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
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)
Posted by Kevin @ 9:14 pm
Pay no attention to the fan behind the curtain.
Posted by Staff @ 12:36 pm
This interesting post by a newcomer to SMOFcon compares setting deadlines in con management to running a software project.
Posted by Staff @ 4:40 pm
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.
Posted by Cheryl @ 7:41 pm
Well, that was a busy day.
It started out with a committee meeting for the San Jose SMOFcon bid over breakfast at 9:00am. After that I had a couple of hours to explore Austin and buy a pile of AA batteries for Kevin (if you really want the gory details as to why, check his LiveJournal). I also spent a lot of money in the hot sauce shop.
Over lunch SFSFC was sponsoring food in the con suite, this being the SMOFcon equivalent of holding a bid party. The one sure fire way to convince SMOFs that you can run a good convention is to feed them well.
John Picacio turned up at lunch time, and I spent an hour or so chatting with him, Traci, Vincent Villafranca and a few others about art show issues, in particular at World Fantasy, before the “what artists want” panel at 3:30. The panel was a bit disjointed but touched on many relevant issues. I’ll try to do a more complete summary of it in a separate post, but the main issue that came out of it for me is that Worldcon needs to attract more Art Directors to the convention. Currently the only specialist Art Director we see regularly is Irene Gallo. Lou Anders comes as well, but he does almost all the jobs at Pyr and is not an art specialist. Art Directors are to artists what editors are to writers, so if the art directors are not there then the artists have little chance of advancing their careers by networking. Hopefully Reno will take this on board.
That panel was followed immediately by the Montreal debrief panel, which unsurprisingly spent a lot of time talking about the difficulties of getting money around the world. The general upshot of it is that opening bank accounts, or even using the bank account of a friendly local fan group, is easy, but sending checks to a foreign country is not, even if those checks are supposedly cut in the currency of the receiving country. If a check isn’t from a local bank in the receiving country you will have trouble.
Kevin and I went out to dinner with Deb Geisler, to a very nice Tex-Mex restaurant called Iron Cactus. That’s two fine meals we have had in Austin. We like this town.
At 8:00pm we had the Fannish Inquisition, and you can replay my live coverage of the event here. We had a total of 21 people online at one point or another. The highlights are as follows:
And finally, the 2010 SMOFcon will be in San Jose, and I have spent the rest of the evening working on the web site and various social media tasks related to the convention. As it is nearly midnight, I’m now going to bed.
Posted by Cheryl @ 1:41 am
One of the traditional elements of SMOFcon is the Friday Night Mixer. The members are divided into teams (more or less) at random and given some task to accomplish. The idea is a) to get to know other people and b) to practice working together to accomplish goals. This year’s exercise was to come up with a complete Worldcon bid (including budget, poster and flier). We were given three possible sites to choose from: The (abandoned) Brompton Road Tube Station, the Moon, and the Grand Palace on Arrakis.
Some of the groups appear to have worked very well. They appointed a bid chair early on, identified tasks and appointed people to do them. The group I was in was nowhere near so well organized. As I know that I have zero charisma when it comes to leadership I sat back and let them get on with having fun. Fortunately we were able to use our imagination instead. So while other groups sweated over budgets we just held our convention in the far future and used time travel to make suitable investments that would give us an unlimited budget. This was not really the point of the exercise. However, the Mixer is supposed to be fun as well as work, and having a group that fails in a fun way can provide as much of a lesson as a group that succeeds.
Something else we fell down on was art. We didn’t have anyone with artistic talent in our group, and I have no art software on this computer, so it was hard to come up with anything good. In contrast some of the other groups had really great fliers and even put up their own web sites.
One of the things I noticed — that we didn’t really talk about because the theme of the con is time management, not marketing — is coherence. Our group in particular came up with a bunch of great ideas, but few of them fitted together. Because no one wanted to shoot down anyone else’s good idea, and we had no effective leadership, everyone’s ideas tended to get included. This does not make for a good marketing campaign. Fortunately, by the clever stratagem of letting everyone else present first, I bought myself enough time to concoct the necessary linkage to get most of it in. Here’s the bid presentation, somewhat reconstructed to be a little more coherent than when I gave it.
London in 3030: Möbius Trip Con – a return to the roots of fandom
We understand that our opposition is Trantor, and it is a fine city, er, planet with many great facilities, but it is lacking in one thing: trees. So we tried to come up with a bid that involved trees, and trees have roots, so we decided that it was time for fandom to return to its roots on planet Earth. I can see some of you shaking your heads in confusion. As we all know, Earth was destroyed sometime in the 25th Century. Fortunately, thanks to the modern technology of the Möbius Gate were are able to use inter-dimensional travel to get back to Earth as it was then. The only fully inhabitable part of the planet is the old London underground system, and we have reserved space in the Brompton Road station and nearby local facilities. The station is on the Piccadilly Line, which is very convenient for the Heathrow spaceport, should any of you be able to figure out how to get there by convention means. Accommodation will be in Kensington Palace. We will hold the Hugo Awards and Masquerade in the Albert Hall. The dealers’ room will be in Harrods, and the art show in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Science and Natural History Museums are also a short walk away. We must warn you, however, that inter-dimensional travel is rather risky if you don’t watch your step, so please remember our convention slogan: “Mind the Gap”.
At some point we also got asked to come up with a signature drink for the convention, and we had something about gargleblasters that I had forgotten, so I extemporized and waffled a bit about finding the last bottle of malt whisky in the universe.
Posted by Cheryl @ 1:02 am
This evening Kevin and I have been honorary Canadians – we went out to dinner with a group from the far north and chatted amiably about the chances of Team San Jose Canada in the coming Olympic hockey tournament. The restaurant was Korean, good, cheap, and close to the hotel, which was useful as it appears to rather cold in Texas (though by no means cold enough to worry Canadians).
We are now back at the convention where there is a reception going on and programming will start very soon.
Posted by Cheryl @ 9:26 pm
I have checked out both the con suite / social area and the function space and I appear to get good wifi signals in both. This bodes well for coverage. I’m going to go ahead and set up a CoverItLive session for the Fannish Inquisition.
Posted by Cheryl @ 7:28 pm
Well, we are here. The hotel is very nice, despite being only a Garden Inn, and the wifi is free. Also the promised snow storm apparently turned out to be like San Francisco snow – melting before it even hit the ground. Houston apparently has proper snow, but we don’t. Kudos to Janice Gelb who noted on Twitter, “Guess not everything is bigger in TX.”
I arrived to a flurry of emails from work, so I may be a bit distracted today, but the plan now is to get registered and check out the wifi situation in the function space. Also food. I have had two light breakfasts, and a couple of cookies on the plane, but my stomach is telling me this isn’t good enough.
Posted by Cheryl @ 5:52 pm
I see that our Twitter Tracker for SMOFcon has sprung into life. As I see people tweeting about the convention I will add them to the Twitter List.
Posted by Cheryl @ 10:56 pm
