![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A Few WisCon 44 (2020) Followups
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:
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.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject