The Minicon split is not in any way independent of the Boskone split; in that being aware of what happened at Boskone was very much in our rearview mirror here.
At Boskone, they saw many of the same issues we were seeing, and never found any agreement on what to try to do -- and the 1987 Boskone blew up badly enough that the hotel (and all other hotels in Boston) refused to deal with them for quite a long time (forcing the move to Springfield, into much smaller facilities, forcing downsizing and leading them to do drastic things that pissed people off trying to get that to happen). (I was in Boston from 1981 to 1985 so I watched a lot of the run-up there.)
So, our attempts to avoid that fate eventually (we'd had formal task-forces to study the question of our continued growth and obvious strains we were seeing as far back as 1991) lead us to try to do something gentler and more controlled. Which ended up working out very similarly, and not as we had intended.
We know two bad ways to deal with the problem (so far). I think maybe the freshness date on the problem is passed, and nobody else will have to deal with it (maybe), things having changed so much.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2019-04-24 03:00 am (UTC)At Boskone, they saw many of the same issues we were seeing, and never found any agreement on what to try to do -- and the 1987 Boskone blew up badly enough that the hotel (and all other hotels in Boston) refused to deal with them for quite a long time (forcing the move to Springfield, into much smaller facilities, forcing downsizing and leading them to do drastic things that pissed people off trying to get that to happen). (I was in Boston from 1981 to 1985 so I watched a lot of the run-up there.)
So, our attempts to avoid that fate eventually (we'd had formal task-forces to study the question of our continued growth and obvious strains we were seeing as far back as 1991) lead us to try to do something gentler and more controlled. Which ended up working out very similarly, and not as we had intended.
We know two bad ways to deal with the problem (so far). I think maybe the freshness date on the problem is passed, and nobody else will have to deal with it (maybe), things having changed so much.