Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

This morning at Westercon, I moderated the "Fannish Inquisition," where bids for future Westercons, the seated Westercon, seated Worldcons, and bids for future Worldcons made presentations and took questions. We had to squeeze a little bit for time (it's probably better to do it as two separate panels), but we got through everyone who was there. Lisa recorded everything, but we do not expect to get it uploaded until we get home due to the other things we have to do here and due to only standard (slower) internet connections being included in the room rate.

( San Jose in 2018 Worldcon Officially Launches )

We spent the afternoon after the Fannish Inquisition doing our own things. I had several smoffish discussions with various people, while Lisa took Scott Sanford (who was able to come to Westercon as a last-minute helper for dealer AmyCat) to lunch. We didn't see any other programming, but I observed that the halls were very quiet between program changeover times, so a pretty high percentage of the members must have been interested in the program.

The SFSFC Board of Directors held its regular three-times-a-year meeting this morning in Fremont. Some of the discussions we held there reminded me of a particular milestone I personally reached recently that I forgot to mention here.

( ConJose Had a Surplus. I, OTOH... )

Two weeks ago, right after Westercon 66, I made the final payment on the $50,000 401(k) loan. From my point of view, my own personal expenses associated with the 2002 Worldcon were paid off as of July 12, 2013. Whew!

With the minor storm over L.A.con IV deciding that spending more than $30,000 to provide wi-fi service to their members was not a good use of the convention's resources (I agree), there has been some discussion of what a Worldcon spends its money on. There are some (IMO uniformed) people out there who have a hard time thinking that a Worldcon is spending money on anything because so much of what the convention must do is either invisible or taken for granted. So I dug through my files and did a rough breakdown of ConJose's income and expense by major category. I had to fiddle around quite a bit because the budget was arranged by division, but the expenses that get people excited are not necessarily neatly arranged. That's why there are several "other" categories and a miscellaneous into which a lot of small items from throughout the convention were rolled. If you really want to know this at a fine level of detail, e-mail me and I'll send you the line-item budget.

Another adjustment I made was to show only the net Art Show income (after paying the artists), rather than the gross. (ConJose's records showed the gross sales as income -- needed for sales-tax reporting -- and the payments to artists as a convention operating expense. I consider it misleading to show 15% of the convention's revenue that way because it's sequestered -- everything except the convention's commission goes to the artists.

( Here be pie charts )

Again, anyone who wants the fine details behind these numbers should write to me directly and I will send you the latest and I think last version (revision 50) of the ConJose budget, which shows every line item on which we received or spent money.

This message is posted as public. If you want to send it on to someone else or point people at it, I don't care, and you don't need to ask my permission to do so.

Edit, 10:45: Based on a comment, added explanation that expenses were also $850,000, the same as revenue.

Edit, 11:30: Modified the pie charts so that the charts themselves and their ScrapBook Gallery descriptions include the gross amount of approximately $850,000.

We actually made the decision on these awards back in September, but there was a delay in getting an acceptance confirmation. We obviously couldn't announce them, or even tell the other applicants they hadn't won, until we got confirmations from all the winners.

( Press release text; many of you will have seen this elsewhere if my press-release announcements list is working )

I'm pleased we were able to present these scholarships again, and hope we do so next year as well. I know I find SMOFCon valuable, and I think it's an important thing to encourage people to learn how others run their conventions. We get better conventions when we're communicating with each other, and not just by e-mail, LJ, etc. There's still value in in-person meetings.