A Dialogue on filk/fandom, guests, and community. And dialogue

[mneme]

Had a short dialogue with gundo on the nature of fandom, coming out of my musing on running a con (did I mention? No, I didn't--yet--but I'm running a con, and it will be -fabulous-) and occasionally having to -un-delegate, which I figured was worthy of wider distribution. "mneme" is, naturally, yours truly.

mneme: I have very mixed feelings towards the hotel/guest liaison positions, as having someone focused on making the hotel/guests happy = good, but having another step in the game of telephone between the rest of the concom and these ever-important externalities = bad

gundo: at a larger con, I believe those are necessary, but the size of the NE cons...

mneme: Indeed. A larger con also has a larger pool to troll for someone with the combination of knowledge and proactiveness you really need for a good liaison. But they also have (potentially, anyway) a lot more guests, and not a presumption that most of the concom already know some or all the guests.

gundo: Well, and at the larger cons the guests aren't part of the larger family, whereas here they are

mneme: Indeed. Well, sometimes they aren't--but filk overall is a much smaller community, and, yes, we pull guests from that community rather than across a (however artificial) "pro" barrier. (something that sf fandom in general also resists, but..it gets complicated).

gundo: Very complicated

mneme: Yes. In general, fandom favors GOHs who are part of the fannish community, if on the pro side. But there are exceptions--and someone who is fan/pro and treated as such in one area is still going to be a superstar in another where they're less well known.

gundo: Well, there are a lot of us who are in the filk community who are pro in some way

mneme: Indeed. The filk community -also- has a pro/fan barrier, although it's even thinner than in literary fandom for a number of reasons. But with the exception of segmented GOH items like the GAFilk "Super Secret Guest", we don't even -think- to pull from outside the community (if often Pro-side people known and known to be within the community ). This is, I think, because Filk defines itself as "within the filk community" -- whereas sf defines itself primarily as "within the dialogue of science fiction" and the literary fandom/convention-going communities is within and appreciative of (as well as in dialogue with) the larger community.

gundo: Right...there's that definition of filk as community, vs filk as style or content

mneme: *nod* It's very telling. And I think a lot of that -is- dialogue. Something is part of a folk tradition if and only if it is in dialogue with other things within that tradition -- just as a work is genre sf only if it is in dialogue with the body of sf works (and when a sf work gets written that is -not- in dialogue with the sf genre, this is often painfully obvious).

gundo: As long as there is ongoing dialogue, then yes, it works

mneme: Indeed. A one-sided "dialogue" can go south, very quickly, particularly when it's perceived differently from both sides.

mneme: Ah, true. And yeah, the whole dysfunctional fannish community thing can be...bad. Some of that is that different people can have really different idea of what a community, well, means.

gundo: Yeah, that's true as well

mneme: Particularly when you're looking at communities built out of geography vs ones based on association and common interests. I mean, one of the reasons that Merav and I are pretty good choices for leadership in the NYC filk community is that we're both in close dialogue the the more global filk community, rather than mostly/primarily in the local area. But that also means we'll have some closer relationships with people across the country than ones with some of those in the local filk community.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'm hotel liaison for ConCertino, somewhat reluctantly. Lois Mangan actually liked it and did a good job of it. As with so many things in organizing a con, it fell to me because I didn't take a step backward as fast as the others. Hotel contracts are complicated, hotel personalities even more so, and someone has to deal with them, even if it's someone with less than ideal people skills, like me.

[mneme]

Indeed. If we had an experienced hotel person who wanted the job, I'd send it to them and well sent -- as it was, we had the hotel person for a friendly gaming con who already had a relationship with the hotel (Hello, Dexcon!) negotiate the initial contract for us, but when he had an attack of life he passed the contact on to me, and since the bits we needed were "nail down the contract" and "know what we needed and thus what needed to be confirmed/changed from the hotel", it didn't make any sense for me to pass the contact on at that point. (I'd already been sending the contract out for review, but then I'd also helped review the contract for the last hotel we worked with; more eyes make for fewer errors.

The guest matter is trickier -- since you really do want program to be able to talk directly to guests to discuss programming, the con chair to be able to talk directly to guests to reassure them and make sure everyone's on the same page, etc (particularly for a small con where the chair is making a lot of the decisions); if you -do- have a liason, it should really be someone who views the job as "my job is to make sure the guests get what they need and are represented appropriately in convention decisions", rather than "my job is to be The person who talks to the guests."

[madfilkentist]

I understand what your saying about the guest liaison. One of the reasons I quit Boskone is that they'd adopted a policy that only the guest liaison, not the filk program head, is supposed to talk to the filk guest.

[thnidu]

Arggghhh! (Or should that be "Arrrrrr!" -- see icon)

[mneme]

Yeah. That's so off I don't even...

[thnidu]

Right. G.L.'s job is to arrange guest issues, like transportation and room and meals. But the X program head (for appropriate value of X) should be the one to work with the guest on program! at least, on the guest's X part of the program.

[thnidu]

As we used to say in the Arisia ConComm (and they probably still do) just after the election of the new conchair,
HEL-LO, SUCKER!!!

[mneme]

:) Well, yeah. But the job's got to be done.