[Penguicon-Concom] Trying for a more positive tone

[Anne KG Murphy]

John asked:
> Any questions?

Yes.  Perhaps I missed this, but who is currently on the concom, and
in what positions?  I look at  http://www.penguicon.org/wiki/ConCom
and http://www.penguicon.org/wiki/WhoIsDoingWhat and I see material
from last year or longer ago.  Shall we archive these pages and start
over?  Will you distribute a text list to this mailing list?

It is somewhat hard to pull together and collaborate when we do not
know who each other are.


As for me, I am currently head of Guest relations, or somewhat like
that.  I don't have any authority for selecting guests, other than
Nifties Who Cost Us Nothing, so with John's approval I invited Nick
Sagan (who is costing us nothing), who I am very excited to say is
coming as a Nifty (see www.nicksagan.com for more information -he's a
computer geek and an sf writer).

I am currently working on recruiting Guest Liaisons.  Shay is Randy
Milholland's liaison.  Please let me know if you or someone you know
might be interested in being a liaison to Bruce Schneier, Christine
Peterson, or John Kovalic.

I am also working on getting short Bios for the rest of the Guests and
Nifties together for the website.  Nifties currently include Steve
Jackson, Tom Smith, Luke Ski, Rob Balder, and Nick Sagan.    Again,
please let me know if you have a fannish enthusiasm for one or more of
these people and would put me together a paragraph about them.  I'd
rather not re-use what we have said before because it's nice to use
fresh text from time to time.  We have invitations out to Sarah Zettel
and the Ferret to come back again and I need to write to the slashdot
crowd to see who may be coming back, and there are other suggestions
in the works as well.  More suggestions are welcome.

I described Penguicon to Nick as "a celebration of forward-looking
ideas, collaboration and creation, and lots of just plain fun."  For
the most part I have found it to be so.  I have not attended many
concom meetings, largely because they are almost all held really far
from my house (I live on the west side of Ann Arbor).  Those concom
meetings I have attended, under Steve and Aaron, mainly, were
generally a nice mix of silliness and getting things done, reflecting
both the enthusiasm and the capabilities of this diverse group.

I have not offered to be on the board partly because, again, it mostly
meets really far away from my house.  Also, I am President of the
Board of Directors of the Science Fiction Oral History Association
(SFOHA), I am on the AASFA Board, I am on the executive and
technically the webmaster of the struggling Midfan group, I volunteer
for the democratic party, and I do contract sf copyediting on top of
my full-time job, in addition to being in a sketch comedy troupe.  I
really don't think I would do service to anyone to pick up an
additional post at this time. I quit my post as webmaster of ConFusion
because I was not doing it well.  Um, if anyone is interested in
joining SFOHA, we could really use new energy.  Also we, like Rob,
would really like to see all of Penguicon recorded.


As a human-computer-interaction designer and an sf fan and smof, I
have always really enjoyed the mix of people and ideas that is
Penguicon, and I am excited that Matt might be putting me on
programming this year to share what I know of robots or AI or
requirements engineering or something. (I work for a small AI company
in Ann Arbor where we've been doing research on, among other things,
human-robot interaction.).  I'd like to see us kick-start an open
source project at the con this year and I have some ideas for that.

Other than that, well, you know me.  I played Buffy for two years.
Two years was enough for me, so I'll not do that again, but it was a
lot of fun.  I was GoH liaison to Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, and
Chris Dobona.  I chaired ConFusion for a couple years.

This convention has a lot of energy.  It is not surprising to me that
sometimes that energy ends at cross purposes, but I have been
concerned to see a level of burnout that does seem to be diminishing
our number in the concom.  Because I'd like to see Penguicon continue.
But a fair bit of it has seemed to be from external, Life Happens,
sort of sources, which is to be expected.  I honestly don't think
Penguicon has found its stride in either the open source or sf areas,
but it's getting better known, and every year we try new things. (and
every year the track of gaming and having collaborative fun like the
chaos engine and stuffed animal tea parties is going strong, and we
still have ideas from previous years that we haven't executed on).  If
we can keep attracting shiny creative people while also negotiating
through the fact that shiny creative geekish types sometimes have to
work at it to figure out how to play together nicely, I think we'll
continue to have a great event for years to come.

I feel like a bit of an outsider because I don't come to meetings
much, so I hope my comments don't sound like a political speech.  This
is just what I see, and how I feel.

Best,

--Anne

Anne KG Murphy
akgmurphy at gmail.com
734-649-4534