Westercon 77 to be Hosted by BayCon 2025
Jun. 15th, 2024 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeIt took longer to get this announced while BayCon's parent non-profit organization did some work behind the scenes, but the committee (Lisa and me) that was charged by the Westercon 75 Business Meeting at Loscon 2023 to either find a group interested in running a Westercon in 2025 to to do or to do it ourselves reached a conclusion and "transferred the license" to BayCon 2025.
Westercon 77 to be Hosted by BayCon 2025 is the announcement on the Westercon website.
I must say that I'm relieved no not be in the position of having to organize another Westercon. While I'm very proud of the convention we ran in 2022 in Tonopah, one of the reasons that we were able to do so was thanks to what I have called an "all star" team of conrunners, including multiple Worldcon, NASFiC, and Westercon chairs, who agreed to help put on that convention. In addition, Lisa and I were at that time in a position to "backstop" up to $5,000 in losses the convention might have incurred, although as it happens we never had to do so, as we were able to obtain financial support (grants) from various convention groups that allowed us to do things like have guests of honor, which we initially said we would not do. While the Tonopah Convention Center is very inexpensive to rent (About $600/day including the kitchen and bar) &emdash; so much so that when we won the election in 2019 (a contested election, I will remind people, against a "real city" that we won handily), we already had enough money to cover the largest fixed cost of the convention, which was the convention center rental.
There are some people out there saying that Westercon should die. These are people who have not themselves attended the convention except incidentally when it was part of a convention (notably Loscon) that they were attending anyway. They aren't interested in it anymore, and even though there are still people (not "just five people including Kevin" as one such person put it) who are interested in it.
I'm annoyed that there are at least some people who insist that I'm somehow demanding that the convention continue even though they think that "nobody" attends anymore, where "nobody" appears to be defined as the people making the complaint. This misunderstands my position completely.
I am at heart someone who believes that Westercon's members should decide the future of Westercon. That means that the decision making is vested in the Westercon Bylaws, which the members adopted and can amend as they wish. And that means a majority of the people who still care about the convention's process have to decide it's future — not just those people who used to go but don't attend anymore and think that because they're not interested, then nobody should be interested.
There are also some who point out that most recent Westercons have been combined with other conventions, and who conveniently ignore the non-combined conventions and also ignore the effect that COVID had on one of those would-have-been standalone Westercons (Seattle 2020, which first rescheduled to 2021 and then gave up entirely as the post-COVID recovery proved to be too much for them). That's misleading in other ways, as in some of those cases the "combined" convention was what you might call the "junior partner," while in others like 2019 I think the NASFiC and Westercon elements were pretty equal. (Those who want to kill NASFiC should settle down; take your case to the WSFS court, not the Westercon one.)
It particularly galls me to see people who simply ignore Westercon 74, because they personally did not and never would have gone. While size isn't everything, I do think we had a pretty good chance of having as much as twice as many attendees if (1) COVID hadn't happened and (2) BayCon had not been obliged, for reason I understand, to move from Memorial Day to Independence Day Weekend. Westercon 74 had a large number of Bay Area/Central California members who I'm confident would have made the trip to Tonopah had they not attended BayCon 2022 for their own reasons. The town of Tonopah and the Tonopah Convention Center could have held them all, and I'm sorry they couldn't see what the approximately 160 of us who did attend experienced.
In any event, if the members of Westercon conclude collectively that the convention's time has passed, there is an orderly way to wind it down: repeal the Westercon Bylaws. This was Scenario 1 that the 2023 Westercon Business Meeting considered last year. Repealing the Bylaws would take two years (passage this year and ratification next year), after which there would be two final Westercons without a Business Meeting or Site Selection, with the Last Westercon happening in 2027. At that point, the owner of the Westercon service mark, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, would have to decide what to do with it. They couldn't just hold it indefinitely without holding something to keep the mark alive, because trade/service marks are "use it or lose it," but perhaps if LASFS really does think there's no further interest, they might just formally abandon the mark and leave it to anyone else who might want to try holding an event by that name; it would be up to them.
This year's Business Meeting in Utah will consider ratifying proposals that would effectively "undock" Westercon from the US Independence Day weekend in a procedural sense. (It was not a requirement before, only a "traditional" recommendation.) This would increase the freedom that some groups, including other conventions, would have to try other dates. Possibly Westercon might have a future traveling around and combining with other conventions around Western North America at other times of the year, giving interested fans an incentive to try out other conventions that they've never attended.
