[Penguicon-Concom] Re: [penguicon-general] Bylaws Committee officially fo...

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 05 August 2006 12:14 am, LadySarah wrote:
> If you give up you will never change anything.

You seem under the mistaken impression that Penguicon is owed something by its 
concom or its attendees.  This is not the case.  If anything, it goes the 
other way.

> If you are as worried as you try to make yourself sound, why would you not
> want to take part and put your vision into it?

Because it's not fun, and disentangling from it makes room for something that 
is fun?

> If you dislike "corporate models" so much, I would suggest you stop help to
> run convetions altogether

An ultimatum?  How is this a helpful suggestion?  "The rest of fandom sucks 
even worse, you should gafiate immediately..."

> because any convetion will surely fail without 
> some levels of control and structure

As opposed to failing in the way you're proposing?  I decline your straw man 
argument, we need a police state for the same reason.

> as they are currently trying to put 
> into place and these controls and structures will invariably appear as
> "corporate" controls and structures because like it or not a con is still a
> business,

No, it's a not-for-profit.  So is Habitat for Humanity.  We're essentially 
organizing a really big party every year, which involves renting space to 
hold it in, inviting a lot of people, and getting them to split the cost.

The point is to avoid _losing_ so much money that you can't afford to do it 
any more.  (Every Penguicon so far has cost me money, and Linucon 1 cost me 
over $7k.)  The only point of the incorporation is that enough money is 
changing hands we don't want anybody personally liable if the hotel burns 
down or somebody breaks their neck.  And that the hotel wants an organization 
to do business with, even if we're trying to barter a room block for function 
space so we don't have to pay them anything much.  (This has yet to work for 
us that I'm aware of, except possibly year 2, but if we _start_ making our 
room block we'll be in much better financial shape and we have a sliding 
scale so a partial room block saves us money over straight function space 
rental.)

But our resources aren't just money.  (If they were, we couldn't afford to do 
it.)  Our most preceious resource is the energy and enthusiasm of our 
volunteers, and you can't browbeat enthusiasm out of people.

> it will collapse if it does not make costs just like any business 
> would and it has to do so without all the chapter 8 and 11 and whatever
> breaks big companies get that allow them to operate at a deficit for years
> and years and years.

Year 1 just about broke even, which was surprising (and involved several of 
the people who put money into it not asking to be reimbursed).  Year 2 made 
money (which came as a surprise to me.)  Year 3 lost money.  I'm a bit fuzzy 
on Year 4 (the jury's still out last I heard, and I'd like to point out I 
didn't ask for reimbursement for the LN2 or ice cream ingredients, or money I 
spent on advertising, nor will I).  For Y5 I'm paying for the plane ticket 
and hotel room for at least one of our guests because it was easier than 
trying to get permission to invite them through the concom.

> Also, in many cases the federal government says we 
> have to because of the paperwork we've filed with them and this is not the
> issue I would choose for the government to be angry with me about.

The paperwork I filed with the state of Michigan was massively vague, and 
doesn't really require us to do anything.  I intentionally worded it so that 
anything we decided to do was covered.  (Just about anything can be 
considered "educational".)

It may have been amended since then, but not at the behest of the state.

(We had a longish discussion about this for Linucon, a random snippet of which 
is at http://www.mail-archive.com/convention%40linucon.org/msg00024.html )

> You can stay in your own little corner of the con if you wish, but by doing
> so I believe you are forefiting any and all rights to complain about what
> gets done

But she does get to point and laugh.

> and how with this committe and the board.  The decision in the end 
> is yours, but should you choose your corner over involvement we can remind
> you that you had the chance to make a difference and declined it.

Since when is the correct response to driving people away to tell them it's 
their fault for leaving?  This helps retain people?  What's the goal 
here?  "If it all goes south, you don't get to say 'I told you so'?"  I don't 
think that's going to stop anybody, nor would it prevent the going south 
part.

"I'm happy you still like the corner, sorry the rest isn't working out for 
you, but just make that corner really sparkle and we'll try to handle the 
rest" might be a positive response...

I'm going to go do something else now.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.