This weekend I was at Anime Conji in San Diego having similar thoughts.
(While there was the brief thought that I'd be ecstatic if half the people at Conji showed up for ConJecture, until I heard that they'd past 1,500 members, and remembered that ConJecture ended up at a different hotel and has a much tighter space)
I do agree that there does seem to be a lot of the same people running Worldcon as there were around 1999-2000 when I started going, and have observed that the "young guard" there are already in our forties, or late thirties - except for a few in the n+1-th generation, and that includes a lot of the current Chicago crew.
From other discussions, I suspect that one thing that might help is to lower the costs of membership. I know of efforts to remove the tie between the supporting membership rate and the attending rate, but even that was fought fiercely. So I fear that (Worldcon) fandom may be beginning like the school district in Arizona I heard about years ago where residents of a seniors only development packed the school board with their only agenda being to keep their taxes as low as they could.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-03-28 01:35 pm (UTC)This weekend I was at Anime Conji in San Diego having similar thoughts.
(While there was the brief thought that I'd be ecstatic if half the people at Conji showed up for ConJecture, until I heard that they'd past 1,500 members, and remembered that ConJecture ended up at a different hotel and has a much tighter space)
I do agree that there does seem to be a lot of the same people running Worldcon as there were around 1999-2000 when I started going, and have observed that the "young guard" there are already in our forties, or late thirties - except for a few in the n+1-th generation, and that includes a lot of the current Chicago crew.
From other discussions, I suspect that one thing that might help is to lower the costs of membership. I know of efforts to remove the tie between the supporting membership rate and the attending rate, but even that was fought fiercely. So I fear that (Worldcon) fandom may be beginning like the school district in Arizona I heard about years ago where residents of a seniors only development packed the school board with their only agenda being to keep their taxes as low as they could.