Olive Your Westercons Belong to Us

[kevin_standlee]

The Business Meeting lasted a bit over three hours. In the end, by a vote of 93-27 (which is closer than you think because you need a 3/4 vote to win), the Business Meeting voted to award Westercon 66 to the "Olive Country" bid from bovil and kproche. Because bids selected under these fallback procedures are really just picking a committee and trusting them to pick a site, there is no specific site picked out, although it's likely to be in the Sacramento area. Kevin & Andy are doing the Renovation Masquerade, and therefore we can't expect a whole bunch of activity from them until after Worldcon on this.

It was a really stressful experience for many people including me, and I'm actually quite glad that we went into Committee of the Whole for 30 minutes because that's half an hour that I could go sit down in the wings and not be "on" since I don't preside over CotW.

The Olive Country bid initially failed to get enough votes (83 yes, 29 no), but none of the other bids even had enough support to justify counting. The Portland bid (the one that was actually on the ballot) was closer than the other two, which were the Utah in 2014 Westercon bid saying that they were willing to move up a year, and a bid for Maui. After all four proposals were rejected by the Business Meeting (that 3/4 vote requirement) and after motions to declare a deadlock (majority required) were also rejected, the meeting voted to reconsider the original vote on Olive Country. That passed, so the Olive Country bid was back up on the radar, and on the second vote, it just barely managed to get the necessary majority.

That's the longest Business Meeting over which I've ever presided as a single (sort of) continuous session. I feel pretty good about it, and my ego has been stroked mightily by the large number of people coming up to thank me. If I were a drinking fan, I'd be sloshed right now. But I can't afford that anyway, because we have Girl Genius Radio Theatre at 8 PM tonight and Match Game SF at 10 PM, both in Club Regent, the same room where I spent the day presiding.

Comments

[gvdub.livejournal.com]

We were following from afar. You did an exceptional job keeping things together and moving well. Nicely done, sir.

[solarbird]

Once I found the live streaming I popped on just in time to see Utah and Maui go down. OMG the drama. Man, that's some freaky-ass shit going on - what've you lot been doin' down there? XD Well handled on your part, tho'!

(I notice the Olive Country people were very firm about being a United States bid. STEP TO THE BACK, CANADA! NO 2013 FOR YOU, CASCADIA! (But it'd be a riot if they picked up the Portland hotel contact. WESTERCON: We Know Drama!)

[galtine1.livejournal.com]

Kevin...you handled everything with grace under pressure. As someone who enjoys parliamentary procedure rhetoric, this morning/afternoon was a good example and should be shared as a lesson for those who need to learn more.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Just from what I picked up on the fringes, that meeting was epic. So well done, you.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I wasn't at the meeting, but I heard ALL ABOUT it afterwards. Only problem is, that when I heard it was a well-run meeting and ventured to make complimentary remarks about "Kevin", everyone thought I meant kproche instead of you.

[twilight2000.livejournal.com]

Again - this was a long, drawn out, potentially explosive meeting that you handled skillfully and with grace.

I might have smacked someone ;>

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

You did a great job under difficult circumstances, and thank you in particular for taking care of the concerns of the newbies to the business meeting.

[ceemage.livejournal.com]

I was following along on Twitter. It sounded like you were doing a stellar job.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Portland fandom is disappointed, as you can imagine. But these things happen. It could have been Tonopah...

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

That was an amazing effort. I wonder if LASFS takes over bid selection or there are major changes in the bid process starting with the 2015 bids.

[buddykat.livejournal.com]

LASFS doesn't want it - they would much rather not deal with the Westercon at all if they don't have to. I doubt that anyone else is all that interested in changing the bid process - the system worked the way it was designed to.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Agreed. This was an extraordinary situation. Rather than calling for all sorts of rule changes to try and take the decision completely out of the voters' hands or to prohibit hoax bids from even having a chance of winning, I think the correct lesson to be learned here is that bids, even nominally unopposed ones, need to meet more than just the technical paper filing guidelines. They have to show a minimal level of competence and they need to not spend most of the high-profile bidding time complaining.

In 1989, I was on the San Francisco in '93 Worldcon bid, with Phoenix and Zagreb also on the ballot. All three of these bids (including the one on which I was a member) were perceived as falling apart or incompetent. This led to SMOFS drafting the until-now hoax bid for Hawaii in '93, putting together filing papers, and filing it with ConFiction. This was after the ballot deadline, so they ran as a write-in, and they came in second to San Francisco.

