Convention Reporter

Thanks to a malfunctioning computer I was unable to blog properly from the final two days of Eastercon. Here’s a belated report on those days.

Sunday was filled mainly with panic as I needed working hardware and good Internet access for the various program items I was reporting live from. I did take time out, however, to attend a panel on European SF. This was the second of two such panels. I wrote about them on the translation awards web site.

I reluctantly skipped Mike Carey’s GoH interview (conducted by Paul Cornell) to mess with computers, during which time I did at least confirm that the netbook would work fine with an external screen. That wasn’t much consolation on the day though. Thankfully the hotel had a good supply of power points and I was able to cover the BSFA Awards live using my laptop. You can replay that coverage here. The award winners are listed here.

Thankfully the award ceremony did not take too long, and I was able to get to the Virtual Conventions panel in good time. I wasn’t able to get the laptop connected in that room, but much to my delight I managed to run the Cover It Live session on my iPhone using the public mobile phone network. You can replay that here, and listen to Jim Mowatt’s audio recording of the panel here. I was particularly pleased to see a number of people attending the panel in Second Life, where they were able to watch the coverage on a virtual “big screen”. Here are a bunch of avatars doing just that:

Many thanks to Bill, Spike and Glenn for helping this to happen.

Thanks are also due to Mitch Benn whose live concert drew most of the Eastercon audience off the hotel Internet for the evening and allowed me to get the laptop up and running in good time for the live webcast of the Hugo Nominees announcement. I even had time to record a short interview for Star Ship Sofa, which you can listen to here.

The announcement event was, I think, a great success. The room was packed by the end of the panel, though it did take a while for people to file in after the concert finished. We had 140 people online during the coverage, including many nominees, and a further 61 people have watched the replay. Although it won’t always make sense to have this announcement at Easter, and the next three are liable to take place in the US in meat space, I’m very much hoping that this becomes a regular feature of the fannish year. Many thanks to Vincent Docherty and his team for making it happen.

Star Ship Sofa did a broadcast with a bunch of guests watching the nominee announcements as they went live. You can listen to that here. I got a real buzz out of listening to them commenting on my coverage.

Monday saw my final panel of the weekend: I got to moderate a panel that included Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod. This was about the use of dialect in literature, and the consequences for the accessibility of books. None of the panel really wanted to talk about accessibility, and we spent a lot of the time talking about writing in Scots. With Iain and Ken on board, that was a lot of fun.

I did also attend a panel that Paul Cornell did on religion in science fiction. That was very interesting, and I was lucky enough to have a god speak to me through the Internet during the panel. Fluff Cthulhu tweeted me from Tokyo (he, Feòrag and Charlie Stross are guests at Hal-con this weekend).

There was a dead dog party, but I flaked and got some sleep instead.

Overall I thought it was an excellent convention. I’m sure a few things did go wrong, but I didn’t notice anything serious. The thing that concerned me most was the venue. In many ways it is ideal for an Eastercon. It is a nice space, and very easy to get to both from the M4 and central London. The Heathrow location is ideal for bringing in members from the continent and from across the Atlantic. However, with almost 1400 people in attendance it was starting to get quite crowded. I understand that the same venue will be used in 2012, when George R.R. Martin is due to attend. That could cause major crowd control issues.

Also the hotel food is pretty bad. I only ate in the restaurant once — for breakfast with Anne Murphy on Tuesday morning — and that was bearable. The “buffet” food laid on for con attendees, however, was awful, and by Monday I took to eating in the next-door McDonalds instead because the food was so much better.

The good news is that there are reasonable restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, you just can’t see them from the front door. There’s also a Starbucks in the nearby Sheraton. So it is possible to eat tolerably well.

Crowding, on the other hand, is hard to fix. The con staff did an excellent job of putting up signs encouraging people to do one way flows, not block passages and so on. No amount of signage, however, can fix narrow corridors, and looking at the hotel web site I think the largest room only holds 700 people. A London Eastercon ought to be able to attract 2,000 attendees, and the Radisson is too small for that.

Here are some Eastercon reports from around the blogosphere:

• Danie Ware thinks that fandom has gone digital
• Christian Sauvé reports en Français
• Jim Mowatt has a recording of the Virtual Conventions panel…
• … and a bunch more audio coverage
• Paul McAuley had a great time
• As did Spinks, for whom it was a first convention
• Aliette de Bodard also enjoyed herself
• Al Reynolds was delighted at how busy it was
• Mark Charan Newton met lots of people
• MD Lachlan did martial arts
• Nukapai has a lot of panel reports
• Billy has an extensive write-up of the whisky tasting
• There are some excellent steampunk costume photos here
• WordPunk Radio has more audio coverage

And that only scratches the surface of a very well-blogged and tweeted convention.

