I have, possibly ill-advisedly, waded in to the LJ discussion of Further Confusion's Elevator Management, or more properly, lack of it. Since I had first-hand experience of the exact same building under crush-load conditions in 2002 (albeit without one-sixths of the attendees in fursuits), I thought I would suggest the things that would work, and ( Read more... )

One of the things about which I feel personally frustrated about the just-ended 2009 World Fantasy Convention in San Jose was that our signage, while good, could have been better, particularly at a couple of key points, especially the top of the main stairs, which proved to be the most-common entrance for most people first arriving. It was not at ( Read more... )

The Crotchety Old Fan weighs in on the current Death of Worldcon discussions, and boils down a number of the reasons why many of us are talking past each other. I think he makes some good points, such as isolating why some of us look at monster queues and say, "What terrible planning! We need to do something to eliminate that line" while others ( Read more... )

I sometimes wonder why I bother being open with Worldcon financial figures, when I read people (no, I'm not going to link to it, but some of the people who read this LJ have probably read it) implying that the reason Worldcons are so expensive is because their first priority is feeding the committee's faces. At least the implication wasn't ( Read more... )

SF Signal has published one of their "Mind Melds" about What Worldcon and Comic-Con can learn from each other. Like Cheryl says, I think anyone proposing that Worldcon should settle down in one place so it can Get Big has missed the point. The Olympics have had similar arguments. It's very inefficient for the Olympics to be in a different place ( Read more... )

Consider the words "amateur," "amateurishly," "professional," and "professionally." Note the subtle distinctions in meaning between the nouns and the related adverbs. Discussions about convention-running can get derailed when people use the terms meaning one of those senses to mean the other one.

I am an amateur convention runner, in that I do ( Read more... )

One of the best managers with whom it has been my pleasure to work in SF fandom has peeked out of her well-earned sabbatical to write about managing volunteers. I would suggest it should be required reading for anyone wanting to organize a volunteer-run/staffed event.

If you are kproche or anyone else who has worked on the 2009 World Fantasy Con web site, you're ineligible for this question because you already know the answer.

If you wanted to find you whether you were a member of the 2009 WFC and you went to the convention's web site, where do you think you would find this information, if anywhere? If you can't ( Read more... )

Commenting on this message about Worldcon budgeting led me to reference a message I wrote in 2006 about Where Does Worldcon's Money Go that includes graphs of the income and expenses by major category for ConJose. I'm glad I went back and revisited the thread, because I discovered a long-buried screened comment (I screen anonymous posts) that I ( Read more... )

trinsf has asked me to distribute her questions about event volunteers. If you think you can help, please click on through and see what she's asking.