The WorldCon of my Dreams
Aug. 2nd, 2020 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydamorehouseI've been writing to various friends about how I would have run a virtual WorldCon enough that I want to distill my ideas here, in one place.
By now, we all know how disastrous the Hugo Ceremony was, but I have a much bigger and much more... mundane complaint.
I was tellingnaomikritzer via email this morning that it's clear that the same problem that GRRM has: being hidebound, enamored of the good,old days, etc., affected ALL of ConZealand this year. I suspect it's because they approached the idea of a virtual con the wrong way. They said to themselves, "These are what my favorite things about WorldCON are, so how do I translate that to virtual," INSTEAD of "How do I take the virtual world and import what I love about cons into the way people experience the internet??"
It's a subtle difference, but critical.
Like, what BAFFLED me was that ConZealand, THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CON, wasn't 24-hours.
Sure, okay, everything is on New Zealand time, because the main organizers live there, cool, cool, but why the hell not get volunteers in every time zone so that the people in Europe and the African continent could attend at their convenience, instead of having to get up at midnight and attend readings at 2 or 3 am. I mean, yes, there are night owls everywhere, but for fuck's stake, there are also FANS IN EVERY TIME ZONE.
I don't understand why World Con, this year didn't take advantage of that?
Like, also, for much of the world New Zealand is already tomorrow. Make that a theme? "Come to the Future, ConZealand, where is already tomorrow!" and then do a 24-hour con, where in the middle of NZ's night, fans in Germany or Lithuania or Croatia (or all at once) carry the torch by running English-lanugage (or subtitled, because fans could DO this,) panels with their country's biggest SF writers and fans, and then the torch is passed to Zimbabwe and India and Russia, and on and on across the globe until New Zealand wakes up again and can take back the reins?
How fucking cool would that have been?
We could have harnessed the global power of fandom and done something newsworthy for its AWESOME, rather than being called out for transphobic racist bullshit AGAIN.
It just pissed me off that when I woke up at my ungodly hour of 8 am, there was nothing at all to do, officially, at WorldCON. Sure, sure, the Discord was 24 hours, but that's not the same as getting to see a panel in... (let me see who might share a decent time zone with my 8 am with a quick Google) Okay, if I am awake at 8 am in St. Paul, it's a nice decent afternoon 2 pm in Spain, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Algeria, just to name a few.
THINK ABOUT THIS.
I wake up at 6 am and hop over to the WorldCON schedule and see that people are deep into their afternoon over in the Republic of Ireland, so I watch a panel with Irish authors talking about the state of their fandom/pro-dom, and, then, I see that Ethiopia is having a watch party for its famous post-apocalyptic film Crumbs. Mmm, but I can't decide between that and watching the film Afronauts (set in Zambia, directed by a Ghanaian American woman.) After that, I decide to check out science fiction from the Indian sub-continent organized by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies®, Bangalore (IASFS), Indian Science Fiction Writers Association.
You could have issued a downloadable and printable passport that people could have stamped if they attended a panel held in another country/by another country's fandom and encouraged people to try to "catch them all."
Think about how cool this could have been,.
It would have been easy, because it could have been crowdsourced into one of the most active and brilliant group of nerds in the world: FANS.
And it could have been done with just a little forethought and some organization. Put the world out early and ask for volunteers. Tell people, "offer up your SF/F content: movies, fannish clubs, authors" and say, "we will worry about translations once we get some excitement rolling," because you know that if somebody wanted to run an obscure Thai horror film that needed dubs, we could have found someone to do that shit ASAP, and make it available in dozens of languages. We could have contacted folks in Japan about running cosplay or debuting new anime that already has a huge international followers.
There is stuff out there. It just might not be in English, but that's such a tiny hurtle, if you think big enough.
Also, WorldCon is often a destination con. Where were our local folks running around doing virtual tours of New Zealand natural wonders--stuff New Zealanders are uniquely able to show us, because THEY ARE NEARLY COVID FREE. They could have even showed up people, doing things, together, like going into a bookstore, and live-streaming videos from there.
For con that invites the world in, it is a shame we didn't think to crowdshare it with the world.
By now, we all know how disastrous the Hugo Ceremony was, but I have a much bigger and much more... mundane complaint.
I was telling
naomikritzer via email this morning that it's clear that the same problem that GRRM has: being hidebound, enamored of the good,old days, etc., affected ALL of ConZealand this year. I suspect it's because they approached the idea of a virtual con the wrong way. They said to themselves, "These are what my favorite things about WorldCON are, so how do I translate that to virtual," INSTEAD of "How do I take the virtual world and import what I love about cons into the way people experience the internet??"It's a subtle difference, but critical.
Like, what BAFFLED me was that ConZealand, THE WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CON, wasn't 24-hours.
Sure, okay, everything is on New Zealand time, because the main organizers live there, cool, cool, but why the hell not get volunteers in every time zone so that the people in Europe and the African continent could attend at their convenience, instead of having to get up at midnight and attend readings at 2 or 3 am. I mean, yes, there are night owls everywhere, but for fuck's stake, there are also FANS IN EVERY TIME ZONE.
