Site Selection Misconceptions

[kevin_standlee]

My Google Alerts turned up this blog post that included this misconception about where Worldcons are held:

Every other year, WorldCon alternates between a U.S. and an international location.

That's not true, of course, but as I reviewed in my head the locations of recent Worldcons, I realized that if you've only come to the field after 2001, you might think so. Look at where the Worldcons 2002-onward have been or will be:

2002: San Jose
2003: Toronto
2004: Boston
2005: Glasgow
2006: Anaheim
2007: Yokohama
2008: Denver

Now if you believe in patterns predicting the future, this means good things for the Montreal in 2009 Worldcon bid. OTOH, what about the Australia in 2010 bid? They don't have any opposition, and are unlikely to do so.

If Montreal wins for 2009 and (as seems almost 100% certain) Australia wins for 2010, it will be only the second time in the history of the Worldcon that there have been two consecutive non-US sites. (The only time to date was 1994 Winnipeg and 1995 Glasgow.) And it will be the first time ever that there will be no seated Worldcons in the USA, since in the 1994-96 period we selected Worldcons three years in advance, not two.

I guess this shows that the convention is indeed more global than it once was, although I suppose we'll be able to find detractors who say that it's bad that it's still held in the USA so often. When we were running up to the 2002 Worldcon in San Jose, I and Tom Whitmore did an interview with a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who had done his research and knew something about fandom -- he was wearing a Green Lantern signet ring! -- but said, approximately, "How can you call it a 'world' convention when most of them have been held in the USA."

I replied that while he'd obviously looked at the Long List of Worldcons, it wasn't really fair to look at the entire (at that time) sixty-year history of the convention, but that he should look at the past twenty years instead to see how things were trending.

Since I started attending Worldcons in 1984, there have been or will be (through 2008) Worldcons in these countries:

USA: 16
UK: 3
Canada: 2
Australia: 2
Netherlands: 1
Japan: 1

On the average, two-thirds of Worldcons held after 1983 have been in the USA; however, as I noted above, the percentage has been 50% since 2002.

Will this trend (generally, for more non-US Worldcons) continue? I don't think so. I think it more likely to level out at roughly 3/5 US Worldcons; however, don't try holding me to that prediction for any given five consecutive Worldcons.

Oh, I did go and post a comment to that blog correcting the misconception, as well as clarifying that NASFiC can be held outside the USA (although it never has been).

Comments

[totient]

Although we have a lot of fans in Massachusetts, nobody's muttering about another Worldcon right now

Well, not within earshot of you, anyway.

Boston is one of a very small number of cities which could hold a Worldcon exclusively using local talent. That's not to say that that's how it's done when the Worldcon is in one of those cities, but it could be. Minneapolis might be another. Toronto certainly is not.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Boston is one of a very small number of cities which could hold a Worldcon exclusively using local talent.

We have a lot of fans in this area, but the needs for a Worldcon are not just for the willing -- they're also needs for specific skills, management experience, knowledge of previous Worldcons, etc.

Being foolish enough to believe that all of the talent you need to run a Worldcon is located in your city is a really, really bad idea.

[totient]

The statement was in no way meant as a critique of who was in charge of N4. You had the great luxury of having your pick of local and imported talent, and of course making use of those options is what made N4 so great. But I still disagree with your statement that running Worldcon with only local talent is "impossible", at least here.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

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.

[totient]

There's a difference between "technically feasible" and "a good idea."

Completely agreed.

You might have, for instance, a Masquerade director who runs 200-entry events at your local 10K-member anime con

And we also have Richard Hill, who ran the N4 masquerade, and Susan de Guardiola and Donna Dube, who have each run Costumecon masquerades, and Jill Eastlake, who just ran a 39-entry event at our local 2K+ member Ambitious Regional and who's about as plugged in to Worldcons as it gets. And that's just counting the folks in New England; Byron Connell and Carl and Elaine Mami and a host of others who've run Worldcon or Costumecon masquerades are also nearby enough to be regulars at Boston convention.

The point I am trying to make is that Deb had way more high quality local talent to include in her mix than Toronto did. Not to knock Barb Schofield who did a wonderful job, but she's not going to do it again and there aren't three other strong local possbilities there the way there are here.

[totient]

at Boston convention

... at Boston regional conventions.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, that's understandable. A model that has worked for some conventions is for most or all of the divisions to have one "local" and one "remote" manager, either as co-division heads or as one being the deputy of the other. In theory, you can then partner competent "locals" with "out of towners" who will give that added perspective.

But running distributed committees is really hard work. You have to keep stressing communication, and you have to get people to "buy in" to the idea. I've been on enough committees of different styles to have seen a huge range of reactions. Me, I'm much more likely to over-communicate -- although I reckon many people on the ConJose committee will probably roll their eyes and say, "by 'over-communicate' he means 'micromanage and talk too much.'" I'd rather do that than be King Log from whom no decisions ever get made.

But I digress, as usual.

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

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.

[totient]

That's not to say that that's how it's done

Ah, that sentence makes me sounds like the total neo who doesn't know who he's talking to. I should perhaps have said "That's not to say that's how it should be done".