I may look back one day and realise I lived through the final years of LitFandom

[major_clanger]

"You are offering a room full of vintage first-edition hardbacks to a group of people who read books on their phones."

Madeline Ashby: 'Memento mori. (Or, how Worldcon’s youth problem will resolve.)'

If I had more time this would be a long post ranging over:

• how the people I see at conventions in my mid-40s are in large part those I went to cons with

Comments

[purplecthulhu]

I think there may be an interesting national split here

[daveon]

To be unfair to the Orlando bid. There were a lot of Americans who felt that Orlando is even a bigger shithole than Spokane and actually a royal pain in the arse to get to. There's one direct flight a day from Seattle, otherwise it's about 8 hours of travel.

Also, their bid pitch was very libertarian sounding which left me cold.

OTOH - Spokane? Sheesh.

[fjm]

I put this post over there:

I went to DragonCon this year instead of Worldcon (I was recruiting artists for London next year). I enjoyed it very much.

However:

I kept wondering why I wasn’t seeing many people my age, and very much not women (I’m in my early 40s). Then I also noticed I was seeing no toddlers: lots of babies, lots of older children but no infants. So I took a look at the child care policy. DragonCon offers no childcare for children aged under 7. In a convention of 55,000.

So DragonCon may indeed be young, but has it ever occurred to you to wonder why it has *stayed* young over thirty years?

[autopope]

O_o

That's ... very bad. Is it just half-assed, or do you think there's a deliberate policy of deterring older con-goers?

(Speculating that older con-goers -- especially with kids -- are less easily parted from disposable income than teens and twenty-somethings with no commitments like mortgages or childraising costs, and cons with permanent employees might prioritize providing revenue streams for large dealer operations or sponsors like games or film or comic companies who will help keep them in business ....)

[major_clanger]

See my comment. The article I link to suggests that Dragoncon stopped offering child care because it was underused, but of course if you make a convention unfriendly or awkward to people with young children then they won't come, so of course demand for child care will drop off.

I also wonder if there are legal issues. Running child care for 500 young children (my rough guess at the demand if it scaled from what I've seen at other cons) would be a daunting prospect. To all intents and purposes, you'd be setting up a summer camp in its own right.

[akicif]

Argh. Googling "DragonCon Children" brings up the whole Ed Kramer business....

[nojay]

It's a while since I was at a Dragon*Con but the impression I got it was much like a big music festival in terms of the age spread of attendees it attracted i.e. tuned for folks in their late teens and twenties. I can't remember anything particular about childcare provisions back then and I don't recall many children being present but given the frenetic atmosphere I don't think kids would have had a particularly good time at a D*C.

The monster Comikets in Japan (attendance about 500,000 over three days) don't do childcare and I don't think I ever saw anyone under the age of 14 there at all. Again most attendees are in their late teens and early twenties with a few old fogies (like myself) and professional exhibitors.

[daveon]

I've been thinking about this article too and while I can't fault the central thesis - yeap, this is a self correcting problem - some of the other conclusions weren't ones I immediately thought would work.

1. I'm still unconvinced by the YA Hugo and as one of the commentators said, it feels very: 1. YA Hugo: 2. ???? 3. Profits!!!!

2. Having a stationary Worldcon feels like a step in the wrong direction. I'm not sure the world needs another 100K person convention. Plus I feel there's little enough 'world' in the Worldcon.

3. Maybe the pure LitFandom convention is going to slowly fade away... I suspect that it will slowly adapt. I'd like to see more media focus myself.

9-Worlds seems to have been a good demonstration of what you can do, although their timing for next year sounds terrible.

[beamjockey]

the lack of progress towards panel parity

Actually, I'd thought that selecting London as a Worldcon site was an indication of progress. UK conrunners I know (present company very much included) are attentive to such issues and determined to improve things.

Mathematically perfect gender-parity does not interest me so much as becoming wide awake to the possibility of new voices and putting effort into recruiting good program participants we might previously have overlooked.

One might hope that Loncon will set an example from which subsequent Worldcons will learn, but a bit of missionary work won't hurt either.

[emmzzi]

I wish we could move beyond gender parity and consider all kinds of parity.

[major_clanger]

That's the next challenge, and it will be a tougher one. Gender parity meant aiming for panels to be representative of the wider convention membership in terms of gender, which was itself nearly at parity already.

But, to take an obvious example, getting wider ethnic diversity on panels will involve getting wider ethnic diversity at conventions. It was good that we had a noticeable number of attendees at 8^2 who were not white, but it was still a very small fraction of the overall membership.

[emmzzi]

Invite GoHs from the communities you want to attract. Put pictures of them on the web sites.