's GitHub repository and sync in on their own. Every signature is a permanent, tamper-proof record against the exact Spanish text, which is the binding version. Members see what they still owe and get a reminder before a deadline lapses.
GDPR is built in, not bolted on. A member can download everything the system holds on them, gathered from every section that stores personal data, or ask to be forgotten: deletion runs after a 30-day grace period they can cancel.
- Self-service signupGoogle sign-in or a magic link, a profile, consents, and automatic admission to the volunteer pool.
- Consent you can proveDocuments synced from GitHub, append-only signature records, reminders before deadlines.
- GDPR as a featureOne-click data export and a real right-to-deletion path with a grace period.
- Profiles with privacy tiersMembers choose who sees each contact field.
- Automatic provisioningTeam memberships and Google Workspace access follow a person on their own.
Organize
Departments and their sub-teams each get a page, join requests, role definitions, and linked Google Shared Drives and Groups. Join a team and the access arrives; leave and it goes, with drift detected and reconciled.
Shifts run on rotas for build, event and strike, with single or range signups, voluntelling by coordinators, skills and working-style preferences, and a coordinator dashboard that shows coverage and urgency per day.
Visible to everyone, not locked in a coordinator's head.
- TeamsOwn pages, membership, roles, and Workspace groups and drives per team.
- ShiftsRotas, signups, priorities, and live coverage numbers, not guesswork.
- Community calendarOne-off and recurring team events, plus a personal calendar feed of your own commitments.
- Working groupsThe Board's register of working groups, their coordinators, deliverables and dates.
- Cantina rosterWho is on site each day and what they can and cannot eat, for the kitchen.
Camps & the site
Theme camps (barrios) register each year with their leads, images and placement details. Camp leads then draw their footprint on an interactive map of the site, inside a placement window the city planning team controls, and every polygon edit is kept in history.
Shipping containers have their own register and photos, and get placed on the same map each year. Rides to and from the burn get a board of their own.
- CampsPer-year registrations, leads, workshop leads, and camp members.
- City planning mapBarrio polygons drawn on a real map of the site, with append-only edit history.
- ContainersYear-over-year container register, placed on the map per year.
- Event guideEvents submitted, moderated, browsed and bookmarked into a personal schedule.
- RideshareDrivers post offers, riders post requests, and a map board helps them find each other.
Built by the people who build the city.
Money
A store where camps and departments order from the org's catalog, pay by card through Stripe or by bank transfer, and receive one consolidated invoice per camp order. Members file expense reports with receipts; approved reports are booked into the accounting system automatically.
Budgets are planned per fiscal year, and actual spend is read from a local mirror of the association's Holded books, so no page waits on the accounting API. The treasurer generates SEPA payout files for what members are owed.
The Board sees where the money is without asking anyone to update a sheet.
- Camp services storePer-year catalog with VAT and deposits, Stripe checkout, consolidated invoicing.
- ExpensesReceipts and supplier invoices attached, Finance approval, booked into Holded.
- Pre-approvalsPools such as creativity grants and travel, pre-authorized per person before they spend.
- BudgetsFiscal-year budgets with groups, categories, line items, and a field-level change log.
- Ledger & payoutsAccounting mirror, creditor balances, and SEPA payout files for the bank.
Govern
Colaborador and Asociado membership tiers are applied for, voted on by the Board, and run on synchronized two-year terms. Governance and admin roles carry real start and end dates.
The Asociados' binding assembly votes run here too: the electorate is frozen the moment a vote opens, the tally stays sealed until it closes, and ranked ballots are counted by instant runoff.
When someone asks "who approved that, and when", the answer is one search away.
- Applications & votesMembership tiers applied for, voted on, recorded.
- Assembly votesFrozen electorate, sealed tally, results stored once.
- Roles with termsGovernance and admin roles with start and end dates, not tribal memory.
- Audit trailEvery privileged or automated action leaves a record the Board can read.
- Drive watchdogFlags permission changes on managed Google Drive folders that the system did not make.
Communicate
Every email goes through one outbox with retries, a pause switch, per-category preferences and unsubscribe links, and admins can see each send. In-app notifications land in an inbox, and marketing audiences are computed from Humans and synced into MailerLite.
Surveys support branching questions in several languages and three anonymity levels, from identified to fully anonymous. An issue tracker routes bug reports and questions to the people who own that part of the app.
The whole member-facing UI ships in seven languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, German, French, Italian, and Dutch, because a Spanish burn is not an English-only crowd.
- Email outboxEvery mail the system sends is queued, retried, and visible to admins.
- NotificationsAn in-app inbox, plus live counts of work waiting for review.
- SurveysBranching, multilingual, with identified, completion-tracked or anonymous answers.
- Help when you need itRole-aware guide pages, a global search, an issue tracker, and an AI helper.
- Seven languagesen · es · ca · de · fr · it · nl, enforced by tests.
At the gate
Ticket orders and attendees sync from Ticket Tailor every few minutes, are matched to members by verified email, and can be transferred between members.
At the door, a gate tablet scans each ticket and the server decides: a red, amber or green card, a photo ID check, and one permanent admission record. Early entry is checked against every source that grants it, so a build crew member is let in on the right day and not before.
The gate crew works from live data, in the desert, on whatever device is charged.
- TicketingVendor sync, auto-matching to members, and ticket transfers.
- Gate admissionServer-decided scans with ID confirmation and an append-only record.
- Early entryOne list combined from shifts, camps and teams, matching who is actually allowed in.
- Grants & codesEntitlements like cheaper tickets or early entry, and discount codes sent in waves.
- Phone scannerRead-only ticket lookup from a phone browser camera.
Over 2,000 real people trust this system, and a volunteer Board relies on it to run a legal Spanish asociación.
Take the parts your burn needs.
Humans is built as independent sections — People, Teams, Shifts, Tickets, Store, Expenses, Governance, and more — each owning its own data and talking to the others through narrow interfaces. That structure is the roadmap: a deployment per burn, configured with the sections your org actually uses. Run People + Shifts + Gate and skip the rest, or add your language. The modularity is real today; per-burn configuration is where the project is headed.
Curious how it's built — and how well? Read the engineering story.
Bring Humans to your burn.
We built this for ourselves and we would love for it to run your burn too. Write to us — we are volunteers, we get it.