Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 01:39:11 -0500
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: Elspeth Kovar <ekovar at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Minutes of the November 19th meeting are online
Cc: Peggy Rae Sapienza <peggyraes at comcast.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 11:25 AM 11/24/04, samlubell at verizon.net wrote:
>Thanks Keith.  Since we don't know the exact amount, there's no sense in
>causing panic until we know for sure.

This was written in response to Keith's post which said:

"It was announced at the meeting that Capclave had lost roughly
seven thousand dollars.  We don't know the exact amount yet.  I've
left that number out of the minutes since Sam said he doesn't want
it mentioned at SMOFcon -- which is where I will be distributing
the December WSFA Journal, which will contain the minutes of the
last two meetings."

I've been thinking about that since the Third Friday meeting, and realized
that I was reacting in an unfortunate knee-jerk fashion in response to
concerns rather than addressing them in a useful way.  I'll try to make up
for it by doing the latter now.

Which is that far from causing panic, being open about at a local SMOFcon
about having lost money could be one of the best things that has happened
to WSFA.  We have a chance at good PR and, more importantly, resources that
we usually wouldn't.

I realize that you're worried about what people might think but there's no
shame in saying that one has run into a problem and wants to learn how to
fix it.  In fact, there would probably be far fewer problems if more people
did that and it's something to be encouraged.

In this case we've been following the honorable tradition of "if it ain't
broke, don't fix it."  WSFA held the third oldest SF convention using our
very casual model, and with a few pauses when we didn't hold a convention
at all we've used it from 1950 until now for our local convention.  We are
rather amazing in that a half-century-old way of doing things worked so
long despite all the changes that occurred during that time.  We can take
pride in that, and more relevantly take pride in not hiding problems or
clinging to tradition.

And if, you're still worried, from a straight PR standpoint it's far better
to tell people about a problem in an exclusive, educated forum that also
sees you taking measures to correct it than for things to leak out.

Sam, and the rest of WSFA:

Instead of hiding I think that we should take advantage of a resource that
is rare: a SMOFcon in our own back yard.  This is the best gathering of
folks interested in conventions, and at a time when they're far more
interested in how things work than in hashing over things that
haven't.  And believe me, SMOFs are good at hashing things over.  From that
standpoint alone this is a useful chance.

Much more importantly, when something goes wrong one of the best ways to
figure out how to fix it is to talk with other people and in under a week
we're going to have a lot of people in one place who have a tremendous
amount of experience.  When I was talking Friday night about putting
together a facilities committee or some such you wanted me to talk to Dale
about how BSFS does it.  (I did a while back and, to the best of my
recollection, Dale finds a hotel, negotiates the contract, and that's the
Balticon hotel.  That model is *not* an option for WSFA.)  Much easier and
much more useful would be to ask a lot of folks and get them comparing ideas.

And a lot of WSFAns can afford to go without the usual travel expenses; the
WSFA rate isn't advertised but talk to Bob about it.

It could also be good PR for both WSFA and Capclave.  WSFA, as the host of
Disclave, has a reputation.  Granted that in the later years the reputation
had more to do with 'DripClave' than with the literary guests we used to
have but a lot of folks remember those times as well.  Just take a look at
http://www.wsfa.org/disclist.htm. We used to host one of the best
conventions around, and it wasn't just because of our guests: it was
because we cared.  Coming out as a group that's actually willing to say
that the way we've done things for years isn't working any more and being
willing explore new ways of doing things could have tremendous cache.  And
once conrunners start talking up a convention that triggers a network.

If it weren't so close to SMOFcon I would very much want to suggest an
additional panel, both for the sake of WSFA and for others -- when trying
to put this together as an actual panel idea I wanted to make it broad
enough to be useful to a lot of people.  The result that we're looking for
is "How do you avoid losing money, or at least know that you're going to do
so?".  While I really, really want ideas of how to structure things and
think that that's what WSFA needs most but that's probably too
narrow.  What I've come up thus far is "Budgeting for Small Conventions:
Methods from Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations to Organizational Structure".

(I've even come up with panel participants, based on who is listed as a
member of SMOFcon.  There are appallingly few WSFAns but for the sake of
the my fantasy panel I'm delighted that Jim Mann is now included.  Once
started on the idea I had to run with it.)

But even if there isn't a chance for a panel we have a tremendous
opportunity.  There's a WSFA member rate for the con which isn't advertised
(but talk to Bob about it) which means that folks can have a taste of how
much fun this can be; usually there are travel and hotel expenses and a
SMOFcon only comes to an area once in a decade or so.  And I have a list of
non-conrunning coolness as well.

More than that, this is the gathering of people with ideas and experience
when it comes to handling SF conventions, and the one time every year that
they're not busy either working on conventions or trying to decompress from
doing so.

We've run into a problem: the paradigm we've used to run conventions for
half a century worked well but it finally slipped into one of the
cracks.  We've been lucky, and we've been fortunate.  Now it seems that we
should explore putting some measures in place for when we aren't.  What
better place to do so than a SMOFcon?

It's long past my bedtime, thus the lack of editing, but I figured that
this is important enough to stay up -

Elspeth

Post Script:

There's going to be the usual Friday night icebreaker/party at SMOFcon this
year.  While it may not become the ongoing thing that the 1986 SMOFcon
icebreaker "If I Ran the Z/O/O/ Con" became I have the basic details and
can post them if anyone's interested and wants to prepare.  Suffice to say,
with Geri handling it it's going to be a *lot* of fun!

I'm not involved with this year's SMOFcon in any way; it's just my
opinion.  And I'm really looking forward to this convention!

E.