A Few WisCon 44 (2020) Followups

[brainwane]

Quick notes before I forget.

Otherwise volunteering: The Otherwise Award needs to be more structured about "here are volunteer opportunities we have" in a more accessible way, the way WisCon is! A brief list of some things we need help with (you can email volunteer`@`otherwiseaward.org):

* writing blog posts about exciting stuff our former winners and fellows are up to
* helping with data entry/spam-killing/general textual updates for our website
* helping me with the auction (either in Madison or remotely, including by doing things like live-tweeting/Discord-checking)
* serving on a future jury
* apprenticing to our bookkeeper
* apprenticing to our auctioneer (I am sure I will not be the auctioneer forever!)
* making art for next year's winner
* sourcing/making merchandise to sell in our online shop
* dealing with our stuff-to-auction storage in Madison
* spreading the word to get more people to nominate work

And more, I'm sure.

This came out of the discussion following the "renaming the Otherwise Award" panel which people seemed to appreciate -- may have time to talk about that in a followup post.

Discord: There was a Discord chat this year. It made some things easier. Naturally, some people suggested: what if we do this every year?

I'll quote and slightly edit what I said in response to one discussion:

I appreciate the desire for a textual backchannel for all of WisCon even in years when we can meet in person. I agree about how the experience of finding centralized discussion is better this year. I agree that being able to do backchannel only among the registered members (as opposed to public, Twitter/Dreamwidth/Google Group/etc.) is reallllly good. But there are a few reasons I am leery of doing this especially with Discord:

1. The Safety team would have to staff up to be available and to keep an eye on both physical and digital spaces simultaneously (we could mitigate this by getting more volunteers and having some more bots to help alert Safety of stuff to look at)

2. Discord is closed-source and its ownership is in that startuppy kind of approach that I have distrust for (we could look at alternatives)

3. An important part of WisCon, most years, is how most of your conversations are ephemeral and not recorded/saved/searchable; having a central text backchannel increases the invitation to create a shared archived searchable record of members' thoughts/conversations (and I do not trust Discord to be the home for that in the long term), which would be something we'd have to remediate, and that feels more complicated

....

Zulip/Slack/Discord/similar as backchannel for staff feels like a different thing that I see fewer problems with

....

[in response to the fact that Slack (for the free plan) only displays most recent messages]: Slack still has those archived messages... it's a mitigation

Zulip is better than Slack or Discord in most ways IMO. But the ONLY reason I hesitate to recommend Zulip for WisCon right now: I am waiting for them to implement https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/168 muting/blocking. Then I can shout to all fannish groups and say USE ZULIP.

I emailed email personnel`@`sf3.org to say:

1. there's a conversation about all this stuff, for the several minutes prior to [link to Discord discussion]
2. I'm willing to put in 3-5 hours of work or a small monetary donation to help figure this out next year

and that way WisCon's tech committee can take me up on that when they have a chance to take a breath. Anyone else who is interested, please follow my lead; I know I can't do this alone but together we can make a backchannel 2.0 that suits more people's needs and rises to meet our values.

One thing that came up in oral discussion in a small spontaneous videocall: some people really like the topic-based structure because then they know, for example, if they go into a "video games" channel, it's ok to just start saying stuff about videogames, to have conversations about that, etc. I only realized today how that didn't particularly suit me, because I trust that I'll be able to meet any person at WisCon and have an interesting conversation with them that ranges over various topics, and I want to basically start with the person, not the topic -- connection BEFORE content, not connection-through-content. The way I ended up doing this was by announcing (in the spontaneous meetup channels and in the "lobby"): "hey, I'm holding an impromptu short Jitsi videocall right now for the next 20 minutes, anyone want to talk?" and talking fluidly with the 1-6 people who showed up, about whatever topics came up. There's one day left in the con and perhaps I'll try some experiments to see whether there's a Discord-based channel/home (or whether I could make one) for the kind of conversation I'm talking about.

What if we did more of this? People also talked about year-round or more frequent WisCon or mini-WisCon events. Again I'll quote/edit what I said:

There needs to be Safety consistently available to moderate the space and help it stay safe. If the current Safety staff say, after this year's con, "it took more people than it usually does, here is how many person-hours it took over the course of 5 days to moderate this" then accounting for that is going to be a key factor in how often this kind of space can exist.

