Encouraging Promising Conrunners

I do take transit when it's convenient, and tonight it was, as I had to meet David Clark and Tom Whitmore at The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore in Berkeley this evening, so after work, I headed over to Union City and caught a BART train up to Berkeley, arriving just as they were closing the store, and we headed around the corner for a meeting over dinner. The three of us are the SFSFC SMOFCon Scholarship Committee. SFSFC will be awarding two $300 scholarships to help pay some of the costs to attend SMOFCon 23 in Portland, Oregon. (Just in case anyone reading this doesn't know, SMOFCon is an annual convention about running science fiction conventions. It moves around and is hosted by a different group each year.) Our committee's job was to evaluate the applications we received and to prepare our recommendations for a special meeting of the SFSFC Board of Directors scheduled for this weekend.

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The nice thing about this is that we generally get a number of good applications. I was really happy to see so many people from FanimeCon (site down as I compose this message) applying. The bad thing is that we have to only pick two people out of it. Last year, I encouraged all of those who didn't get an award to re-apply, but none of them did so. Looking at the batch we have this year, I will make a similar statement to the people who applied this year.