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            "457": {
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                "title": "Realities of Running a Convention Vol 1",
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                        "*": "For those enthusiastically thinking of running a convention.\n\nYOU DO NOT GET TO GO TO THE CONVENTION YOU ARE RUNNING\n\nThe initial enthusiasm many have to run a con is that they have a dream con in mind. That dream con is the con they dream of going to, the con they'd like to attend but have felt the usual disappointment of those that they do attend. You know, the ones we spend bitching about at breakfast (with the lycra dude chortling too loud at his fellow diner's retelling of the CSI furry episode) or later in the evening at the bar (where there's no signs of lycra but still the distant chortling of mid-list writers watching on a laptop a youtube remix of Battlestar Galactica, a Lady GaGa song and the CSI furry episode, intellectual chortling, though it sounds the same).\n\nAnyways, you have a dream con all figured out and you make the commitment (while drunk at a room party or on a sugar high during a game of Cosmic Encounter) to rally your mates and make a bid at the business meeting. Your one mistake is that your dream con floats in your mind as if you're attending it. You forget you won't be attending that con because you'll be too damn busy running it. Well, that's what you should be doing. Funny how often that doesn't dawn on committee members till it's way too late. It's often why committee can look so damn unhappy or some individuals seem rather useless at dealing with anything when the con is actually underway. Committee members, I tell you: You don't get to go. Fuck off and run the damn con. You wanted to run it, now run it. Your job isn't to have fun, that's our job. Your job is to make it fun for us.\n\nNow, this isn't to say a committee can't have fun. But it has to be a different fun.\n\nSo when you decide to run a con you have to make sure in your mind that your objective is to manage a con and not create the con you always wanted to go to. Now there's nothing wrong with the two overlapping, even coinciding (in a way, they should) but we're talking about the mindset. You have to sacrifice the dream of going to that con and replace it with the dream of giving that con to others. Like Buddha deliberately not achieving full enlightenment so he could remain on this earth and point the way to Nirvana. Your goal is to produce a convention others enjoy in your proxy. You can bask in the achievment, the closing ceremony applause, the good reviews on blogs, even the rare email of \"Thank you\" (which do feel the best). Running a con can be a rewarding and worthwhile experience. It usually isn't, but that's by the by.\n\nI know exemplary committee members who have admitted to me that they don't entirely enjoy the con experience simply as a member participant, but get their fan jollys by working on them, usually because that is how they get there sense of community. These people are what keep conventions coming along every year. Usually, though, they aren't the driving force (unless they come out of the woodwork to save a failing con, which is more often than you think). The driving force, the initial momentum, is from those who get an idea in their head and say, usually, by the Sunday evening of the convention \"You know what'll make a great con?\" So after generating that first excitement, followed by a ping of bliss when winning the bid, it often, about three months in, turns into a deflating realization that it's actually work and then, about three months before the con date, that they'll not get to go cause there's all this shit in the way called running a con (which by now half of them regret having got involved in the first place). This is not a problem for the con pragmatists and realists, but for the dreamers it can be.\n\nAnd that is why it is not uncommon for a committee member or two to resign just weeks before the convention is due. Sure, they'll have a reason, even a legitimate sounding one, but they invariably turn up to the convention and sit in the fan lounge, having fun, sometimes bitching about the committee who are running around keeping the thing going. And yes, the members of your former committee may have been rude arseholes and yes they did distort your vision for the convention, but you are still there, going to the convention you were meant to be running. But then hey, I've been to cons where almost the whole committee decided they'd also go to their own con. Needless to say they were shit conventions. [more down the track about resignations, particularly the public kind]\n\nSo if you are thinking about running a convention, think about the con you want the experience of having run, not the con you wish others would run for you so you can experience it. Do that from the very beginning and you've made the first step towards a successful, even legendary, convention.\n\nOh, and be kind to the lycra guy, he may be the one who saves your convention or sends you that thank you email.\n\nThough not likely.\n\nThis document written by Robin Pen and located at http://robinpen.livejournal.com/21761.html This page reprinted with his permission.\n\n[[Category:Convention_organisation]]"
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            "458": {
                "pageid": 458,
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                "title": "Realities of Running a Convention Vol 2",
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                        "*": "Bollocks of Leadership\n\nConvenor, it is on your head. Deal with it\n\nA single person rarely brings the seed of a convention forth. Usually it forms itself in the air between three or four people, often while caught in a con induced high and within the loud din of a room party (A bad time to make such decisions \u2013 though far less conventions would happen if they weren\u2019t). It feels, as it should, as a team coming together. That\u2019s exciting in itself, that creation of comradeship.\n\nSo you prepare your bid for the business meeting and realise that someone has to be the convenor. A con committee needs a convenor, once referred to as the chair. The tradition and structure of conventions is that it is a gathering convened by one said person at a particular place and time. And as such you have a convenor.\n\nThis group, who think of themselves as \u201cthe core\u201d propose one of their friends and colleagues to be convenor often on the grounds they have been more active and interactive, often using their personable and practical life skills, and hence are better known to the fan community and more respected for that reason. Thus they are best suited to be the main face when making the bid and to garner a stronger confidence for their con and thus the votes. And when you win the bid that committee pretty much forget they made you convenor and you all go back to being that happy little \u201ccore\u201d.\n\nBut the terrible truth is that throughout the history of conventions almost inevitably the only names remembered in the oral mythology, passed down through hotel bars, fan lounges and in the dimmer hours of room parties, are those of convenors or chairs of shit conventions. No one knows who else was on the committee or care who or if any of them particularly fucked up their duties, it is only the name of the one person who was in charge of it all who is remembered.\n\nEventually, the convenor will realize this truth, perhaps semi-consciously, but it rises and floats on the surface and stays there like a stubborn turd in the toilet bowl. And because that turd just won\u2019t go down no matter how much you flush a worse truth then permeates your nose. Your fellow \u201ccore\u201d didn\u2019t pick you because you\u2019d be best for the convenor\u2019s job, they more didn\u2019t want the job themselves. They didn\u2019t want the job because they didn\u2019t want the responsibility. They didn\u2019t want it to be on their head when it screws up.\n\nThis is when the tension in the committee begins, because though the convenor is grasping the realization of the situation the rest of the core is still caught up in the fun of ideals. They have that freedom because they don\u2019t quite feel the real responsibility, and I mean the real responsibility that you have to answer for your convention. And oddly it doesn\u2019t directly occur to them that it will all fall on the convenor\u2019s head. You think it would, but denial is extremely effective and rather easy to do when you put your mind to it.\n\nSo in short you get a weird, but rather common situation, a convenor who is feeling a bit shafted by their friends and friends who resent how their friend who is convenor is not treating them as equals in the process anymore. The resentments, though not clearly identified, begins to grow, turning into that fracturing, the nay-saying, the outright rejections of proposals, the accusations of \u201cyou are trying to take this con away from us\u201d and all the petty, petty bullshit that seems to infest the average fan committee swirling around in unpleasantness like lycra tights and purple capes spinning in a laundromat.\n\nWhat happens from here depends; the convenor depressingly caving in to the squabbles and thus no cohesive leadership, a convenor who is taken out of the loop by the others, thus no visible leadership, a convenor who takes others out of the loop, etc. All the usual human crap, but we\u2019ll leave that for another time.\n\nThis document written by Robin Pen and located at http://robinpen.livejournal.com/22041.html  This page reprinted with his permission.\n\n[[Category:Convention_organisation]]"
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