large convention theory

[totient]

Magic things happen to SF conventions at around 3000 people. Where exactly is hard to tell; Boskone and Minicon both jumped from noticeably under 3000 to substantially over in a single year. But two things happen. First, management tricks to shoehorn the staff into a structure appropriate for a 2500-person con stop working. Another level of indirection, of convention management, is needed; you need a larger cadre of experienced managers, and they and the chair have to think in a more abstracted manner. At the same time, your volunteer base gets distracted; there are just as many or more of them, but they're not willing to give you their weekends.

Put more concretely, a convention has a run-time volunteer need of a little less than two hours per attendee. Arisia meets this need by having 100 people who work 25 hours each, and 150 who work 12 hours each. We push our management structures to be able to handle that many people; this model might work for 2700 but it wouldn't work for 3000, because three-level management can only handle 250 or so people. But with new incentive and a four-level management structures, we could have the same 100 people working 25 hours each, and 500 people who worked 4 to 8 hours, and that would take us to 3000 people pretty comfortably. The doubling in the size of the staff requires rethinking how volunteers works, but that's a rethinking you have to do to get past 2500 people anyway. Once you do it, the management reasons to keep your volunteer count down are obviated. By adding more casual workers, this management structure scales from here to probably around 5000 attendees before you have to worry about incenting your workers to work longer hours. Which is good, because it's a lot easier to find people who'll work a couple of hours than people who'll work all weekend.

Will we reinvent volunteers this way? We don't have to; at this size we have the luxury that the current structure does more or less work. But if we get a lot bigger, we'll have to lower our incentive requirements, and that's one of the counterintuitive conclusions that I think other big conventions like Boskone and Minicon missed.

Comments

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Can you still use that icon? :-) Your hypothesis sounds reasonable, and testing ways to recruit volunteers (if you have ideas) might not be a bad idea at the present size too...

Far to awake and aware @ 6:30am

[cintyber.livejournal.com]

I think you get to use that icon for life...after-all you never really stop being Chair, you are simply killing time until the next round.

On this idea though, and from watching how people respond to various task requests, people seem willing to sign up for "a" specific task. What I mean is that people in general like to go into things with a set idea of what it is that they will be doing. Some people are more fluid and can handle a variety but the majority want things to go thusly;
Task
Instructions
Duration
Set end time

They want to know that they will be relieved at a specific time.

If we can give them a clear view of what they are signing up for, and throw in some heavy pre-con & at-con "Arisia Wants You" marketing (that states we only need a small portion of their time) we can bring in the numbers we need.

That being said, some of our perks would have to be reworked to account for these shorter hours of dedication. There will always be some of the Staff who work 72+ hours at Con (this is due to the nature of the Staff more than anything) but we need to make sure that those kind of hours are not required for the convention to operate.

*goes off to scribble in her own LJ and to stop raving in this one*

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

Both lower, and raise, our incentives. For example, lowering the T-shirt giveaway hours to five, and upping the free membership hours to 18. And in between, offering extras, such as staff den priveledges.

(Not that I think too much about staff den)

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

In my not so humble opinion staff den privileges should be a higher cut off than free membership because it doesn't scale well (and because it's not efficient to change the number of people being fed on the fly.)

That being said it could be reasonable to have a set of jobs that came with staff den privileges.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Oh look, a hidden assumption: that memberships cost more than T-shirts. Once you get to 3000 people, that's not true anymore! Especially since people with free memberships will come back and volunteer again. Maybe the free membership should be after five, and the T-shirt should be after 15.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

A tshirt may cost more for the con, but it's unlikely to be worth more for the person. If I were volunteering towards a goal (which clearly isn't the case since I do programming but am still dumb enough to gopher :), I'd stop at five in the above case.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know shirts cost more, at least in real money. Technically, the volunteer membership has a real cost, too; we just don't budget for it. (After all, the volunteers still get all the pubs, the badge, and eat at the con's expense.)

[frotz.livejournal.com]

I think you're on the right track here; I was somewhat involved with Balticon when it was having these sorts of growing pains downtown, and the solution was roughly the same, with a lot of reliance on casual volunteers. At some conventions there's enormous pressure to sell your soul to the convention if you've done any work for them at all, while Balticon was always always able to come up with a lot of stuff that someone who was willing to just help out for a few hours could usefully do; this requires delegation skills, though, which is something a lot of people are really bad at. In the latter years that I was actually going, but not really so involved with it anymore, I would often put in a couple of hours here or there for the fun of it. (The swag is really not a motivator in this case; I've got free Balticon membership for life and more t-shirts than I can easily shake a stick at.)

That said, I think Balticon has gotten smaller, perhaps somewhat intentionally, and it's not so much of an issue anymore.