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

[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.)