I don't understand why World Con, this year didn't take advantage of that?
Like, also, for much of the world New Zealand is already tomorrow. Make that a theme? "Come to the Future, ConZealand, where is already tomorrow!" and then do a 24-hour con, where in the middle of NZ's night, fans in Germany or Lithuania or Croatia (or all at once) carry the torch by running English-lanugage (or subtitled, because fans could DO this,) panels with their country's biggest SF writers and fans, and then the torch is passed to Zimbabwe and India and Russia, and on and on across the globe until New Zealand wakes up again and can take back the reins?
How fucking cool would that have been?
We could have harnessed the global power of fandom and done something newsworthy for its AWESOME, rather than being called out for transphobic racist bullshit AGAIN.
It just pissed me off that when I woke up at my ungodly hour of 8 am, there was nothing at all to do, officially, at WorldCON. Sure, sure, the Discord was 24 hours, but that's not the same as getting to see a panel in... (let me see who might share a decent time zone with my 8 am with a quick Google) Okay, if I am awake at 8 am in St. Paul, it's a nice decent afternoon 2 pm in Spain, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Algeria, just to name a few.
THINK ABOUT THIS.
I wake up at 6 am and hop over to the WorldCON schedule and see that people are deep into their afternoon over in the Republic of Ireland, so I watch a panel with Irish authors talking about the state of their fandom/pro-dom, and, then, I see that Ethiopia is having a watch party for its famous post-apocalyptic film Crumbs. Mmm, but I can't decide between that and watching the film Afronauts (set in Zambia, directed by a Ghanaian American woman.) After that, I decide to check out science fiction from the Indian sub-continent organized by the Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies®, Bangalore (IASFS), Indian Science Fiction Writers Association.
You could have issued a downloadable and printable passport that people could have stamped if they attended a panel held in another country/by another country's fandom and encouraged people to try to "catch them all."
Think about how cool this could have been,.
It would have been easy, because it could have been crowdsourced into one of the most active and brilliant group of nerds in the world: FANS.
And it could have been done with just a little forethought and some organization. Put the world out early and ask for volunteers. Tell people, "offer up your SF/F content: movies, fannish clubs, authors" and say, "we will worry about translations once we get some excitement rolling," because you know that if somebody wanted to run an obscure Thai horror film that needed dubs, we could have found someone to do that shit ASAP, and make it available in dozens of languages. We could have contacted folks in Japan about running cosplay or debuting new anime that already has a huge international followers.
There is stuff out there. It just might not be in English, but that's such a tiny hurtle, if you think big enough.
Also, WorldCon is often a destination con. Where were our local folks running around doing virtual tours of New Zealand natural wonders--stuff New Zealanders are uniquely able to show us, because THEY ARE NEARLY COVID FREE. They could have even showed up people, doing things, together, like going into a bookstore, and live-streaming videos from there.
For con that invites the world in, it is a shame we didn't think to crowdshare it with the world.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-02 05:58 pm (UTC)Aww, I love that. Your online multi-cultural international online con sounds amazing.
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Date: 2020-08-03 12:16 am (UTC)But, a fun dream!
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Date: 2020-08-02 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 12:17 am (UTC)Thing is WorldCons have at least two years after they win a bid to start planning. Sometimes more.
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Date: 2020-08-02 11:35 pm (UTC)P.
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Date: 2020-08-03 12:17 am (UTC)This one would be fun to part of. Think of the people you'd meet!
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Date: 2020-08-03 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 03:56 pm (UTC)I feel like the best con is a con that finds a way to use not only all the virtual tools available, but also makes use of all of its fanbase. Like, WORLD Cons in particular, could chose to make the whole world feel as though they were taking part in it. This feature feels like it would be friendly to cons who want to have a local flavor but that get attendees from all over, if that makes sense?
Not that WorldCON attendees COULDN'T also chose to use this, if it were available.
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Date: 2020-08-03 04:00 pm (UTC)Yes, and I love your idea of stressing the international flavor of Worldcon. I was astonished when I heard that New Zealand was essentially sidelined during the awards ceremony. I can't imagine the host country being sidelined during an Olympics introductory ceremony.
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Date: 2020-08-03 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-03 03:57 pm (UTC)Yeah, now I just have to figure out how to make my dream a reality. A perennial problem.
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Date: 2020-08-03 03:12 pm (UTC)GenCon was also online only this year. Their audience is almost entirely US-based, so they did stay with their normal schedule of ~8a-midnight Eastern time. But they did run 3 simultaneous twitch streams (not all the time on all "channels"), but a pretty decent amount of content) to help it feel like slightly more than regular online gaming sessions. And their "Looking Glass" for the Exhibition hall was clever and searchable.
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Date: 2020-08-03 03:59 pm (UTC)I think one of the reasons I had fun at WisCON was that it was in a lot of ways "open sourced." Like, Discord was there as a clearinghouse, but if people wanted to start a Skype hangout they could, they just used the #spontaneous-programming channel or the #spontaneous-party channel to get the word out and to put out appropriate meeting links, etc., you know? So, all this stuff could be harnessed to put together one hell of a con.