Leadership Challenges

debgeisler wrote in this LJ entry about the nature of leadership, particularly in volunteer organizations like, for instance, Worldcon committees. She makes some good points, which I won't repeat here. If you have any curiousity as to some of the challenges of leading a Worldcon (or other groups of volunteers, for that matter), I encourage you to read it.

Proof Positive

Most of you reading this know that I'm one of the proofreaders for Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan's Hugo Award-winning fanzine, which she recently took semi-pro, for reasons described in issue 120. (I'm not going to put a direct link to #120 because pending changes to the site will probably change the direct address; see below.) As I told the folks at BASFA last Monday, this means that if you want to keep reading the 'zine, you need to contribute something toward the cost of it happening; that night, I collected one annual subscription and a bunch of single-copy contributions, raising a total of $26.

Yesterday, I spent part of the late afternoon proofing the next issue, which is mostly finished. I worry sometimes when I find nothing at all upon which to comment -- I get concerned that I'm not reading closely enough -- but there were enough things in the current draft that made me feel I was doing my job.

Cheryl is also working on a redesign of the magazine and its presentation on the web site, and I've been reviewing and commenting on those as well. I won't say any more about that until she's ready to roll out the changes publicly. She also recently made changes that allow comments to things in the Emerald City weblog, which will possibly appease some of those people who complained that EmCit doesn't have a letter column.

It's Official -- ConJose is Dead

I'm posting this from the meeting room in the Fremont/Centerville Train Station where SFSFC has just finished up a special meeting to deal with several issues that needed to be resolved before our next regular meeting in November. One thing that wasn't urgent but which we bundled into the meeting was the final action of ConJose. The last bits of official reports of the 2002 Worldcon and dealing with the remaining assets (money) were being managed by the ConJose Asset Management Committee. I, representing CJAM, presented ConJose's final report to WSFS this year. ConJose has done everything required of it by WSFS; all of the WSFS-reportable funds of ConJose have been spent or accounted for; and ConJose has no further WSFS responsibilities, so SFSFC officially discharged the CJAM Committee.

This means that after nine years and two months (the 2002 bid committee was formed in July 1996), SFSFC no longer has a committee that is either bidding for a Worldcon, operating a Worldcon, or managing the clean-up after a Worldcon. Hooray!