Early Night

[kevin_standlee]

My main contribution to the Raleigh NASFiC party was to help carry bags of soda from the FoodSource grocery store diagonally across the street from the Atlantis, but I'm told that this was indeed helpful and so I reckon I did my part. While I would have loved to have stayed out later and talked and SMOFed, I have to be up early for meetings and therefore am going to try to get to bed before midnight so I might get as much as six hours sleep.

There was an active party scene tonight, full of crowded parties, but none intolerably so that I noticed. It was, however, pretty warm, as the hotel's air conditioning isn't really up to coping with so many people in this area. People seemed to be enjoying themselves. I was really pleased to run into several more first-time-convention (not just first Worldcon) attendees, although none of them found us by way of TheHugoAwards.org this time.

Earlier this evening I encountered a first-timer that I didn't realize was at his first convention. I had been helping Newsletter with items about the Business Meeting and griping about the usual Business Meeting stuff, and he stuck his oar in and proceeded to tell us how little we knew. I got a little huffy at him, and later apologized. Once I was done with the stuff on deadline, I tried to engage more productively with him. I explained about the WSFS Constitution and rules, and when I started to go into some of the finer points, he said, "Well, the Board of Directors would take care of that."

I said, "We don't have a Board of Directors."

"Then who runs these things?"

I explained that Reno's Worldcon was a completely different corporation than last year's in Melbourne and next year's in Chicago. He still looked puzzled. "Then who decides who runs it?"

"The members. Like you, and me, and everyone else here. You're a member of the World Science Fiction Society because you bought a membership to this convention."

He still didn't understand what was stopping anyone from just running a Worldcon. I tried to explain that there was a small body that managed the service marks, and he persisted in thinking that to be the Board of Directors.

I said, "Worldcon business is run by a 'town meeting' government. Everyone, including you, can show up in Room A2 tomorrow morning and debate and vote."

"What's to stop someone from filibustering." He replied confidently.

"There are rules about debate time limits."

"Well, I could just bring in 5000 people and take it over," he said.

I said, "Yes, you could, but could you get them to come to Chicago next year and repeat it?"

"If I had enough money."

I said, "Nobody is going to spend that much money on a Worldcon."

He still seemed pretty dubious. The idea that Worldcons are run by the members, not by a remote, isolated Board of Directors that controls everything through corporate politics, seemed so strange to him. "You complain about how inefficient it is! It's your own fault!" he complained.

"Yes," I said, "But anything else will get shouted down. And we've been doing things this way since 1939."

I had to go and get dinner at this point, but I'm sure I still haven't convinced him. OTOH, I left him puzzling over the WSFS Constitution in the Souvenir Book. I wonder if he'll be at the meeting tomorrow morning."

[Note that the above conversation is quasi-quoted and summarized from perhaps 20 minutes of chasing around the strange way in which we run our conventions.]

Comments

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Inefficient, yes, but this is more often a feature than a bug.

[kshandra]

I had to go and get dinner at this point, but I'm sure I still haven't convinced him.

No, you hadn't. He proceeded to try and make the same point to gridlore (and me, though I tuned out of the conversation when I realized that swearing at my ex-boyfriend's father was non-productive) on Sunday night at dinner.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That's what I figured. Some people simply can't grasp the concept of a convention that's been held since 1939 not being run by a single organization under a Strong Guiding Corporation, since that is of course the way all events happen, and anything that doesn't work that way doesn't exist at all. It's an utter blind spot to people like this.

I dare him to try any of the things he thinks he can do. He'll fail, and fail miserably, and he'll never understand why he failed. There are times when the amorphous nature of WSFS and Worldcon drives me crazy, but there is a certain strength to it as well, because it's very difficult to subvert such a dispersed organization. And if he thinks that the organization is so dispersed that he could just go organize his own Worldcon because nobody would stop him, he'd discover (the hard way) that past Worldcons with money would gladly come forward to drop a lawsuit on him if cease-and-desist letters weren't enough for him.

[kshandra]

I dare him to try any of the things he thinks he can do.

And THAT was what pissed me off the hardest. Doug said, more than once "You go right ahead and try it" - and the response every time was "I'm not interested in doing it." (My hand to god, I would have left the restaurant if it hadn't meant abandoning Doug...and I was still tempted to do it anyway.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Exactly. He's convinced he knows more than anyone in an organization that has been around since before I was born, and that we're all a bunch of fools for not understanding such simple things. It couldn't possibly be that he's wrong, could it be?

If I ever encounter him again, I'm going to tell him, to his face: "You're wrong, you're a blowhard, and the very fact that you say that you're 'not interested' is a clear sign that you just like talking to hear your lips flap and that you don't know one thing about how our organization works. If you show up at our meeting and try any of your tricks, you'll be slapped down so fast your head will spin and you'll not have the slightest idea how you lost."

I used to be as smart as he was, but I had the excuse of being a teenager.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The most-charitable thing I can think of saying is that he, like a lot of people, probably know one or two bits of parliamentary procedure, but probably know it wrong and think that one thing works everywhere. For instance, "A motion to adjourn is always in order," is funny, and it's almost true, but not always. (Explanation upon request.) And someone who thinks that "you can always suspend the rules," is wrong.

There are naturally pathological cases where, say, 10,000 zombies come in to a single Business Meeting and try to dominate things, but when you get to such cases, you're beyond the realm of reality. Besides, you'll never get it done next year, and persisting will just get you involved in nasty lawsuits that you'll lose.