totient | Entries tagged with arisia

Met up with Julia at 10 this morning and headed to Haverhill for an Arisia art show worksession. Julia had some inventory to do and a meeting to take, and I started on the pegboard.

Some time ago Arisia changed from attaching pairs of pegboard together with zip ties (which we then removed every year) to using heavy duty braided picture wire. A while after that we made some more pairs at a worksession where we were also doing a lot of other work, and I didn't supervise the assembly as well as I should have. A little ways in I noticed some of the assembly being done in a way that could come loose, and got everyone doing it so that it wouldn't, but a few got through and stayed that way for the years since.

So my first task was to find the bad pairs and redo them. There turned out to be three of these. I also sorted pegboard by color and restacked it so that it wouldn't be damaged in transit.

Arisia has two different shades of brown pegboard, and we try to split the show so that one part can be one color and one the other without the difference being noticeable. In the new hotel that split comes out differently from what we've been doing, so we needed to make some more pairs of the darker color (we have quite a bit of unpaired pegboard). This takes a lot longer than checking or restacking pegboard, but I got started, and then when Julia was done with her stuff she joined in. We made a lot of pairs, but only had barely enough wire for the currently planned layout, with one pair to spare.

There are ways to hang pegboards that aren't attached together, and we have zip ties to make pairs the old way, so we packed a few more pegboards into the carts just in case. After all, there may still be small changes to the layout, or damage to pegboard in transit.

So now the pegboard is all nicely packaged up and tagged to go to the convention, along with the other Art Show stuff. And I have a cooking project to play with and a new desk to put together.

Today seems like a good day to remember Cassandra Lease, who was one of the first people to step up to save Arisia in October 2018. Her running for the board was one of the things that convinced me that saving Arisia was even the right thing to do. She was one of the best writers I have ever met, and certainly the best writer I've ever collaborated with.

Cass did not die violently, but I rather suspect that structural violence was a contributing factor to her untimely death in early 2021.

Nine or ten years ago, I had a conversation with Mikki Kendall about what was keeping people of color away from Arisia. There was a lot of speculation, and some important thoughts about tracking our progress, but only one concrete suggestion: that our badges were too small.

That sounds kind of absurd on the face of it. On one level the explanation is simple: Black teens -- and by this I mean specific Black teens -- felt unsafe in a hotel whose security staff didn't think they belonged at the convention. Bigger badges would more clearly identify them as part of the community and cut down on the harassment they got for being there. But of course this barrier is just one of thousands. The point isn't to fix it (though that's also important). The point is to turn Arisia into the kind of organization that notices subtle things like this and fixes them, or better yet is capable of predicting micro-impacts before they happen and can, to switch metaphors, build a playing field that's actually level instead of being full of potholes.

I had the idea that having Jodie as conchair would help with this. We certainly got a lesson in cultural assumptions from having him on board, but of course Jodie was a person and not some kind of magic talisman so there are still plenty of things that need fixing, and also we'll need to come to understand the way in which the changes he made addressed this problem because, well, they're often subtle.

One of those is just becoming clear to me, and I thought I'd share it because I know I would never have thought of it myself. When writing the most recent budget, Jodie aimed high on all of the small admin line items. This put a couple of thousand dollars of expenses in the budget that weren't likely to be used, but our income numbers were uncertain enough that this seemed like a reasonable idea, and it's not like we had the volunteers available to pull off some of the things that fell out of the budget because of it. I didn't really think more of it until the con was over and it was time to close the books.

At which point I realized that we had a whole raft of cultural assumptions about budgeting. The biggest is that Arisia's event isn't a fundraiser with the goal of raising as much money for our charitable purpose as possible. The event *is* our charitable purpose and there are places where we're limited in our purpose by the amount of money available. We have some policies that let us reallocate money between line items as needed, so that money that we don't manage to use for our charitable purpose in one place can be used for it in another. We're bad at communicating which those places are, or encouraging people to ask for more money if they can use it effectively. Most people think we're in a more normal budget regime where spending less money is the goal and going over your budget is bad.

In other words, we have set up an asshole filter.

