I should write more...

[bovil]

My tags are lost, but I don't really care. Anyway, on to SMOFcon...

We went in to SMOFcon with minimal responsibilities: Organize the distillery tour for Thursday, turn over excess WFC 2009 supplies still in our hands to SMOFcon.

Both went well. We had 15 tour participants, spent 3 hours at the distillery, and had a great time. Several cases of supplies were turned over to SMOFcon hospitality.

The rest of the weekend?

Thursday night we met up with a bunch of folks in hospitality.

On Friday we hung out with folks in hospitality, mostly. We peeked in at the "Bid Boot Camp" mega-panel. The notes on the board for the portion we missed were interesting, but the discussion going on when we went in was a bit odd. People were arguing that if you didn't sell pre-supports/memberships during your party, you weren't getting anything out of it. Yeah. Not so much. We also went over to Singlebarrel (on the back side of the block) for a cocktail; between 5pm and 6pm you can get a Ramos Gin Fizz there (we did, they were fantastic).

Friday night was the "Open Space Programming Mixer" (though we referred to it as "Open Source Programming Mixer"). The idea was to generate the convention's program during the mixer, but it was logistically challenged. The major pitfalls were:

• One program track should have been scheduled in advance, because all open-source resulted in no prep time and no program to promote the convention on
• Idea forms should have been available all day; the rush to write down forms made my (and others') penmanship worse than usual (online advance submissions would have been cool too)
• The program team should have sorted and grouped similar panel ideas before the "vote" to make it easier on voters and on the team themselves during collation/counting
• Titles, descriptions and participants should have been listed on the "pocket program"
• there should have been a participants roster where people could see if they were scheduled to present and when

In the end, though, the program was pretty good and there were no zero-audience panels. Consuite was a blast after.

Saturday morning I skipped out (more on this elsewhere). Saturday afternoon programming wasn't that interesting to me, so we hung out in hospitality more, and went back to Singlebarrel again for cocktails at 5. Afterward, we went to Maceio Brazilian Steakhouse for meat on swords, and were only an hour late for the Fannish Inquisition. FI is where Worldcons and Worldcon bids present in-person progress reports and answer questions. Some questions were great, some questions were pointless, some were repeats. Consuite was a blast after.

Sunday morning I had a 10am panel with Laurie Mann on using social media in your convention, it was well-attended (and live-tweeted). The 11am "Reno Open Committee Meeting" was less of a committee meeting and more of an extension of the Fannish Inquisition. There was little useful to me there, but since I'm on the committee I went.

We checked out of the hotel and checked luggage, and then did our 3pm party panel with Marah Searle-Kovacevic, Sandra Childress, Gary Blog and Sharon Sbarsky. It started out with more panelists than audience, but quickly collected people. All in all, it went well and we covered a lot of ground.

The post-mortem was at 4pm, we stayed for a bit, got sick of people making the same complaints about open-source programming and went home. We didn't stay for the dead dog party, because in many ways the whole convention was a dead dog party from the moment people walked in the door.

I'm not going to go out of my way to go back to SMOFcon, but if it's close again, I would enjoy attending.

Comments

[baronlaw.livejournal.com]

Didn't you run all those Mad Science parties mostly to promote CC26 after you already had the bid?

[bovil.livejournal.com]

We started 3 years before the vote (our bid), and ran after until the convention. Didn't sell a single membership during a party.

[kproche.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think we sold maybe a half-dozen. Lisa just kept a receipt book and our lock-bag in a drawer where she could reach them if absolutely necessary.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I may have sold a few, but it was rare. I was not about to say No to money, but I didn't have an official membership table at the parties either.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

I find if you're not prepared to sell a membership (or presupport) during a party, someone will inevitably want one. OTOH, one should think of parties as advertising like a flyer--it's more to get your name out there than it is to make money.

Arisia often holds a party at Worldcon to attract not memberships, but pros.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

One of our local anime conventions sells no memberships on-site at events they're promoting at. Never. They pay for a dealer's table, and they hand out cards with a discount code that gets you something like $5 or $10 off over the next 3 weeks if you buy online.

No transcription errors, no cash boxes or processing, and yet they still grow steadily year-on-year and get no complaints about their registration process.