My Ears Are Burning

[kevin_standlee]

This is, I'm afraid, going to be one of those enigmatic postings where, unless you have all of the rest of the pieces, you won't know what's going on. And there is always the possibility that I'm reading more into something I read today than I should, and seeing myself in something aimed at someone else.

People keep asking me, "When is the Bay Area going to hold another Worldcon?" I keep answering, truthfully, variations of, "I don't think it should until the local environment becomes less toxic."* I don't see a lot of things that make me think the necessary changes have happened yet. Oh, maybe some of them, but the toxic elements are still there. (Incidentally, I don't see anyone else emerging who seems interested in drowning himself in personal debt to do the necessary work. The previous two Bay Area Worldcons came near to financially ruining me and at least one other person. Anyone else want to try carrying that anvil into the swimming pool?)

When I co-chaired ConJose, I managed to antagonize a whole lot of people, most of them local to the Bay Area. I think that in a whole bunch of individuals' cases, I had the choice of being liked or of getting the convention done. We couldn't have done it both ways. I put the convention first, and I'm better aware of the consequences than certain people think. While I'm flattered at the respect I've received in worldwide conrunning circles, I also know that I'm all but persona non grata in a number of local circles. As someone who wants to be liked, it hurts me more than you'll ever know that the price of getting the convention done was the friendship of those people.

Here's a quote from the penultimate issue of Emerald City:

There is, of course, a matter of committee culture here. Interaction’s staff were very good at cross-departmental communication, at least the divisional level which is where I worked. I recall from ConJosé that attempts to comment on what another department was doing were often greeted with fury by the people responsible for that department.

I think that's a fair assessment. Had I taken the choice of "not hurting people's feelings," while trying to manage ConJose, then fairly significant pieces of the convention wouldn't have happened at all, or else they would have happened much less well than they did. As it was, it was a pretty near thing, and I'll go to my grave frustrated over the things that went wrong or at least went very mediocre as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not saying we couldn't have another Worldcon in the Bay Area, or that it couldn't be well run. But I think it would have to rely upon "outsiders" -- people not part of the regular Bay Area conrunning circles -- even more so than the previous two did. The only other way to avoid the toxicity that I can see would be to try for one of the existing conventions to try running on their existing management structure, rejecting any outside involvement and just trying to run things at Worldcon scale out of their own resources. Neither alternative sounds very attractive to me.
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*I realize that this doesn't really answer the question posed. Another indirect answer is, "I know when I'd bid and what I'd do to maximize my chances of winning another bid sometime before 2020." To anyone with an understanding of fannish politics, I should think the answer is pretty obvious, and I leave it as an exercise for the student.

Comments

[howeird]

As Just Some Guy Who Attended WorldCon, with only minor clues about the running of cons due to passing aquaintences with a couple of con committee types, I have to say you done good. Very good.

Feathers will always be ruffled in this kind of situation. How permanently they stay that way depends mostly on the ruffle-ee. I've been on boards for theater groups and Peace Corps alumni groups, both of which feature wall to wall strong-willed, intelligent, independent people (I would guess a con committee would share this trait), and know that a chairperson's people skills can only go so far in mending rifts. You can please some of the people some of the time...

I understand about the out-of-pocket hell, I've been there with a couple of community theater projects. But I am kind of surprised that in this valley a Worldcon was not underwritten by one or several corporations. How naive am I being?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

As Just Some Guy Who Attended WorldCon, with only minor clues about the running of cons due to passing aquaintences with a couple of con committee types, I have to say you done good. Very good.

Thank you. People like you are who I did the work for.

I understand about the out-of-pocket hell, I've been there with a couple of community theater projects.

And it's precisely that "out-of-pocket hell" that makes me so furious when I hear people casually assuming that of course conrunners are lining their pockets at fannish expense. I want to put those people in my shoes for a while, or maybe transfer my credit-card balances to them, and see what they say.

But I am kind of surprised that in this valley a Worldcon was not underwritten by one or several corporations. How naive am I being?

A fair bit, I think, with no offense intended. No Worldcon in North America has been "underwritten" in the sense of having substantial portions of its expenses covered by a corporate sponsor. The two Glasgow Worldcons had a form of sponsorship called "subvention," whereby the local equivalent of the Convention & Visitors Bureau granted the convention enough money to where the cost of running the con came down to approximately what it would have cost in the USA -- things cost a lot more in Europe -- but that hardly matters much.

To be "underwritten by one or several corporations," someone would have to know how to apply for the corporate sponsorship. I sure don't know how to do it. Nobody in our organization did. People talk a lot about sponsorships, but we don't have too many people who are any good at going out and getting enough sponsorship to make a huge difference. Oh, you get bits and pieces here and there, and they do help, but you'd need a six-figure sum to make a big impact.

[tkunsman.livejournal.com]

Corprate sponsoships . . . hmmm, not so sure if I would want to see the Hugo awards sponsored by X-company or some other stuff along these lines. Sure having some help is not bad, but I think if you could get X-company to give 6 figures to a Worldcon, they might want to control a lot of activities that might make said con not so fun.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And there you go with the other reasons we don't have much sponsorship: Autonomy. We want to pay a rather substantial premium on our membership costs to avoid Big Bad Evil Corporate Sponsorship.

There was a fairly notorious case -- the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton -- where the convention accepted a lot of (badly needed) sponsorship from Bridge Publications. This led to a lot of bad feeling. When I was organizing Interaction's major events, we went after a bunch of sponsorship, but (for instance) we split what would have been the highest-profile sponsorship (two vertical banners hanging over the stage with the sponsor logos) into sixths, priced at GBP1000 each. Now that's less than USD2,000 each, and yet we had only one taker -- not enough to justify creating the banners in the first place.

People are somewhat afraid that we'd end up holding the L. RON HUBBARD WRITERS OF THE FUTURE hugo awards CEREMONY.

[(Anonymous)]

Having spent a huge amount of my time (when I should have been running my business) trying to raise money for the Glasgow Worldcon, corporate sponsorship is a sore point with me. There seem to be two primary reasons why Worldcon doesn't get sponsorships:

1. Because fandom is a social group that corporations do not like to be associated with; and

2. Because at a mere 5000 people, Worldcon is much to small for large corporations to bother with.

Things would have been a bit easier in the Bay Area, because people here don't immediately get a bad case of fan cooties immediately you mention the term "science fiction", but size would have been an issue. In the UK there were companies who sold SF product to hard core fans who were not interested in Worldcon because the convention was too small and not open to the general public.

The conclusion that I have come to is that Worldcon won't be able to attract serious sponsors unless it works hard to promote itself, which it can best do by promoting its most valuable asset, the Hugo Awards.

- Cheryl