And maybe we even kind of knew that we'd done that, and figured that we could sort of make up for it by encouraging people to be, as

siderea mostly calls it in that post, transgressive. But something I certainly didn't connect, and don't see in

siderea's post, is that POC have a lot less freedom to be transgressive in American society. The good news is that this year we had enough POC volunteers to be able to observe the effect. The bad news, of course, is that it's absolutely there. Not every line was budgeted so high that it wound up actually being extra, and it was POC who wound up not asking for reimbursement for things they decided to spend anyway (since the charitable purpose was quite visible).

So going forward, we'll find ways to build a budget that make it clear where people should spend additional money if they have the opportunity to do so, without having to budget as if everyone will in fact do that.

And along with finally having larger badges, that will be two steps forward, out of thousands. Not for lack of willingness, but for lack of understanding.

I'm always looking for more understanding. But I think the only way I'm really going to get these tools to disassemble injustice is to hand them to someone else.

Oren Jay Sofer's newsletter this morning has a bit about patience. It's not on his web site, but he opens with this question:

How can having patience with climate emergency, war, and the rest of the chaos in the world be useful?

And then proceeds to talk about how to have patience with overwhelming things without becoming either passive or overwhelmed.

That's great and all, but he never really answers his question. I think that's because he's asking very slightly the wrong question. (And not just because of which things he chooses to lump in with "the rest of the chaos in the world".) Better, I think is:

How can having patience for climate emergency, war, and the rest of the chaos in the world be useful?

Let me give an example.

Arisia recently opened new bank accounts at a Black-owned bank here in Boston. Yesterday it was time to update the signature cards for these. My previous experience with this is that it is always a hassle, that the rules for how to make it happen are never presented the same way twice, and in general there's way more runaround than there has to be. But at our old bank, it has also been that walking in to a branch as an older white man, with a lot of class markers, cut the hassle down significantly. (Including that the locations and hours of the branches were arranged to make even walking in less of a hassle for people like me.)

This was not our experience yesterday. It took nearly four hours to get the signature cards changed, including a lot of driving back and forth across Boston for different pieces of paper.

And that is the point: we opened these bank accounts as a way of giving up our privilege. It takes patience not to be the one who gets to take shortcuts with red tape. But it's also useful in a way that Oren misses.

Dealing with big problems is going to take a long time. It may be a while before we have anything visible to show for it. We are going to need a lot of patience, both in the moment and in the long term, in order to keep up the effort we need.

In a file 770 thread, Steve Davidson accuses Arisia of wanting to be Dragon-Con.

Arisia has never wanted to be Dragon-Con. There was a time when we wanted to be SXSW. I'd like to think I have gotten us past that desire.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/184967.html

I had big plans for today: get up early in Melrose, pick up Julia at 10 in the Scion, head to Haverhill to take care of what seemed like probably ten task hours of work at Arisia's warehouse there, drop off some things there and maybe bring some others back to town, and then get into a bunch of Art Show weeds about layout.

It was after 10:00 already when I realized that I'd left some of those drop off items at the NESFA clubhouse, and also that Rachel was going to need the Scion, so instead I came home, dropped off the Scion and unloaded the few things I'd remembered to put in it, and made a Zipcar reservation. They had a Honda Odyssey available at noon. Score! Those things have a 1400 pound load capacity which is enough for an errand I'd been meaning to run for months now.

Arisia and NESFA share a lot of equipment including some Art Show equipment but each club has its own pipe and pegboard. Different layouts mean that the two shows use about the same amount of pegboard even though the Arisia show is a little smaller -- three quarters of a ton in each case. We each have some spare pegboard -- about another quarter ton -- to handle variability in the show size and damage. Arisia also has some color variability which we've been looking for an excuse to remedy. Recently (by which I mean in the last five years) Arisia has noticed enough wear and tear on the pegboard that, combined with the color issue, is enough reason to start thinking about where the next batch of pegboard was going to come from. NESFA's pegboard has also gotten worn -- more than ours, since it has been around longer -- but they have better color consistency so it still looks pretty OK.

