Placement is eliminating the Village system that allows multiple camps to be placed as a single unit. It is being replaced by the HUBS system, which is almost the same thing.
For quite a long time now, camps could group together in a system called villages. Camps within a single village could share (or not share) resources such as generators, water, etc., or not, as they saw fit. Some examples of diverse villages include:
- AEZ, the Alternative Energy Zone. Camps only had to commit to not using generators of any type to join AEZ.
- The Village of PolyParadise. They provide all the common services that you would expect of a camp.
- BAAAHS station, mostly organized around that big sheep art car
- Anahasana Village, a pretty coherent group of 7 camps with a single events program.
- Kidsville, a village of literally dozens of tiny camps, some with only a couple of people, but all with at least one kid
There are more villages than you think. Some of them look like a single camp when you walk by, some of them look like a bunch of individual camps doing their own thing, and some of them frankly just look like a bunch of open camping stuffed with individual camping groups that don’t appear to be offering much in the way of a public amenity.
In 2022, Placement launched a new program called HUBs which sounded an awful lot like villages. The HUBs program, honestly, was a lot like villages, but with a couple of tiny differences:
- Each camp in a HUB is given individual placement by the org, although the HUB itself is asked to submit their desired layout and in my experience they always get what they ask for, possibly after some negotiation as the city map is drawn up
- Whereas Villages used to receive the whole allocation of Stewards (DGS) tickets at the village level, which they could redistribute as they saw fit, with HUBs every camp gets its own Stewards tickets.
Although this may come as a surprise to some people, in the end it’s really more of a minor classification difference. Villages that feel like they are really doing one thing with a single identity might want to just register for 2024 as theme camps, and heck, nobody said you can’t include “village” in your name. Nobody will notice the difference! Other villages that cooperate differently where the camps really have their own identities can simply register as HUBS and find that the practical differences are negligible.