Combining the 2025 Westercon with BayCon makes sense, and it might even make sense to consider doing so for 2026 as well. Or maybe we should just wind it down and "hand in the keys" to LASFS. But as long as Westercon has its own bylaws and is governed by its members, it should be the members who decide.
Westercon 77 to be Hosted by BayCon 2025 is the announcement on the Westercon website.
I must say that I'm relieved no not be in the position of having to organize another Westercon. While I'm very proud of the convention we ran in 2022 in Tonopah, one of the reasons that we were able to do so was thanks to what I have called an "all star" team of conrunners, including multiple Worldcon, NASFiC, and Westercon chairs, who agreed to help put on that convention. In addition, Lisa and I were at that time in a position to "backstop" up to $5,000 in losses the convention might have incurred, although as it happens we never had to do so, as we were able to obtain financial support (grants) from various convention groups that allowed us to do things like have guests of honor, which we initially said we would not do. While the Tonopah Convention Center is very inexpensive to rent (About $600/day including the kitchen and bar) &emdash; so much so that when we won the election in 2019 (a contested election, I will remind people, against a "real city" that we won handily), we already had enough money to cover the largest fixed cost of the convention, which was the convention center rental.
There are some people out there saying that Westercon should die. These are people who have not themselves attended the convention except incidentally when it was part of a convention (notably Loscon) that they were attending anyway. They aren't interested in it anymore, and even though there are still people (not "just five people including Kevin" as one such person put it) who are interested in it.
I'm annoyed that there are at least some people who insist that I'm somehow demanding that the convention continue even though they think that "nobody" attends anymore, where "nobody" appears to be defined as the people making the complaint. This misunderstands my position completely.
I am at heart someone who believes that Westercon's members should decide the future of Westercon. That means that the decision making is vested in the Westercon Bylaws, which the members adopted and can amend as they wish. And that means a majority of the people who still care about the convention's process have to decide it's future — not just those people who used to go but don't attend anymore and think that because they're not interested, then nobody should be interested.
There are also some who point out that most recent Westercons have been combined with other conventions, and who conveniently ignore the non-combined conventions and also ignore the effect that COVID had on one of those would-have-been standalone Westercons (Seattle 2020, which first rescheduled to 2021 and then gave up entirely as the post-COVID recovery proved to be too much for them). That's misleading in other ways, as in some of those cases the "combined" convention was what you might call the "junior partner," while in others like 2019 I think the NASFiC and Westercon elements were pretty equal. (Those who want to kill NASFiC should settle down; take your case to the WSFS court, not the Westercon one.)
It particularly galls me to see people who simply ignore Westercon 74, because they personally did not and never would have gone. While size isn't everything, I do think we had a pretty good chance of having as much as twice as many attendees if (1) COVID hadn't happened and (2) BayCon had not been obliged, for reason I understand, to move from Memorial Day to Independence Day Weekend. Westercon 74 had a large number of Bay Area/Central California members who I'm confident would have made the trip to Tonopah had they not attended BayCon 2022 for their own reasons. The town of Tonopah and the Tonopah Convention Center could have held them all, and I'm sorry they couldn't see what the approximately 160 of us who did attend experienced.
In any event, if the members of Westercon conclude collectively that the convention's time has passed, there is an orderly way to wind it down: repeal the Westercon Bylaws. This was Scenario 1 that the 2023 Westercon Business Meeting considered last year. Repealing the Bylaws would take two years (passage this year and ratification next year), after which there would be two final Westercons without a Business Meeting or Site Selection, with the Last Westercon happening in 2027. At that point, the owner of the Westercon service mark, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, would have to decide what to do with it. They couldn't just hold it indefinitely without holding something to keep the mark alive, because trade/service marks are "use it or lose it," but perhaps if LASFS really does think there's no further interest, they might just formally abandon the mark and leave it to anyone else who might want to try holding an event by that name; it would be up to them.
This year's Business Meeting in Utah will consider ratifying proposals that would effectively "undock" Westercon from the US Independence Day weekend in a procedural sense. (It was not a requirement before, only a "traditional" recommendation.) This would increase the freedom that some groups, including other conventions, would have to try other dates. Possibly Westercon might have a future traveling around and combining with other conventions around Western North America at other times of the year, giving interested fans an incentive to try out other conventions that they've never attended.
Combining the 2025 Westercon with BayCon makes sense, and it might even make sense to consider doing so for 2026 as well. Or maybe we should just wind it down and "hand in the keys" to LASFS. But as long as Westercon has its own bylaws and is governed by its members, it should be the members who decide.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-15 08:11 pm (UTC)Decoupling Westercon from July 4 neatly answers this question.