[Board] Re: [penguicon-general] Bylaws Committee officially forming.

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 04 August 2006 12:43 pm, Tracy Worcester wrote:
> We don't.  However, you've unhappy being part of the Board, and I'm going to
> be neck deep in education for at least a year, and possibly longer.  I
> personally want to make sure that the people who get involved one year,
> three years, five years down the road have some idea what the vision you and
> I started out with *is*.

I didn't say I was going away.  There's a very real possibility that Fade and 
I will try to get married at Penguicon (since Steve Jackson will be there and 
it's all his fault anyway).  And I may spring to bring Howard Tayler back, 
and I've already volunteered to put together a food track.

I just don't consider the board interesting.  I like most of the people _on_ 
the board but when you start having Matt Arnold telling me I'm being 
hypocritical for not liking closed lists yet being _on_ a closed list that I 
didn't close...  Well, actually, my preferred way of dealing with him is to 
try to stay out of his way and vice versa.  His job is to tell us what we 
can't do, and my job is to do impossible things.  (If you thought it was a 
_good_ idea to do thermite in the parking lot, I could probably arrange it.  
If you want a reunion of the cast of "Tron" at a future Penguicon, no 
guarantees but I know how to go about it.)

But these days if I lay the groundwork for speculative things and then they 
come through, I'm in trouble because then I have to go to nay-sayers and 
go "oh by the way, famous person X thinks they're coming to our con.  That's 
all right, isn't it?"  Even if it's somebody I mentioned to them before, if 
it's not one for the 3 or 4 they ordered off the menu for this year...  And 
rather than get _into_ that situation, I just don't do any of it.

Heck, to get the big names you have to ask _more_ than a year in advance.  
This year Tamora Pierce turned us down "with regret" beacause her April 
schedule was already full by this past April.  The whole reply was one big 
invitation to ask her about 2008, and Matt Arnold immediately chimed in "no 
no no, we don't want her in 2008!"

I can't effectively recruit guests with an approvals committee in the way, and 
it's not _possible_ to recruit some types of guests if we can't make binding 
decisions far enough in advance.  So I'd prefer somebody else do it.

And I'm a bit frustrated that I went to Ottawa Linux Symposium and Confluence 
here in Pittsburgh, and didn't have flyers for either one.  And I feel that 
if I make my own flyers they would be _unauthorized_ flyers, and I just 
haven't got the energy to deal with that.

> > We have to figure out what we want the convention to be, and then make a
> > > structure to support that vision.
> >
> > s/support/enshrine/
> 
> To a certain degree, yes.  But since one of the things I'm going to be
> enshrining is the fact that every five years, they're going to have to do a
> review of the bylaws and customary practices, updating them for changing
> reality, I'm not too worried about ossification.

Sounds reasonable.

> Rob, I don't enjoy bureaucracy.  But as a visionary, I've come to conclusion
> that if I want to leave any legacy at all, I have to actually a) tell people
> (preferably in written form) what the vision is, and b) create structures
> and processes which will serve some of the purposes I have been serving
> within the organization.

I'm all for documentation, education, workshops, mentoring...  I'm just 
confused how a mission statement qualifies as documentation, education, or 
mentoring.

*shrug*

> Somewhere down the line, I'm going to want to stop doing work related to the
> convention which I find no fun at all, and go back to doing the bits I do
> enjoy.  And that means I have to help train the people who will end up doing
> my job.

I've hit the point where even _trying_ to do the bits I don't particularly 
enjoy involves enough friction with people whose job it is to say "no" that I 
just can't function in that context anymore.  So I glue on things like the 
LN2 ice cream which has little or nothing to do with the rest of the con and 
minimizes the opportunity for other people to say "no".

This year, I'm thinking of importing another idea that worked well at Linucon: 
caffeinated soap as a freebie giveaway in the attendee baggies.  This year 
seems like a good time for it.  I can't find a copy of the something positive 
gamer hygiene flyer online right now, but here's one of Randy Millholland's 
shirts in Steve Jackson's store:
http://www.warehouse23.com/search.cgi?gtype=t-shirts&pline=Something+Positive&keywords=Hygiene
And John Kovalic recently did a week on this topic, starting here:
http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/archive.asp?nextform=viewcomic&id=1143

Or I could just focus on the food track.  Or I could focus on actually 
recording the panels for once.  Or getting a CD burned for each attendee.  
(The CD would work better if we actually got a call for papers out.  It's 
partly my fault we never did, but the last time I was involved in putting 
together the technical track was year 2.  I can't just do a call for papers 
on my own authority anymore, it's really the tech programming person's 
job...)

> Some people will arrive, grok it, and want to check the document to make
> sure they've understood correctly.  Some people will arrive, love it, and
> not have any idea what makes it so cool, but know they want to see it
> continue.  This will help them hit the ground running.

Conflating the bylaws (a state of Michigan legal requirement) and the Big Book 
of Penguicon strikes me as a bad idea.  How to run con suite should not be 
filed with the state.  Documentation is "we did this and it worked".  That's 
not the same as "This is how it should be done in future", let alone how it 
_must_ be done.