However! WisCon-inspired mini events that WisCon publicizes, like "here are this month's WisCon-inspired events that are indepedently run and organized" would be lower-stakes; 5-10 different book groups, cons, meetups, friend groups, etc. all around the world could take turns hosting online WisCon-ish panels, and discussion in ephemeral spaces (the "ephemeral" is important).

I love the idea of different meetup groups, book clubs, institutions like the Speculative Literature Foundation, etc. taking on the task of rotating around having WisCon-ish panels/sessions remotely, a few per month, and hosting ephemeral discussion about it -- WisCon could publicize and link to it but not say "this is run by WisCon and will be monitored by WisCon's Safety folks", just, this is an org trying to keep WisCon-y stuff going. Like FOGCon & Think Galacticon stuff -- cross-publicizing.

Otherwise Auction: went all right! I may have more thoughts later. This was meant to be a quick post. Very grateful to everyone who donated, helped work on the auction, bid, and/or laughed/enjoyed!

Next year's guests: People who read this journal may know that I am kind of a Zen Cho superfan and am extremely excited that she is one of next year's Guests of Honor. I have emailed in and nominated her for WisCon GoH a few times now. At Penguicon a few years ago I proposed and led a Zen Cho appreciation session that ended up just being me monologuing about themes in her work for 45 minute. Thus: I will be proposing some panels for WisCon 45 as soon as I can.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Thanks so much for this thoughtful followup. I've been really enjoying having a Discord in the background and it feels like it does add a valuable dimension for me, but I can definitely see why it's an added vulnerability, especially seeing all the conversations today about how to export content.

I think what felt most valuable to me as the parent of a small child was being able to still participate, have conversations, and be engaged during her naps and other necessary alone time. I know there is some childcare at wiscon but at 1.5 she's still in a clingy barnacle can't leave with strangers stage, so I'm not sure how much that would have helped if we'd been able to go in person this year.

It was also kind of nice to have a chat space to ask questions and find out what's going on before heading to something, and seeing visible names/pronouns was really nice. I'm a little mixed about the chats for panels, to be honest -- the conversations were valuable but i had a lot of trouble getting distracted by the conversation, especially with short panels.

I love slack but i agree about the 10k lock on messages falling short of true ephemerality. I guess if you only had it live for a month you could use people's registration fees to cover month's subscription and give people more privileges to block people -- in free slack that's been a problem at ingress events, because they assume you'd have no reason to block someone at your company, and the limited roles are a paid feature. I wonder if the fancier version might also have settings to limit data retention, but the blocking thing might be a deal breaker.

I love thinking about it in terms of connection before content. I'm used to using chats like this to prep for an event then largely ignoring them once everyone gets to the location except for the occasional logistics check. (Again coming from the weird context of ingress, which is also hierarchical and competitive in maybe problematic ways.)

It does seem like trying to scale the discord up to a live con at the ratio of one channel per panel would be utterly unmanageable, but maybe there would be some value in keeping a discord similarly sized to this year's or deliberately scaled down in the future? As i noted in my survey (which i filled out before seeing this) I'm sufficiently invested in the idea of a chat that I'd be willing to help out if there's a way i could be useful within the constraints of my childcare obligations and living on the east coast.

I really really love the idea of having wiscon spinoff events throughout the year!

The Otherwise auction was super fun! I'm somehow always pleasantly surprised by that, don't know why my brain expects so little from auctions! Thank you for everything you did to make that and the whole convention happen! It is definitely one of the highlights of my 2020 so far.

[kore]

That's a great point re childcare, and it applies to accessibility too (I hear lots about cons but will probably never go to one because I have agoraphobia and panic disorder).

[seekingferret]

There's one day left in the con and perhaps I'll try some experiments to see whether there's a Discord-based channel/home (or whether I could make one) for the kind of conversation I'm talking about.

Just start a DM. Discord supports group DMs for up to 10 people if you want to talk in a group. I started a few DMs over Wiscon to have conversations more wide ranging than would be covered in just a theme channel.

