There's a difference between "technically feasible" and "a good idea."
Larger metropolitan areas like Boston, greater LA, the SF Bay Area, and Chicago possibly could somehow manage to cobble together a Worldcon committee out of only people who live within easy driving distance of each other and who can gather to meet in person often. Trying to run a Worldcon with that committee is a Really Bad Idea. Oh, you might appear to have, on paper, the skills. What you're unlikely to have is the cultural knowledge of Worldcon as an ongoing entity.
You may have a lot of local conrunners who have great technical skills at various bits and pieces of convention running. But most of them have never attended a Worldcon before, let alone worked on one. Therefore, almost none of them have any idea of the convention's overall culture, and are likely to evaluate everything in terms of how it would work at their local convention.
You might have, for instance, a Masquerade director who runs 200-entry events at your local 10K-member anime con. He doesn't have any connections with Worldcon costuming fandom, and manages to antagonize at least half the entries in your Worldcon masquerade out of sheer ignorance of cultural norms, and when called on it, says, "I run bigger masquerades than any of you, so sit down and shut up; I know what I'm doing. Besides, this is [Big City] and we do things our way here."
Another possibility: Because your talented local conrunners don't travel much outside of their local area, they don't really "get" that a really substantial portion of the members will be coming from a country that isn't the USA. They may well end up doing something that completely antagonizes all of your non-US members on account of not having any non-American members on your committee telling you, that "What you propose doing will really tick off non-American members."
These are not really that hypothetical. The serial numbers have been scratched slightly, but the situations are, alas, all too real.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 06:59 am (UTC)Larger metropolitan areas like Boston, greater LA, the SF Bay Area, and Chicago possibly could somehow manage to cobble together a Worldcon committee out of only people who live within easy driving distance of each other and who can gather to meet in person often. Trying to run a Worldcon with that committee is a Really Bad Idea. Oh, you might appear to have, on paper, the skills. What you're unlikely to have is the cultural knowledge of Worldcon as an ongoing entity.
You may have a lot of local conrunners who have great technical skills at various bits and pieces of convention running. But most of them have never attended a Worldcon before, let alone worked on one. Therefore, almost none of them have any idea of the convention's overall culture, and are likely to evaluate everything in terms of how it would work at their local convention.
You might have, for instance, a Masquerade director who runs 200-entry events at your local 10K-member anime con. He doesn't have any connections with Worldcon costuming fandom, and manages to antagonize at least half the entries in your Worldcon masquerade out of sheer ignorance of cultural norms, and when called on it, says, "I run bigger masquerades than any of you, so sit down and shut up; I know what I'm doing. Besides, this is [Big City] and we do things our way here."
Another possibility: Because your talented local conrunners don't travel much outside of their local area, they don't really "get" that a really substantial portion of the members will be coming from a country that isn't the USA. They may well end up doing something that completely antagonizes all of your non-US members on account of not having any non-American members on your committee telling you, that "What you propose doing will really tick off non-American members."
These are not really that hypothetical. The serial numbers have been scratched slightly, but the situations are, alas, all too real.