more data

[totient]

Arisia registration figures are pointing to a con of around 2900 or perhaps 3000 people. This is squarely in the middle of a strange no-man's land: there's very little data about how conventions of this size work. Boskone went directly from a 2700 person con in the Park Plaza in 1984 -- something the dynamics of which Arisia understands intimately -- to the largest SF convention in the world, and already too big for its new and bigger hotel, in a single year (1985). Minicon likewise skipped over 3000 as an attendance figure, and found (as Boskone did) that a 3300 person con is very different to run from a 2000-2500 person one.

I'm sure everyone will fit in our enormous new hotel, but I'm really quite curious to find out which things will be the same and which will be different at that number, because almost no one has done it before.

And I'm glad that we still have a membership cap, even if it's higher than it was before.

Comments

[londo.livejournal.com]

Seen it, though I didn't remember all of the details. See my first comment in this post. :)

I disagree with the general assertion "a convention has a run-time volunteer need of a little less than two hours per attendee," but can't bring myself to disprove it in the case of Arisia.

Do you have a plan for getting a quarter of Arisia to put in 8h each, average? Does that account for the number of comps that come from 3h of panels?

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

I wasn't including the program participants, no.

It helps that the standard deviation is large; we don't have many people putting in 100 hours at con but we do have quite a few putting in a lot more than 8. If we could get a quarter of Arisia to put in even two hours, plus the ten percent who put in 12+ and the few who put in 50+, we'd probably be in great shape.