ericcoleman | So, let's talk about this here, since I made a flippant comment elsewhere

This started with a flippant comment on

philady's LJ, but it seems to have escalated, so I feel I should discuss it.

As some of you know, I do not attend Convergence

philady posted a poll here that said

Are you getting stoked for CONvergence?
Yes.
HELL YES!
I'm not going. I'm lame.

Me being me, I said

"I'm not going, the people who run Convergence are lame"

433 took exception to this, and for good reason.

So, the reason for my problems with Convergence go back several years. When I was trying to do the 12 cons in 12 months I contacted them to see about playing.

I have one rule when it comes to cons, if I contact a con about playing, it is my responsibility to pay for my badge. If they comp me, that's a good thing, but that is up to them.

If they contact me, they are contacting me as a pro. I don't make much of my living playing music, but I certainly do at least a little. Unless you are a tiny tiny con, you comp the pros. Period.

The next year I was contacted, please come play at the con. Cool. I had a good time the year before. Oh, if you want to do anything else, you have to buy a badge.

I said that I can't do that, you're asking me to drive there and play a show for no recompense except hopefully selling some CDs, I can't. I was nice about it, I do try to treat any venue I play with a good degree of professionalism, then the guy got all defensive and weird and went off on a rant about how it is not "pay to play" since I would get into my own show free.

I live 200+ miles away from the Twin Cities. At that point driving there and back cost me around 60 bucks. This guy asked me to play a free show that is costing me money, and tells me that it is not "pay to play". If I was local I suppose that I might have had a different reaction. I'm not.

The way I see this is like ... well ... if I was playing at a club, and they said, "sure, you can be on the stage, but if you want to go anywhere else you have to pay the cover charge".

It's a terrible way to treat people who you invite in to perform for and entertain YOUR guests. We are part of the show. You should show us respect. I think I may have had a different reaction if not for the "it's not pay to play thing". It would have just been left there, and I wouldn't go to Convergence. But the guy was an ass.

I know a little about the history of TC cons, and I know that there was a point where too many people got comped, things got out of control. But there is a point at which it is just silly.

So there is why I made my little flippant comment

433. It wasn't the best way to handle it, but maybe this will do some good. I have talked to other folks involved with Convergence about this, but nothing has come of it. It's a big con. You can do what you want because of that. But it does not serve the con well to treat people badly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's what we have with CONvergence - the Concom and Directors are not comped. There's less of a sense of entitlement that way.

MarsCon concom aren't comped either...
We gotta pay.

~Nicky

Good to hear. I hope a lot of other cons move past that outmoded plan.

This is all personal opinion, and I know can be quite divisive. That being said.....

I agree and disagree. I'm okay with not comping the Directors. But then again I'm also a firm believer that the Directors should be on the Concom or Staff in some capacity as well.

I completely disagree on the Concom... if it weren't for the concom there'd be no convention. I don't know about Convergence but at Cap we comp people if they volunteer 12 hours over the course of the weekend, and the con makes money.Plus the comps to the guests of honor, etc. Every last concom member is going to put in way more than 12 hours over the course of the year, so why should they be asked to reach into their pocket to pay to go to the event that they're running and putting on. Just doesn't seem right to me.

There are people involved with running Cap who feel very strongly that I'm an idiot on this issue, and when they're in charge they get to set the rules. So we don't even have a consistent practice from year to year... which goes to some of our lameness. :)

Well ... I can see why though. Cap got really out of control a decade or so ago. I still find it funny (in a vaguelly bitter sort of way) that the guy who scooped gaming out from under me ended up comping a bunch of his gaming group (I heard it may have been as many as 30), and chased most of the rest of the gamers out of the gaming room and screwed up gaming at Cap for years.

Oh there's definitely abuse... and a hard line on it is one way to deal with it. There's a middle ground though. Comp the department heads only. Reimburse staff/panelists/volunteers after the fact, if the con makes money or comes close enough to breaking even that paying off the volunteers is the right public relations thing to do.