Meanwhile Stu Hellinger was getting tired of paying for storage for the ton of pegboard and similar amount of pipe that had been used for Lunacon in New York, and so Arisia and NESFA jointly bought it and hauled it up to Boston. In the leadup to Arisia 2019 we went through it and Arisia's and sorted about 80% of all that into quartiles (that means we actually have five roughly equal piles including one unsorted pile). The top half we kept. The bottom quartile we marked for disposal. The third quartile turns out to be very color consistent and matches NESFA's pegboard, and it's in better shape than most of NESFA's pegboard, so a while ago I loaded it into the Scion and hauled it down there, where it has been sitting on a janky trashpicked pallet in kind of an annoying location in the back of their clubhouse. And pretty soon that location was going to stop being kind of annoying and start being really annoying. So I had promised I'd go through the NESFA pegboard, discard the worst 10% of it which would be enough to make room for the Lunacon pegboard on their nice pallets, tuck it all away nicely, and get rid of the janky pallet.

A week ago I emailed Boston Building Resources to ask if they were interested in a bunch of pegboard, and sent them some pics of the stuff we were getting rid of. They wrote back that they were, and I arranged that I'd be dropping it off, during their not especially generous business hours. I thought I'd need two trips and I really didn't have a plan for when either of those trips was going to be. But I knew that at least the NESFA trip was going to have to be soon.

Back to this morning: a Zipcar for more than about five hours costs the same as a 24 hour reservation. I knew I was going to need a car until at least 6, and an Odyssey costs the same to rent as any other car they had available. This particular one was available for a whole day so I booked it through tomorrow at noon. Dropping off the pegboard in the late morning will be totally fine traffic wise and with my work schedule. Suddenly I had a plan for getting all this ratty pegboard out of everyone's hair, and it wasn't even going to involve extra trips to Haverhill or even NESFA.

Having made the Zipcar reservation, I played some Ingress on the walk over and got there at 11:58. The 15-minutes-early trick only works if there's time between you and the previous reservation, so I had to wait two minutes to get in. Drove out to Bedford, drove to Haverhill, and got some lovely help loading 800 pounds of pegboard into the back of the Odyssey. Filled Julia in on a bunch of details of what needed to happen next for Art Show, and she also got some other folks to help her do it, so we were done by 5 even though it was after 1 by the time we started.

Meanwhile the layout turned out to be hardly weedy at all and Megan and Julia have it under control.

Dropped Julia off in Reading, ran back into town, ran a few other errands and had a bit of dinner, and then got back to NESFA just as the parking lot was starting to empty out from the NESFA meeting there. Backed in to the lot and got Raz to help me go through NESFA's ton of pegboard, sort it into piles, put the best 90% back on the nice pallets along with the Lunacon pile, and load the worst 200 pounds into the Odyssey.

So now I am home, and I have half a ton of pegboard in a Zipcar parked across the street.

And that sounds perfectly ridiculous if you don't know that there are Zipcars with the load capacity for that, and to spare.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/172138.html

All packed for the weekend. All the printing and email for today is done. Plenty to do once I get to the hotel and a long day tomorrow, but now I rest, in my own bed. Good night, Arisia. I'll see you in the morning.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/168689.html

Art Show is one of the things in Arisia that has the most post-con work to do -- in most years it is 50 hours or so, not that I have been tracking it super closely. I've finished the biggest chunk, which is to get our accounting of which pieces sold to the point where it can be reviewed by Treasury and compared to the money we took in. Hopefully we'll be able to get checks out tomorrow when our Treasurer and I meet to go over the data. There is still a debrief to write and email to send out and webpages to update. But the little light at the end of the tunnel is appreciably larger every day. Maybe I'll even pick up the blogging now that everyone else seems to be doing that here. Not that I did all that much of it even back when it was the only game in town.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/166798.html

... that is, slowly but inexorably. Arisia starts, for me, in 83 hours and 21 minutes. I've made five visits to the NESFA clubhouse this weekend, and three to Arisia storage. I have a long to-do list including three things that I should really do before I go to bed and one that I should get up early for. But I also have lots of help. Not just the people who signed up for the worksessions this weekend, but random friends pitching in for small things here and there, and bystanders helping out for an hour, and my awesome co-director Megan and assistant director Julia. Thank you all! You're fantastic, and I couldn't do it without you.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/166621.html

Arisia worksession tonight. Two of my best volunteers showed up and the three of us got what I thought would be eight task hours of work done in two and a half hours. That was a lot of fun, and we're much closer to ready for the convention now.