Kevin and Andy could easily have produced the purely nominal filing documents for the Granzella's Westercon bid. The fact that they didn't do so was a way to try and keep the door open for Portland to pull themselves together. When the voters showed sufficient frustration with Portland's "real" bid that they gave more votes to the "hoax," Portland still had a chance to win the hearts and minds of the electorate in person, and I know that had they made a better showing before the Business Meeting, Kevin & Andy would have thrown their support to Portland. But Portland's supporters, for the most part, managed to lose voters every time they spoke. I could see it happening while sitting up there watching their supporters speak.

Hint: When you're trying to get three-fourths of the people in a room to vote for you, and when you know there's a pretty good chance that many of them are the people who voted for your opposition back when you only needed a majority and didn't get it, you are not helping your cause when you say that anyone who voted for your opposition should be ashamed of themselves and start personally insulting the opposition's leadership.

The hardest thing for me, sitting up their behind the people speaking, was to keep my expression relatively neutral as I watched a bid immolate themselves politically.

I lost a serious bid once: Sacramento in '91 Westercon (lost to a real bid from Vancouver). Rather than getting angry about it, I learned some lessons about how to bid and win. Portland had a perfectly good site and probably had the makings of a good Westercon hidden away inside a terrible bid. Personally, I wish than instead of flouncing away and saying, "All politics is terrible, woe is me," their supporters come back and try again with an actual bid rather than a proposal that says, "Vote for me because you have no choice."

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

You mention something that I think it's important to repeat, and keep repeating -- that many folks were looking for responsiveness to concerns. I'm one of those people who went into the bid presentation panel looking for a Portland presentation that would allay concerns about the bid. I didn't see that. What I *hoped* would happen next was that the bid chair and staff would go find out the answers the questions they hadn't answered at the panel -- like "How many square feet is the meeting space?" -- in preparation for the next day. I *hoped* to see a presentation at the business meeting that started with, "Okay, we've heard you, we get it, and we're fixing it. Here's the information that was asked about yesterday, and here's what's going to be changed going forward" -- with specific details and responses. Instead, there was a repeat of the bid panel speech, in an increasingly angry/desperate tone. Every step, I kept looking for *some* sign that the concerns expressed had been heard and were being taken seriously. Only when none of that happened did I feel that a vote for Olive Country was my best choice.

What other bids can learn from this is not that they shouldn't bother, but that they need to take the bidding process seriously, and approach fan questions and concerns with respect and care -- not with eyerolling and dismissive snorts.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to say that the Portland bid also failed to whip up enthusiasm in the other place it really needed to attract a following: Portland! I say this as someone who's worked every Portland Westercon since *mumble* and would have been happy to do it again; we really didn't have as much local fan interest as we should have had.

Portland in 2013

[adriennef.livejournal.com]

First off, Kevin, I would also like to add my thanks for the incredible job you did presiding over the business meeting. You were awesome.

The reason I couldn't get behind the Portland bid is that I just had no confidence they were learning from their bidding experience. What I saw at the bid presentations was a lot of naivete and ignorance of Westercon's history and customs. I understand that this was the first time they ever had to bid on a convention they wanted to host, but just because they were officially unopposed doesn't mean they're entitled to the job. There is still the "None of the Above" option on the ballot.

Glenn Glazer and Bobbie DuFault have been working hard to pull Westercon out of its downward spiral. The lack of enthusiasm the Portland bid showed in convincing its constituency that they would carry on the good work of Westercons 64 and 65 was nonexistent. What's more, they never seemed to fully understand the message we were trying to convey. They thought it was all about us supporting our friends and showing sour grapes made the circumstances even worse. (For the record, I'm not intimidated over traveling to conventions; I did attend Worldcon in Melbourne last year.) At the time Kevin Roche & Andy Trembly dreamed up the Olive Country bid, they had no serious intentions, yet seeing how ill prepared Portland was, few of us were willing to take a chance on them. We have no doubt that Kevin and Andy will carry on the work Glenn and Bobbie have started and may even surpass their results.

Westercon was once a vital convention to the speculative fiction community. It could be again if it remains in the hands of people who demonstrate enthusiasm and understand it takes time and energy to pull such a project together. Portland showed no signs of comprehending this attitude. The Olive Country bid promised the best folks for the job. I apologize if feelings were hurt, but the outcome of this site selection were what was in the best interest of the future of Westercon.

And considering this is the first one I've attended since 1998, I believe I'm speaking a little more objectively than others might.

Re: Portland in 2013

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well spoken, Adrienne.