conac

[calimac]

I don't see much in fan writing about what it's really like to run a convention. Right now we're in the home stretch to Potlatch (2 1/2 weeks), and my job as hotel liaison is full of keeping track of fiddly bits. Last Thursday I had a long meeting with the hotel staff, including my first real contact with the person who'll be handling most of the hard at-con logistics. (Previously, I'd been in touch mostly with the sales manager, who operates on a more abstract level.) It took some persuasion to have this be an in-person meeting, which I thought would work better than phone or e-mail, and it did. We walked about the hotel and talked about matters relating to the various rooms we're using.

Since then I've compiled all my notes and fired off e-mails to various committee members, either things they need to know about their responsibilities or questions the hotel needs answered about their preferences and plans. Some of these have been answered quickly and some not. So, more keeping track. The meeting did throw one major complexity into our plans which we are now hashing out, but better we do it now than be blindsided during the convention itself. I count doing my job as having had the wit to suspect from things previously said during the meeting that this problem was likely to come up, and then having the gumption to ask specifically about it.

I see the liaison job as being both speaker-to-the-hotel on behalf of the committee, and speaker-to-the-committee on behalf of the hotel. This means I speak two different dialects. The committee, for instance, says "dealers' room" (I'm old enough to remember when fans said "huckster room"), while the hotel says "sales room." The hotel knows its physical meeting rooms by their names, but it's rather confusing for the committee, who don't live there, to remember which of the synonymously-named Peak Room, Apex Room, and Summit Room is which (strangely, none of them is on the top floor), so I use their functions when speaking to the committee, while I'm not even going to mention to the hotel that we're calling something the Algonquin room, let alone explain what that means. I'm telling them it's our breakout room, which is the closest available word in their language. (One thing I always advise Mythcon committees is never, ever attempt to explain to the hotel or campus about Golfimbul. It will only confuse them.)

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I would draw a distinction between material on how to run a convention and material on what it's like to run a convention.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

A very good point: the second sort of article is a special case of the con report and does tend to be pretty rare: I'm just thinking now that the dearth of such articles probably contributed to the general feeling in large chunks of UK fandom back in the eighties and early to mid-nineties that fanzine fans and conrunners were two separate species who didn't necessarily have that much to say to each other - which reminds me all too easily of the 1995 fan programme that Jenny and I were responsible for.

Coincidentally, your distinction strikes another chord: I'll be spending a chunk of this weekend writing two documents: one on how to steward or run stewarding for an event, and another on what it's like to be a steward or steward organiser at the same event....

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A very special case, since some of the most interesting stuff occurs before the convention ever happens. (But then, that's true of ordinary con reports that begin as trip reports on how we got there, from Art Widner's foo-foo trips of the 1940s and Willis's The Harp Stateside ["Next day began my grim struggles with the transport systems of the world"] on.)