[penguicon-general] Nifties

[Tracy Worcester]

On 5/17/07, Matt Arnold <matt.mattarn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> With that in mind, consider the post of conchair itself (not this
> year, but over all years of the tradition of conventions in general).
> I think it has two main divisions of tasks in it. One division is
> concom recruitment and management to make sure the convention gets
> created. Chief of Staff, essentially. It's a cat herder.
>
> The other division is full of tasks such as GoH strategy, hotel
> contract, and budgeting, all of which involve reading the mind of
> attendees, guessing how much return you would get for an expense, in a
> cost-benefit tradeoff. They also tend to involve hostile negotiations
> sometimes. How did these categories get combined into the same job?
> I've often wondered why one person has to do both.


Sometimes they aren't rolled together:  I've seen some chairs outsource
parts of this role package.

However, a few parts of the why for the tendency.

1.  Conchair management styles vary wildly.  While it would be possible to
get someone else to recruit for you, like a first stage recruiter, they will
include people who will be a bad match for your style, and exclude people
you would have been able to work with.  Distributing the process that way
can also make people less enthused or more paraonoid, depending on
personality type.

2.  GoH strategy, contract, budgeting, hostile negotiations.  These are
largely cascade from the "buck stops here" principle.  However, I personally
tend to let the enthusiasms of my con comm drive my GoH choices, and I
generally convince someone else to liaise with the hotel, so obviously the
early portions of these *can* be outsourced.

...Tracy
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