According to a post on their Facebook page, Norwescon is on the verge of hitting their membership cap and expects to sell out of memberships later this afternoon. No further memberships will be sold thereafter, including single-day memberships on Sunday.

Goodness only knows why convention committees have programming at 9:00am, especially if they know that most people will be in the bar until very late. The panel item in question was on Welsh language science fiction, which I will admit is a minority interest, but given that Al Reynolds, Liz Williams and Fran Dowd are all Guests of Honour here, it was a very apposite subject. Most Welsh people who are involved in SF, of course, do not speak the language. Many of us grew up in a time when speaking it was still officially frowned upon. But Welsh science fiction does exist and I get a little annoyed with people saying that it all started with the new Doctor Who.

But I am getting head of myself. I have last night to report upon. First up I attended a panel on podcasting. That went very well, and several of us used the hashtag #easterpod on Twitter to report on the panel and carry on a backchannel conversation. If you search Twitter for that hashtag you should get a good sense of the panel.

The panel on alternate sexualities, where I substituted for Farah Mendlesohn, also went well, though it suffered a bit from the classic BritFan disease of wanting to focus on the negative rather than find anything positive to say. We got a lot of useful contributions from the audience.

The big news of the evening, however, was the announcement of the chosen site for the UK in 2014 Worldcon bid. It will, as widely expected, be London, and the reaction in the blogosphere has been very positive thus far. The bid will be chaired by Steve Cooper and Mike Scott. There web site is here. And the venue will be the Excel Centre, which I have included a map reference to below. The Excel is already home to a 35,000 person annual comics convention, so it has plenty of space. It would be great to fill it. I’m hoping to bag an interview with Mike and/or Steve later in the weekend for podcasting on Star Ship Sofa.

Close

Just minutes ago, the bid to bring the 2014 Worldcon to the UK officially announced that they are London in 2014. An early photo was posted of the official announcement ceremony at Eastercon. More news on this as it develops.

The first day of Eastercon is a long way from over yet, but already it has been very busy. Paul Cornell did a reprise of his panel on Kate Bush as a fantasy author, first aired at Worldcon in Montreal, and I was delighted to catch it this time. I also attended a panel on the state of European SF, which had panelists from Sweden. Luxembourg, Italy and Russia. The 2011 Eurocon will be in Stockholm, which is a lovely city. A Eurocon is a great introduction to European fandom for British and American fans. Because the attendees are from all over Europe, most of the programming is in English, that being the one language everyone has in common.

I’ve already spent a pile of money in the dealers’ room, but I’m disappointed at the lack of American books there. There’s no sign of books like The Windup Girl, or Boneshaker, or even the new Connie Willis novel, Blackout. Odd.

Next up for me is attending a panel on podcasting that is due up in about 20 minutes, so I had better stop blogging soon and get off there. The con hotel is very spread out and function rooms are hidden away down long corridors.

The site for the 2014 UK Worldcon bid will be announced tonight between 9:00pm and 9:30pm local time. I’ll be on a panel, but doubtless many people will tweet the news.

If all goes according to plan, we should be hosting four live events from this year’s Eastercon.

On Saturday there is a panel on SF&F and Social Media. The panelists are planning to run this as a live event and take questions off Twitter as well as from the audience. UStream coverage is also planned. Hopefully we’ll be able to embed that in our coverage.

On Sunday we get the ball rolling with live coverage of the British Science Fiction Association Awards.

Immediately following that our reporter, Cheryl Morgan, has to hot-foot it to the panel on virtual conventions which will also be live online. Cheryl is moderating that one, and will be taking your questions through our live coverage.

And finally, the big event of the weekend: the 2010 Hugo Award Nominees Announcement. Hugo Administrator, Vincent Docherty will announce the nominees in a live panel. The information will go out on the Aussiecon 4 Twitter feed, and Cheryl will host a live online event covering the announcement. We expect a few of the nominees will drop by to celebrate. Make sure you are with us for this one.

Video of the presentations and Q&A sessions for seated and future Worldcons and SMOFCons held at this year’s SMOFCon are now available for download from YouTube.

