and the answer is

[totient]

I posted last week wondering what would be different about a 3000 person con from a 2500 person one. As londo points out, really the question is what is different about a con with 300+ people on staff vs more like 250. And the answer (or at least an answer) turns out to be that 300+ people passes the size at which chains of trust encompass the whole committee. We will need new mechanisms for when a volunteer who appears to have authority for something violates that trust. We will need to establish and publicize an escalation mechanism. We will need to establish and publicize our expectations of our volunteers. We will need to establish a way of finding problems that we ourselves are causing before our attendees bring them to us, because we can no longer trust ourselves not to be the problem.

I'm so, so glad we had a chance to learn this gently, as Boskone and Minicon (which jumped straight to larger sizes) could not.

Comments

[crazybone.livejournal.com]

I don't thin the extra 50+ staffers was the issue. I'd argue that chains of trust never encompassed the whole committee, at least not recently. Maybe in the first few years of Arisia (1990 - 1992) there was a chain of trust of something like it as most of the people running things were already friends or friends of friends. At that stage it still has the small town/neighborhood kids putting on a show feel. Also like a small town it has that "everyone knows everyone" thing that kind of acts like a dispersed priest collar effect. At that size people know that acting like an asshat will be noticed, corrected, and word will spread quickly about said asshat. Once you get past around 50 - 100 people that effect goes away. An individual is responsible for their own behavior. The job for those running things is to determine if those reactions were the result of individual action, a breakdown in communication, a larger systemic issue, or a combination of any of these. Then to take every step possible to prevent it from happening again.

[londo.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear what stories you heard about that - I only heard a couple, but I agree that this is what's going on as the convention grows.

[londo.livejournal.com]

Me stating I agree is less useful when you edit the post to include my name.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

Okay, I want to know the background to this, since I didn't get to any gripe sessions (offline!).

I think Arisia will move rapidly into the 3500's, possibly even 4,000. And I think some things scale--obviously, consuite and registration--and some do not. For example, we doubled our tech venues this year, but I don't see our tech or program needs growing any bigger as the con grows to 4K. Similarly, art show, gaming & dealers probably don't need to be bigger. However, we will need to work on an overflow hotel sooner, and a shuttle. (I guess there was one, but I didn't know about it.)

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

In the end our peak occupancy was only about 615. At 3500 attendees (and I doubt we would go higher in 2012) we'd still fit in this hotel. Being a little more on the ball about reservations and an overflow hotel would probably help with the room-availability panic (and panic is the technical term), even if we wound up not really taking overflow rooms. This will require allocating more resources to Innkeeper (or equivalently, moving some responsibilities away from that function) and is an example of a way in which the work on the con goes up much more than linearly with the attendance.