[brainwane]

I think you didn't understand my desire here for openness to conversation with strangers, and openness to strangers who would be able to discover and come into a pre-existing conversation. Group DMs don't seem applicable.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I didn't quite get that. I confess that's a mode of conversation at cons I often find incredibly annoying, when I'm having a conversation with someone and random people just insert themselves. DMs accommodates a mode of conversation with strangers at cons I'm much more comfortable with- Hey, we started out discussing the panel we just saw, but we have other things to say to each other and we're blocking the doorway keeping new people from coming in, let's find a quiet corner or somewhere to sit down and continue talking.

[brainwane]

Our preferences differ, then; I like the "let's continue and move this conversation" experience and the "new people can join" bit as well.

This might be a skills issue. If you would like to get better at making the "new person is interested in joining conversation" interaction more enjoyable and graceful for everyone (including figuring out that perhaps the new person won't be a great addition to the conversation everyone else wants to have, and dealing reasonably smoothly with that to most people's satisfaction), that's a skill you can learn.

[brainwane]

Also, I wasn't asking for advice, and I don't like getting unsolicited advice, especially starting with "Just [do x]".

[seekingferret]

I'm sorry, I interpreted I'm looking to experiment as I'm looking for ideas on how to experiment. When I proposed "Just do x" I was proposing it as an experiment, not a prescription. My apologies for misunderstanding and not being clear.

[brainwane]

Thank you.

some followup throughts on the Discord stuff

[brainwane]

To quote some things I've said in Discord conversations about this since the original post:

for me: there is no substitute for the experience of seeing and conversing with friends and values-aligned strangers in person. All the technological things we can do to whack-a-mole particular subsets of that experience (textual chat, videocalls large and small, livestreams, better audio, birds-of-a-feather meetups, etc.) are pale shadows as [another person] said. I'm sure we'll talk about this in the post-mortem.

And:

In case anyone thinks I am saying: NO! I VETO! or something like that: I do not have the power to veto anything (I'm not on the concom) and I believe I hear what people are saying about things that worked well for them this year. But! I am trying to reduce any accidental impression of consensus, since if no one says "hmmmm" then in this text medium it can be easy to accidentally seem like we're all agreed on this. Also! Let's note survivorship bias (the only people talking here about this issue are people who decided to come to WisCONline, AND got ok enough with saying things in Discord to talk).

[muccamukk]

I see you've subscribed to me, hi! You're welcome to comment on my con report <3

I just wanted to say a) Thank you so much for all your work! It was a great con, and I mostly enjoyed it <3

b) discord did and didn't work for me as a con experience, because hey it was everyone in a room talking, and that was a fun way to spend a weekend, but on the other hand it was so busy and had so many channels, that I ended up just sticking to a couple quieter channels so I didn't get overwhelmed. Having those kinds of spontaneous conversations actually ON discord in the general channels didn't seem to work because THERE WERE TOO MANY PEOPLE OMG! whereas at a con you'd have that either one to one or in a small group. And every time people went on to video chat I had to peace out because I'm on shitty rural internet, and I can't DO video chat. So there was not, for me, a way to find the balance of people first intimate conversation you'd get at an in person con.

In terms of having a digital backchannel to the live in person con that will hopefully happen next year: I'm hoping to go to the actual con, but maybe a scaled down version would be fun? The safety staff seems, to me, to be the big hurdle.

[libskrat]

Question: Is WisCon-the-name trademarked?

Possibly I am catastrophizing here -- it is a thing I have been known to do -- but the potential problem I'm seeing is somebody/ies glomming onto the WisCon name to put on events contrary to WisCon principles, and WisCon having to get into a big public brawl over it.

A trademark Cease and Desist, while certainly unpleasant, is likely to be a quicker, quieter solution.

[cuddyclothes]

You did such a fantastic job at the auction!

As far as the rest of it, it was slightly intimidating having so many people. But I don't go to cons IRL. I stopped in at the disability channels. I think I most enjoyed the Dreamwidth channel, because it's not something that gets discussed.