Anticipation (2009 Worldcon) report and Pass-Along Funds presentation

Aussiecon 4 (2010 Worldcon)

Renovation (2011 Worldcon)

Reconstruction (2010 NASFiC)

2012 Worldcon Bids (Chicago)

2013 Worldcon Bids (Texas)

2014 Worldcon Bids (UK)

There were no bid presentations for 2015 or 2016 Worldcon Bids

2017 Worldcon Bids (New York, Japan)

2010 SMOFCon Bid Presentation and Site Selection (San Jose)

2011 SMOFCon Bids (Hawaii, Amsterdam)

2012 SMOFCon Bids (Pennsylvania)

This interesting post by a newcomer to SMOFcon compares setting deadlines in con management to running a software project.

This was the panel that I most wanted to attend at SMOFcon. Indeed, I wanted to attend it so much that I turned down the opportunity to be on the Social Media panel that, bizarrely, was scheduled against it. Here’s a brief summary for those of you who were not following my tweets.

The panel started quite badly with the panel essentially moaning about how convention members always want more and more out of a con and it is harder and harder to keep them happy. Well duh! What did you expect? That people would ask for less next year? But also it isn’t entirely true. There are some things that convention members used to regard as essential but are now going away. Progress reports was the example that immediately occurred to me. Kevin came up with film programs.

Fortunately the panel quickly realized that they knew a lot less than the audience about the topic, and Bobbi Armbruster proceeded to moderate the event as a mass workshop. Most of the discussion then focused on that old debate of if/how conventions need to market themselves. There were the usual stale conversations about how young people today are X, Y and Z. Mark Olson made a magnificent comment about how you know you are getting old when you find yourself saying, “young people today are not the same as they were in my day.” They are, of course. The characteristic of young people is that they think the old fogies have it all wrong and everything must change. The characteristic of old people is that they think young folks will destroy all that they hold dear. This pattern repeats endlessly.

As Mark rightly said, the big change between then and now is that science fiction has been accepted by mainstream popular culture. As a result, there are now many large and successful commercial events devoted to science fiction, and many more people with a passing interest in it (but not necessarily a passion for it). The challenge for us is to adapt to that situation.

Marketing is something that fans are not good at. I heard a few people say that they had tried to market their convention and it had not worked so they assumed it was a waste of time. I suspect they were just doing it wrong. Alternatively they may have expected a much higher return than is reasonable. If you attend a 20,000 person commercial convention and sell 20 memberships that might be a very good conversion rate. It may be a poor return on the investment for you, but if you have reached 20 people, many of whom who will become new fans and attend conventions for the rest of their lives, that’s a good thing to have done.

One of the most important things about marketing is to identify your target market and appeal to it. I’m indebted to Michael from Arizona who made the very salient point that much of what people used to go to conventions for — meeting and talking to fellow fans, buying special-interest merchandise — can now be done much more effectively online. What conventions need to do is identify things that can’t be done online and provide them.

An example that Michael came up with is posing space for cosplay people (from both anime and steampunk fandom). What those folks want (and see any of my Finncon reports for examples) are safe spaces where they can see and be seen. They don’t necessarily want to enter a masquerade. Many of them are teenage girls who are very shy and non-competitive, but they will be very grateful for somewhere they can go to be in costume. I note that this is a very low maintenance activity.

A point I found it necessary to make is that conventions do not scale linearly. The percentage of members who will be willing to help run a 200 member convention is much higher than the percentage of members who will be willing to help run a 2000 member convention. But equally those 200 members are much higher maintenance than the additional 1800 who attend the bigger event. By the time you get to a 20,000 member convention most of the members want very little from the event. The assumption that a 10,000 person Worldcon would be twice as hard to run, and need twice as many volunteers, as a 5,000 person event is quite wrong.

Of course if you insist on sticking to a philosophy of only wanting your convention attended by people who show the level of commitment that SMOFcon attendees show then you certainly don’t want 2,000 members, let alone 20,000, but that’s slightly different discussion.

At the end of the panel I managed to get a plug in for online conventions such as Flycon (and thanks to Ruth Sachter for mentioning Bittercon). Those sort of things may well be more the future of conventions for many people. We didn’t have any time to discuss them (and it looked like none of the panel even knew such things existed), but I did at least get in a plea for conventions to be less defensive about people trying to report from their events. Positive reports (such as the mass of happy blogging we got from World Fantasy last month) are really good marketing material.

I should add thanks here to Karen Meschke, the chair of SMOFcon 27, who was very supportive of what Kevin and I were doing in covering her event.