> There is going to be a continuing role for visionaries in the organization;
> PenguiCon can't afford not to adapt, change, and continue to collect
> interesting things and people.  But there are more than enough jobs for
> people who couldn't have created this themselves, from scratch, and some of
> those folks may need additional direction.

I agree.  What does it have to do with the bylaws?

> We do cool stuff.  What the cool stuff is depends on who is doing it.
> 
> 
> Yep.  And I want to make sure that their right and ability to do so is
> protected.  One of the reasons I've decided to make a priority of this is,
> right now our infrastructure is half-broken.  If we can get a smoothly
> running machine in place, then the wildcatters like you, and to some degree,
> me, will have specifications on when and where we can graft on cool new
> things, instead of being told a different set of rules every time a question
> is asked.

Good luck with that.

> > And
> > > once we've figured out what we want the bylaws to do for us, we have to
> > > figure out how to say it, and put checks and balances in to make sure it
> > > works for the benefit of the convention and community, consistently.
> >
> > Good bylaws say as little as humanly possible.  The people running the
> > show
> > matter.  The knowledge those people have matters.  The ISO90001 documented
> > procedures and policies, whether or not we follow them, do not.
> 
> 
> In a perfect world, yes, they don't matter.  And I want to keep the bylaws
> as thin as possible.  But I don't live in a perfect world.  Should, at some
> point, we have people who gain power within PenguiCon who are unwise,
> powerhungry, or other forms of stupid, I want to have a structure in place
> to minimize the damage from the mistakes they might make.

I don't believe you can minimize the damage stupid people with power do 
without hobbling everybody.  Right now our defense is term limits, which 
worked pretty well year 3 getting rid of the only real instance of your 
concern we've seen so far (which was also the only one who was unwilling to 
let go afterwards, once again proving Douglas Adams right) and has otherwise 
kept us from burnign out you, Steve, Aaron, or (hopefully) John.

> Someday, I have to do a decent write-up of the three waves thing.  All I
> > have
> > is the six year old thing I did for TMF way back, and it's from the other
> > side...
> 
> 
> Actually, I still remember the Three Waves Theory you came up with.

Robert Cringely/Mark Stephens came up with it.  It's chapter 12 of "Accidental 
Empires".  I just expanded on it.

> It's 
> one of the reasons why I knew, if you and are both leave the Board
> eventually, much as I hate to, I have to create these things before I go.

Procedure is wave 3.  Wave 2 just wants to be trained, and can extrapolate 
based on an existing premise quite well.

> But, I also pretty much knew you were going to hate the idea.  (:

First wavers have organizations too.  They're fan clubs.  Open source is a fan 
club, and science fiction fandom is a fan club.  That's part of the reason I 
expected them to get along so well.  The _only_ way first wavers ever 
organize is self-organized fan club variants.  Submitting patches to open 
source projects is analogous to submitting your fan-fic to a fanzine.

And as with any editorial thing, Sturgeon's Law applies in spades.  90% of it 
is crap, and an editor has to put the thing together by throwing at least 
half of the submissions away and polishing up the remainder to something 
acceptable.  Open source projects have maintainers, conventions have chairs, 
and magazines have editors.  It's the same basic position: somewhere 
between "goalie" and "herding cats".

And the thing is, you NEED a first waver in the editor's chair, or a second 
waver with first wave instincts.  They have to have the right instincts, they 
have to be able to smell the Shiny Thing.  If they can't tell what's shiny 
and what isn't shiny, there's NO POINT.  And you can't train that into 
somebody, they've either got it or they don't.

If you don't understand why a Volkswagen Beetle with a license plate that 
says 'Feature' is inherently cool, you haven't got the fire to be a computer 
geek.  And if you read the first sentence of Wen Spencer's "Tinker" (which 
is "The wargs chased the elf over Pittsburgh Scrap and Salvage's tall 
chain-link fence shortly after the hyper-phase gate powered down.") and can't 
tell whether or not it's likely to hook its intended audience, no amount of 
teaching will clue you in.

Penguicon needs a con chair that can do both.  Documenting examples of this (I 
have plenty, google for "Text mode quake" and "doom as a tool for system 
administration" on the geek side) is no substitute for actually being able to 
go "Ooh: Shiny!"  The actual _knowledge_ to program, write, edit, manage 
people, negotiate a hotel contract, run a con suite...  That's separate.  
It's important too, but it's a different issue.  Having the geek mindset 
doesn't mean you know C, but a book/course on C won't make you a geek

Penguicon can't _not_be_ a fan club.  It won't work if it stops being a 
self-organizing meritocracy that recruits people who have already shown 
talent and interest, and is run by people who "get it".  That doesn't mean 
there isn't politics or backbiting (sheesh, look at Debian) or family 
squabbles (the linux-kernel mailing list has Al Viro and Christoph Hellwig as 
more or less _bouncers_) but if the nature of Penguicon ever changed to the 
point where the con chairs only do things that way because the Bylaws require 
them, it won't work.

I am entirely in favor of documentation.  The more the merrier, and we haven't 
got nearly enough.  I just think that obligating people to follow the 
documentation over their own judgement is bad, and thus don't want the bylaws 
to say how to run the event.

> ...Tracy

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.