You had the great luxury of having your pick of local and imported talent...

Luxury? No. We made a virtue of necessity, by recognizing well before we won that a distributed committee was inevitable and working from the outset to make it function right.

There have been groups that made exactly the same assertion about their local con-running community that you are making about Boston's. Those are Worldcons that are...shall we say, not memorable for excellence.

Perhaps you're right, and it's not "impossible" to run *a* Worldcon with nothing but local talent.

But it wouldn't be a Worldcon worth running.