While I would comp folks in the following order:

Gophers
Panelists
Staff
Chair

The people at the bottom of the totem pole here may have spent more time than anyone on the con, but they're also (arguably) the ones most responsible for determining whether the con ran a surplus or a deficit.

You have the people who do the actual running of the con

The people who are there to entertain the members of the con

And the people who are responsible for not messing up the con

Makes perfect sense to me

I completely disagree on the Concom... if it weren't for the concom there'd be no convention.

Ditto if there were no members. Indeed, if I had 800 members (and 800xattending membership costs in the bank) I'd have a much better chance of running a ad-hoc con than I would if I only had a concom.

I think that what is rankling me here is that you're putting Conrunning/SMOFfing up above everything else in the FANAC hierarchy. Yes, it's work -- ever spent hours practicing filk, or hours running out fanzines? Hobbies, after all, are our job-away-from-job. Hobbies, after all, are our job away from job.

And, you know, I say this as a guy who's primary FANAC throughout his life has been conrunning.

Am I putting Conrunning/SMOFing above everything? I guess you could make a case for that. I think that's being a bit extreme, but I wouldn't say you're outright wrong. Yes Mr.X may spend hours a day at home practicing their guitar, working on their art, putting together their notes so they can be coherent on a panel. But if there were no one to run a con, they'd have to then devote time to finding an audience as well.

So those 20-40 some odd people who are devoting their time to run the con are doing a service so the rest of the community has somewhere to gather and show off the rest of their hobbies. And yes... I get it that if these people didn't spend those hours practicing/painting/writing/compiling notes/etc there would be little reason for the con in the first place... but that's sort of a chicken/egg question. In essence people running a con are providing a service, by creating circumstances for a given group of people to be in one place at a given time so they can interact with each other on a large scale. Could someone else go through the effort to arrange for a space for 800 of their closest friends to get together and hang out for a weekend and explore their hobbies. Sure. And that's how cons get born.

Oh and from your other reply about membership vs. admission. I think that in a lot of cases the term membership is used to justify the non-profit organization rules. How many conventions give you anything other than admission for the given year's con for your membership price? Somewhere along the line someone smart figured out that if you call it a membership organization you can get tax-exempt status, word spread through SMOFish circles and thus was born "membership"

Non-profits can sell tickets (look at just about any museum, for just one category of example.) The ticket/membership discussion is ancient in fandom - and the reason for "memberships" is that a ticketholder expects to sit and be entertained.

Well, our convention funds the year-round activities of our parent organization, MISFITS (http://www.misfit.org), including educational, charitable, and community events. So that's another reason we all pay to play -- it's a fundraiser as well.

The question then becomes "where does it end?" People will volunteer to be on concom and do very little work just for the free membership.

On CONvergence, there are seven Divisional Directors who, aside from making the big convention decisions, also are overseeing various departments of the convention. The Events Division Director, for example, oversees the Mainstage, Consuite, Programming, and many other departments. I'm the Marketing Division Director, which encompasses the Dealers Room, Art Show, Merchandise, and Advertising. So a lot of us put a lot more hours in running the con than Department Heads do!

I realize that a lot of other cons do it differently, and we didn't like that. We wanted the "Exec" to be fully involved with running the con, and we wanted to split it up so that A) One person couldn't just go crazy and wreck the con; and B) there would be less of a chance of one person burning out. Both have worked -- the convention is bigger and stronger every year, and 5 of the 7 people who started the con are still on the "Exec" 11 years later (the other two joined shortly thereafter). We've also had a great number of concom who have been doing amazing work for 5-10 years, so we're very lucky in that respect too.

We have the Board of Directors responsible for the overall health of the Parent Corporation and making sure that there is a convention. That's about where it ends. Then there's the ConCom headed by the Chair with various Department Heads and whatever staff they deem necessary to run the Department. All I've advocated is comping the department heads and con chair. Others have comped the entire staff without a thought. And again that's a decision, and it can lead to abuse if not kept in check.

So, let's talk about this here, since I made a flippant comment elsewhere

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