2025 Westercon Bid Deadline Nears

[kevin_standlee]

No bids have file for Westercon 77 (2025, to be selected at Westercon 75 Anaheim this year). The deadline for filing a bid to be on the ballot is April 15. If no bids file, the election will proceed with only write-in spaces on the ballot, as the final deadline for being eligible for election through the normal process is the end of site selection voting on July 1. If no bid files by then, or should no filed bid get a majority of the votes in the normal election process, then once again, the Westercon Business Meeting on July 2 will have to decide how to handle the selection of Westercon 77. The Business Meeting can either award a bid to any committee they choose, or they can say they are unable to make a decision and punt the task to LASFS, owners of the Westercon service mark.

There are some people who seem convinced that the Business Meeting isn't allowed to make the decision at all, and that LASFS must always decide if the election isn't conclusive. Such people aren't actually reading the rules. I know what those rules say: I wrote most of them! (That is, I rewrote most of them during the last complete revision of the Westercon bylaws thirty years ago.

Meanwhile, from my experience in Tonopah last year, I know that there are people are don't understand that if you get to the point where the Business Meeting has to make a decision, nearly all of the rules are suspended. That is, rules requiring that only non-profit entities can run Westercon, or that it be held in certain portions of Western North America, or just about anything else, don't apply. Only the requirement that it be held somewhere in North America west of 104° west longitude or in Hawaii (anyone who wants to bring up the silly provision about Australia can swallow a cork hat now, thank you) is left.

Note that there is no requirement that Westercon be held on the US Independence Day weekend. It is traditional but not required. Inasmuch as BayCon has decided that they own that weekend now for general SF genre conventions in that region, I think a bid for a different date in 2025 might have a better chance of drawing attendees. Maybe someone might want to consider Memorial Day or even a non-holiday weekend?

Comments

[delosharriman]

The Australia provision is a fine piece of fannish humour, but I've always wondered why it didn't contemplate a tie-up between Australia and Canada, which really seems much more likely than one between Australia and the USA. I don't plan to start a campaign to rewrite the provision, though.

[kevin_standlee]

Nah, it was a whimsical amendment introduced by the DUFF delegate at the 1998 Westercon that would have simply flat-out added Australia to the Westercon-eligible places. A late amendment by Ben Yalow kneecapped it by adding the annexation language. So it doesn't have any practical effect, but an attempt to remove it also failed, and nearly led to the annexation language being removed instead.

This might also be seen as a bit of fannish "revenge" for a different bit of fannish whimsy by a DUFF delegate going the other direction, that being when the Australian NatCon ended up selecting Seattle as the site of (as I recall) the 1985 or 1986 Australian National SF Convention. They thought better of it and held an actually-in-Australia NatCon, but as I recall there was a single panel at that year's Norwescon that claimed to be the actual Aussie NatCon for that year.

[delosharriman]

You know, I think the Australian Natcon picked Seattle that one time pretty much explains the whole thing.

[totient]

Hee! There's some precedent, even. Maybe they could just annex Rottnest Island.

[lindadee]

It was Jerry Kaufman who made the proposal to hold the Australian NATCon in Seattle.

[scott_sanford]

I don't recall reading about BayCon's specific reasons for hopping from Memorial Day weekend to Independence Day weekend when they returned from their Covid hiatus, but things like this happen. If they don't go back, a Westercon in late May in the Bay Area is completely reasonable.

[radar]

Hotels seriously jacked up their rates on everything to recover from COVID, and it wouldn't surprise me if BayCon made the move for that reason, as Memorial Day Weekend probably made it even more expensive and their registration numbers have suffered in recent years.

Of course, there are likely other reasons, but at the end of the day all small conventions are getting hosed right now and the economy is making it really hard for a lot of people to justify attending a convention, let alone running one.

[scott_sanford]

I remember one conversation among the concom about how our local convention was just the wrong size. OryCon, pre-covid, usually ran about 1500 people, about the same size as Baycon the last time I looked.

If you've got 150 people, you're a relatively small group and can pick and choose among mid-size hotels for their accommodations and function space because the event will fit pretty much anywhere.

If you've got 15,000 people converging on the city, great; your event is huge enough to occupy a major city's convention center and will have the budget to match.

In between? Not so much. Even in a reasonably large city there aren't that many hotels that have both the rooms and the function space for an event that size. (In Portland Oregon, there are three.) But the event is too small for convention centers and really big venues to even look at.

[radar]

Oh yeah. If you have a convention of ~500 that has particular needs (an average Costume-Con is about that size and needs a large ballroom with a big stage and lights and sound, a medium-sized ballroom for vendors, and at least 4 panel rooms- more is better), it makes finding a venue complicated and potentially expensive.