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.
