Westercon 73 Business Meeting: Trying to Select Westercon 75

[kevin_standlee]

The Westercon 73 Business Meeting met today to determine what to do about the site of Westercon 75. We first officially received the site selection results, which were that (mainly because no bid filed), None of the Above won the election. The threw the selection to the Business Meeting. Having learned a lesson from 2011, I recommended that we go into Committee of the Whole. That's a kind of parliamentary shell game that allows the meeting to act as a committee, hold multiple test votes, and discuss matters more informally than it can do while in a formal meeting.

Here's the video of the Business Meeting itself:

Watch on YouTube

You will notice that there is a break in the middle, when the meeting resolved itself into committee of the whole. After the break, the meeting resumed, received the report of the committee, and unanimously adopted its recommendations.

By the direction of the Business Meeting, the deliberation of the Committee of the Whole were recorded separately:

Watch on YouTube

Despite the fact that the Business Meeting and the Committee of the Whole include the same people, they are separate meetings, with separate rules. Ben Yalow presided over the COTW, while I presided over the actual Business Meeting.

With just a few minutes to go before we would have had to adjourn until Sunday, we reached a conclusion to Westercon 75 site selection (at least as far as the Westercon 73 Business Meeting was concerned) by creating the "Standlee-Hayes Commission," which consists of me and Lisa and whoever else we recruit. We will consider proposals from groups to host Westercon 75 and select a group to host it. Those of you who think a small select committee should decide where "movable feast" conventions should be held have got your wish, at least in the case of the 2023 Westercon.

The Committee of the Whole also recommended, and the meeting adopted, a recommendation to lower the threshold for determining a site from three-fourths to two-thirds. That wasn't an issue this year (the selection was unanimous), but it did lead to a near-deadlock in 2011. Next year's Business Meeting will have to vote on whether to ratify this change.

I'm not thrilled to be in charge of this site selection. I said in the COTW that I don't expect to get to work on this in earnest until after we get back from Worldcon just after the first of the year. That's also when planning for Westercon 74 needs to ramp up, so I guess we have an incentive to make a decision as soon as we can. What we don't want to do is actually run Westercon 75. One Westercon is enough, thank you.

Comments

[delosharriman]

I'm sorry you got stuck with this.

I had been joking with Lisa about showing up to the Westercon & encouraging people to vote for the Izaak Walton Inn. She figured it wouldn't be too hard to get 5—10 votes, which with nobody running would probably be enough to win. Then I'd have two years to figure out what I was going to do, time in which I could probably inveigle some of the western SMOFs who weren't head-down in Tonopah already to help me.

If I'd thought it would end up this way, I'd have been much more likely to do it!

[kevin_standlee]

You wouldn't have won the main election unless you filed bidding papers no matter how many votes you got; however, with the election thrown to the Business Meeting, you would have had a chance if you'd brought a serious proposal. After all, the only reason Lisa and I stepped forward was because nobody at all had a proposal.

[scott_sanford]

I'm at a loss for a serious proposal - or even a plausible one. Portland fandom has put on great Westercons and no doubt will again, but this is not the year to bid for anything. The current situation has us abnormally disorganized and while we should be fine in two or three years we're just not the fans Westercon needs right now.

I'm a little surprised nobody's shown up with suggestions better than my silly ones:

* that Denny's near the airport
* the vacant lot beside Kevin's house
* Old Man Heinlein's barn
* Point Roberts marina

Although I did get to poke the internet and confirm that Attu Island, while offering an interesting question about eligibility, does not have the function space.

[kevin_standlee]

I was certainly amused that Seaside came up as a possibility among the people with whom I talked here at Loscon. It would be fun. Small (like Tonopah), but fun.

[delosharriman]

The Izaak Walton will work. Lisa and I discussed that pretty thoroughly, because (as Tonopah demonstrates) she is very firm about the distinction between a hoax bid and a joke bid — which is that, if people take the latter seriously enough, you actually can go through with it.

It has the guest rooms, it has function space (in the form of cabins), it has food. There's a modest amount of overflow capacity in the form of various tourist lodges in the Glacier National Park region, and even an airport in the general vicinity for the odd person who doesn't want to arrive by Amtrak. The number of people who would actually come to a convention, the main attraction of which is that it's being held at a site which is served directly by Amtrak (the Empire Builder stops there in daylight both ways, during summer at least), and incidentally has next-to-no Internet access, can't be terribly large. But, by the same token, organizing the convention shouldn't be a huge amount of work, which is why I was willing to consider it in the first place.

[jonesnori]

If that's the place Traincon stopped on the way to Spokane, it's extremely inaccessible. As I recall, all the rooms are upstairs, and there's no elevator. It's a beautiful place, but you'd be leaving a bunch of people out.

Lenore

[delosharriman]

In fact, the Izaak Walton Inn appears to have a number of kinds of accommodations, and they specifically list "first-floor" (which in America normally means ground-floor) rooms in the main building. I'm pretty sure the renovated railway locomotives aren't friendly to people with mobility issues, but the "schoolhouse" rooms appear as though they should be. Considering that the normal clientele of the place is primarily hikers & skiiers, however, I do imagine accessibility is not a top priority overall.

And that is something I would presumably explore by telephone conversation with the management before starting to mount a serious bid effort. But realistically, we are talking about a (potential) 50- to 75-person convention in the middle of Scenic Absolute Nowhere. Bluntly put, from the conversations around Tonopah, it seems that people are looking for reasons not to attend. It's in an out-of-the-way place, not a major city, so no sale. I would expect that to go double for Essex, Montana (even though getting there is arguably easier). Of people who might potentially attend a Westercon, most would find multiple reasons to skip it ; and accessibility concerns are as good as any of the others.

[jonesnori]

Good to know about the first floor rooms. It is a gorgeous area.