Worldcon Day 1: WSFS Day

[kevin_standlee]

This first day of Worldcon was my WSFS day, with a panel about Introduction to the WSFS Business Meeting and the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. Because of that and in honor of the convention's opening ceremonies, I squeezed into my WSFS captain's uniform from Interaction. There were even people who recognized me from the 2005 Worldcon for wearing it.



I'm glad we registered yesterday, because at about 11:15 AM, the registration queue stretched back from Registration to a set of stairs...


To an overflow queue at the top of the stairs that doubled back on itself. I heard quoted wait times of 90 minutes. Painful. However, I did see that they did eventually clear that queue and later in the day it wasn't that awful.

I attended the Opening Ceremonies, which were entertaining; alas, I had a terrible time understanding what most of the people were saying, and I don't think it was just the accents. The amplification distorted things a lot, and most people don't know how to use microphones.


After Opening Ceremonies, I headed into the Fan Village, the "heart" of Loncon 3.


The WSFS banner hung near the main entrance.


There were few people in costume present, but one of them was this lovely Ms. Marvel. She had accessories (like her handbag) that matched the uniform, and amazing blue eyes. I told her how much I appreciated her wearing a costume, particularly on the first day with relatively few people doing so. She seemed to appreciate it.

After grabbing lunch with Lisa, I went off to the Introduction to WSFS panel, which actually had a decent turnout. Mark Olson, Linda Deneroff, and I went through the basics of WSFS procedures and tried our best to de-mystify the meeting. I hope it helps.

Loncon 3 very generously printed an entire WSFS Special Issue of the convention newsletter, The Pigeon Post with all of the early WSFS Business News. My thanks to flickgc to volunteering to do this when the amount of WSFS news I submitted ran to being able to fill six columns.

Lisa spent time sitting at the SJ in 2018 bid table when I was off at panels and at the WSFS Mark Protection Committee Meeting, which was scheduled for South Gallery 33, but when it turned out that the door was locked and nobody was available to unlock it (and hiking over to Program Ops was impractical), we commandeered room 32 next door, which wasn't in use, and held one of the longer MPC meetings. There's a lot of stuff going on, but most of it is actually covered in the MPC's report that is on the Loncon 3 web site. The MPC this past year helped with the defense of a serious threat to the Hugo Awards, with the work of Loncon 3 at the forefront, and some extensive financial help from SCIFI (using up the last of the L.A.con IV surplus and then some) and CanSMOF (spending Anticipation surplus funds) to pay approximately $15,000 in legal fees. I haven't said much about it because we've really not wanted to publicize it until we were relatively confident in the results.

In between the Intro To WSFS and WSFS MPC Meetings I attended a CanSMOF board meeting — Worldcons being one of the few times we can muster a quorum of the CanSMOF directors.

I did not go to the Retro-Hugo Awards ceremony, instead having an unrushed dinner. After dinner, we returned to the Fan Village, where the evening parties were in full swing.



Tiki Dalek made it to Loncon, and collected quite a crowd of admirers.

Lisa and I spent several hours individually mingling and talking at the Fan Village. It was fun, and I was glad I did so; however, it means it was after Midnight by the time we got back to the hotel, and I still hadn't posted the 1939 Retro-Hugo Award Results or updated the 1939 Retro-Hugo web page, not to mention posting the photos I took today and writing up the first day's activities.

As always, there was far more than this to write about (such as my successful deliveries of difficult-to-get-in-UK things to Cheryl and to Flick that I'd been carrying with me from the USA), but this is all I can manage, because it's very late and we have to be up early in order to be in place for the 10 AM WSFS Business Meeting, where Lisa is recording and I am "performing" as the reporting member of two WSFS/Business Meeting committees and the lead proponent of a large proposed amendment to the WSFS Constitution. Despite sleeping 14 hours last night, I need some sleep tonight.

Comments

[dhw.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it is the just-post-DEF-CON timing, but my reaction to a registration queue of 90 minutes is "wow, quick!".

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Whereas I consider a long line a failure of process. In 1993, the Worldcon on which I was a senior committee member was pilloried for allowing excessively long lines to develop, whereas today excessive wait times are apparently a sign of success.

[totient]

Long lines are a failure of process everywhere, but there are a lot of regional differences in the definition of "long".

[dhw.livejournal.com]

Some of it is unavoidable. If you have 15,000 people who all want badges at the same time, you are going to get a queue. You just can't put enough people on registration to make that not happen.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it is possible to provide incentives and ability to spread that queue out over a longer period. For example, if you open pre-registration pickup two days before the convention, people can register sooner and not all queue up at the same time. Publicize that and people will see that it's in their interest to avoid the first-day rush and collect their badges earlier.

[dhw.livejournal.com]

If feasible. You'd need to have the facilities two days in advance, and you'd need to have people manning registration.

You'd also have to have pre-registration, which DEF CON deliberately does not (no checks, no credit cards, no recording of names, by design - cash only). Otherwise you just have early registration, which would shift some of the timing, but still leaves the need for people working registration days early.

[totient]

I don't see why that should be so.

Let's be practical here. Arisia is just about exactly 1/4 that size and with 14 registration stations this last year our max line wait was 270 seconds (we tracked this with a token that we gave to the last person in line each time the token got to the front). For 15,000 people you'd need 50-60 stations. But for 15,000 people you'd also need the new convention center, which has eight enormous registration areas designed for exactly this purpose, one for each entrance. Two of those registration areas are large enough that you could put all of the registration tables in either of them if you didn't want to split registration up, and one of those has enough doors to the outside (and to the rest of the convention center) to be able to handle the flow of people you could process.

Yes, 50 is a lot of volunteers to line up. But 15,000 is a lot of people to recruit from to do it.

[dhw.livejournal.com]

So, 18000 people (which is where things ended up) were crowded but fit in a single hotel's function space in Las Vegas. No space for "8 enormous registration areas", just one logical space for registration (which held somewhere around 10 registration stations, if I recall correctly). 15,000 badges were just what were picked up on the first day.

It'll be interesting to see how things work next year, when it'll be at Bally's and Paris (they are connected).

And of course, on the opposite side of things. PAX has effectively no registration line, because almost all badges are mailed out ahead of time. They just have massive line lines (usual problem -- supply/demand/space).

[dhw.livejournal.com]

Assuming a 1 minute transaction time, start to finish, the throughput of that line is 840/hour.

With the same assumption, unless I am insufficiently caffeinated, you are looking at a wait of 270 seconds turning into a worst case of 63 people on line at peak, or an instantaneous demand of 77 people wanting a badge at any given time (since 14 are at the front being served).

[totient]

I suspect we're doing a little worse than 1 minute on transaction time, because our actual throughput for the 4 peak hours of Friday was more like 650/hour.

[dhw.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I chose one minute as a best case and to make the math easier.

[jcfiala.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the updates!

Amusingly, this is the same weekend as Gen Con, another convention I'd like to be at. Obviously I couldn't be at both conventions, but it's painful not being at either.

[ericlarson.livejournal.com]

Now you've made me curious. What was this threat? Could you put a link in pointing to the MPC report so I can satisfy my 'satiable curiosity?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The link is in the original post above to the MPC Report.