Potlatch: the Scalzi Rule discussion
Mar. 3rd, 2009 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacSome - including Scalzi himself, as it turns out - may ask, What's the Scalzi Rule? From the program book: "Some s-f professionals, convention programmers, and other fans have requested audience members at s-f convention panels to refrain from making statements, limiting their participation to asking questions if they wish to address the panelists."
My contribution to this hour's discussion was to argue that it's perfectly reasonable to make a statement, to put forward a proposition, if your desire is to elicit reactions, to find out what the panelists think of it. And I retold this story from Walt Willis's The Harp Stateside (page 171 of your Warhoon 28): "The most interesting part was the question period, when Jim Harmon got up and made a speech the purport of which was that Joe Gibson was an imbecile. As if this were a mere procedural error, Moskowitz [the moderator] told him he must ask a question, not make a speech. Whereupon Jim, logically enough, asked the panel whether or not it agreed that Joe Gibson was an imbecile."
It now also occurs to me that this account is clear evidence that the Scalzi Rule has been around since at least 1952.
To nobody's surprise, it was generally agreed that the Scalzi Rule is out of place at a convention like Potlatch, where the panels are all about interaction between the panel and the audience. That's certainly my practice as a moderator. I expect that everybody in a Potlatch programming room is an intelligent person with interesting things to say. What the panelists are is privileged: they get to speak first, they get to speak most, and they get to interject whenever they want to. The audience members can only speak when called on, and in a group of any size and liveliness, any one of them is likely only to be called on once each, simply because of time restrictions.
That certainly was the result on the ACH panel, where the audience was just chock-full of brilliant observations, some of which called for comments from the panelists and some of which didn't, but were equally mind-opening to hear. I just did my best to follow the rules of audience handling as I've learned them at the feet of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wild_irises and other great moderators: acknowledge that there's a forest of worthy hands but don't hesitate on choosing; pick 2-4 (but no more) people at once, so that a couple can relax knowing they're in the queue; put the queue on hold temporarily if a comment calls for a quick survey of a lot of people; call folk by name if you know their names.*
A lot of the Scalzi Rule discussion was on how to be a good audience member, and I spent the rest of the hour trying to be one. To many of the things said I could have had a response, but I realized that response either mostly amounted to "I agree" or would have been rather off-topic. Besides, I'd had my say, so I just sat and listened in contentment.
If I had said anything else, it would have been in response to the defense of the Scalzi Rule offered by several people: that it's a prophylactic intended to protect the panel from "That Guy": the one who hijacks it to make an egocentric speech. Fair enough, but in my experience, That Guy is as likely to be a panelist as an audience member (a point made by others, so "I agree"), and in either case it's the moderator's ad hoc duty to deal with it. When it is an audience member, it's often a person with no sense of social boundaries (there's one we know at local cons under the rubric of "The Hand That Would Not Die") who's unlikely to be deterred by any rules. It just seems to me that imposing the Scalzi Rule as a response to that problem is overkill, like prohibiting passengers from taking liquid on an airplane because some terrorist might make a liquid-based bomb. It's both insufficient to address the problem and has too many negative externalities on innocent people. Even at a stone Baycon, an audience comment can be just as interesting and productive as a question, and preventing speeches needs a different approach.
* Usually that's their first name, even if you don't know them personally; we're all friends in fandom. On the other hand, I moderated a panel at Worldcon a few years ago where this old guy in the front row raised his hand, and though I knew his name I just couldn't bring myself to call him "Gene". I called him "Mr. Wolfe".
My contribution to this hour's discussion was to argue that it's perfectly reasonable to make a statement, to put forward a proposition, if your desire is to elicit reactions, to find out what the panelists think of it. And I retold this story from Walt Willis's The Harp Stateside (page 171 of your Warhoon 28): "The most interesting part was the question period, when Jim Harmon got up and made a speech the purport of which was that Joe Gibson was an imbecile. As if this were a mere procedural error, Moskowitz [the moderator] told him he must ask a question, not make a speech. Whereupon Jim, logically enough, asked the panel whether or not it agreed that Joe Gibson was an imbecile."
It now also occurs to me that this account is clear evidence that the Scalzi Rule has been around since at least 1952.
To nobody's surprise, it was generally agreed that the Scalzi Rule is out of place at a convention like Potlatch, where the panels are all about interaction between the panel and the audience. That's certainly my practice as a moderator. I expect that everybody in a Potlatch programming room is an intelligent person with interesting things to say. What the panelists are is privileged: they get to speak first, they get to speak most, and they get to interject whenever they want to. The audience members can only speak when called on, and in a group of any size and liveliness, any one of them is likely only to be called on once each, simply because of time restrictions.
That certainly was the result on the ACH panel, where the audience was just chock-full of brilliant observations, some of which called for comments from the panelists and some of which didn't, but were equally mind-opening to hear. I just did my best to follow the rules of audience handling as I've learned them at the feet of
wild_irises and other great moderators: acknowledge that there's a forest of worthy hands but don't hesitate on choosing; pick 2-4 (but no more) people at once, so that a couple can relax knowing they're in the queue; put the queue on hold temporarily if a comment calls for a quick survey of a lot of people; call folk by name if you know their names.*A lot of the Scalzi Rule discussion was on how to be a good audience member, and I spent the rest of the hour trying to be one. To many of the things said I could have had a response, but I realized that response either mostly amounted to "I agree" or would have been rather off-topic. Besides, I'd had my say, so I just sat and listened in contentment.
If I had said anything else, it would have been in response to the defense of the Scalzi Rule offered by several people: that it's a prophylactic intended to protect the panel from "That Guy": the one who hijacks it to make an egocentric speech. Fair enough, but in my experience, That Guy is as likely to be a panelist as an audience member (a point made by others, so "I agree"), and in either case it's the moderator's ad hoc duty to deal with it. When it is an audience member, it's often a person with no sense of social boundaries (there's one we know at local cons under the rubric of "The Hand That Would Not Die") who's unlikely to be deterred by any rules. It just seems to me that imposing the Scalzi Rule as a response to that problem is overkill, like prohibiting passengers from taking liquid on an airplane because some terrorist might make a liquid-based bomb. It's both insufficient to address the problem and has too many negative externalities on innocent people. Even at a stone Baycon, an audience comment can be just as interesting and productive as a question, and preventing speeches needs a different approach.
* Usually that's their first name, even if you don't know them personally; we're all friends in fandom. On the other hand, I moderated a panel at Worldcon a few years ago where this old guy in the front row raised his hand, and though I knew his name I just couldn't bring myself to call him "Gene". I called him "Mr. Wolfe".
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