[transcendancing]

I am grateful for the Discord because it meant I could join in at all. I am so glad and grateful I got to go to the convention at all, and it was certainly something that... just... how the spaces was as a whole and how people were interacting and the focus on safety and visibility and accessibility and all the 'we are always trying to do better' was just, so breathtakingly wonderful. It's pretty much all I hoped it would be on that level.

I struggled between work and timezone to join in with anything other than the occasional smaller channel conversations.

In person I generally meet and enjoy company with people in wide ranging ways similar to how you describe them. But I valued the spaces where people were there to talk about a particular thing because it made it an easier access, especially at off peak times. Revisiting panel conversations and stream conversations after the fact was... too overwhelming and I couldn't follow it and it made me feel like I'd missed out - I think that's part of the ephemeral nature of things you mention. In absence of watching with others live, I struggled and ultimately couldn't go back and enjoy the panel even though the content is something right in my wheelhouse.

It's a lot of food for thought. I definitely feel I got great value from the small amount I could attend. I am so grateful for the opportunity and I appreciate all the volunteer effort and commitment to making things happen, and as safe and smooth as possible for people.

[suncani]

Inital thoughts are:

It was my first time attending WisCon although I have attended similarly aligned cons. I think the panels, for the most part, worked well and it was good to have a central space straight after the panel for discussion - I didn't follow it particularly much during as I found it hard to split attention between the panel and the discussion.

I did tend to stick to the quieter channels partially because I was on a very different time zone (+5 hrs) so it was hard to keep track of the convo and also because it was very very overwhelming. Having lots of channels though did work well to ensure people could have small group conversations in the smaller ones and partially created that feeling of spontaneous conversation.

TL;DL I think keeping a similar setup for panel discussions works and it might be worth looking to replicate that at the next in-person con at least for the panels assigned larger rooms. This would be less overwhelming for Safety, keep the benefits having such a discussion area bring and provide an oppotunity for non-on site people to contribute.

[parody_bit]

I said this in my survey and alluded to it when I volunteered (virtual-only) for ConCom, so this won't be new information to anyone who reads those things. I share it with you and your followers in case it affects how we might all think about and choose to talk about this in the future, though.

If WisCon is in-person next year, a significant portion of our usual membership won't be able to attend. (Over 10% of Americans are diabetic, and almost half have heart disease. Up to 15% are at risk for kidney disease. Maybe 8% have asthma, 2% have psoriatic disease, and up to 1% may have rheumatoid arthritis. I've left out a bunch of other autoimmune illnesses, and I know these percentages overlap significantly, but we also know WisCon has a higher percentage of attendees with disabilities than other cons or, potentially, the general population.) It won't be safe for many of us to travel or gather until there's a vaccine, and "18 months" (from, I assume, March 2020) is the pie-in-the-sky timeline for getting a vaccine ready; getting it distributed will take time, too. It won't happen by May 2021. I would like to believe that, without a vaccine or an antiviral that completely protects patients from organ damage, even able-bodied people won't rush out to attend in-person cons, just yet. Thinking about the elevator lobby between sessions gives me the shakes. (I'm trying hard not to think about it, having typed that.)

Given that I trust WisCon to be inclusive, I'd also like to see everyone avoiding discourse that paints the online option as merely a nice thing to have, a second-class mode of participation that is separate from the "real" con that happens in-person. It is literally the only mode of participation that will be available to many of us, and it should be prioritized the same as the in-person con (if that happens) in 2021.

I do definitely agree that it would be really useful to find a tool that guarantees the kind of privacy and ephemerality that the in-person con offers!

Unfortunately, I can't offer money right now (here's hoping that changes), and once the semester starts, I can't consistently offer lots and lots of time, but I have put my name in to help find a way to do the virtual side of the con (full disclosure: until there's a cure, I will continue to advocate for the whole con to be virtual for one more year, because I think it's the most equitable solution--but I made it clear I'd still help with the virtual side even if an in-person con goes forward). One nice thing about this tenure-track job, as opposed to my last one: I only have to meet a set number of hours per semester of volunteering in my own field, and then I can use volunteer time for other things I want to help make happen. :)

And, a total side note, but I'm not sure I've said this yet: it was really nice to see you during the auction! :)