Over the last three worksessions, at Arisia storage (as with this one) and at NESFA, we have gone through all 750 or so pieces of pegboard in Boston and selected the 293 in the best shape to come to the convention. Of these, 287 belong to Arisia and 6 belong to NESFA. I had been thinking it would be a good idea to merge the two collections. But now that I've seen the condition of NESFA's pegboard I don't think that's a good idea any more.

I'm still grateful to NESFA for allowing me to cherry pick their pegboard, though. Those six pieces match some of ours in color and mean that we'll have enough of that color to do an entire section and not have to worry about it being next to a color that doesn't match.

Crossposts: https://totient.livejournal.com/165983.html

Can we please please please stop responding to negative feedback with "If you want better, volunteer to do the work yourself"? Not everyone can and no one should have to. People have more important things to do, maybe even more important within the frame of the conversation, maybe just more important to them. Maybe they just don't want to, and that should be fine too. It's not that people are entitled to have everything better. Negative feedback might go unaddressed. But the feedback is valuable whether it comes with an offer to do something about it or not, and volunteer shaming stifles a useful flow of information, most often accomplishing nothing but a little bit of false comfort.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/164574.html

Yesterday afternoon I left my desk at 3:15 to meet Ed Council by bicycle at Arisia storage. I got there in time to go upstairs, fetch a hand truck, convert it to four wheel operation, and walk out the door to our meeting point at 3:29:58 against a 3:30 meeting time. Not quite a minute later he pulled up and we unloaded his SUV of six cases of LED lightbulbs. He seemed a little disoriented by how quickly I was sending him on his way, but I was pleased to be back at my desk at 3:47.

When I got home it was recycling night, and there was actually room in our recycling bins so I finally got a chance to put out some old blank Arisia art show paperwork. We've come up with a new, lower-error process and so don't need the old by-hand print shop checkin forms, nor the old and more error-prone format of sales slips.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/160709.html

As many people who have ever stood still for five minutes within my earshot know, I believe that organizations pass through phase transitions as they grow, with the major inflection points being at 10, 50, 250, 1250, and I speculate 2x5^n for any integer n. The two major ways that I model this are organizational fanout, wherein the maximum number of reports is 10 and the best achievable indirect reporting efficiency is 50%; and communications modes, which relate to Dunbar's number and the limits of human comprehension. Communications mode shifts each have a different description and there is enough material that I will probably eventually write a book about them, so I won't describe them here.

A consequence of this, as again many of my readers will have heard me say already, is that as organizations approach one of these inflection points from below, they begin to adapt to keep their communications and control structures working. They optimize for output from individual contributors at the expense of encouraging teamwork and delegation to keep their headcount from rising. They put infrastructure in place to smooth the existing, but fraying, means of communication. There are countless such knobs and I'm sure my book will include descriptions of many of them.

But for the organization to successfully pass through a transition point, all of these knobs, having been turned all the way up, will have to be turned all the way in the other direction. The organization suddenly needs entirely new communications infrastructure. Organizational cohesion will have to be replaced by unit cohesion. Delegation and teamwork suddenly takes priority over individual output. Schedules and timelines will suddenly be driven from different points as communications modes shift¹. And so on.

Note, importantly, that it is not enough to recognize an optimization as being specific to the lower approach to the phase transition. To turn the knobs the other way, you have to know what the other way is. You can't just rip the knob off.

Big Ops is a knob. We use it in volunteer organizations of 249 people to keep the singly-indirected, centralized communications flowing. When the organization reaches 251 people it begins to drop information -- sometimes critical information.

Boskone recognized this as a problem and tried to solve it by ripping the knob off, with predictable results. Arisia seems to have found the other end of the knob, because the Ops desk at Arisia 2013 was positively boring. Information was flowing around it, and getting where it needed to go. We threw so many replacement options at the problem that it is hard to say which one is the other end of the knob, but I think one thing that really helped was having so many people still reading their email at con, so that information could reach, for instance, hotel liaisons directly from the departments that needed to reach them, without Ops having to get involved.

We do still need an Ops desk. They will still need to be prepared to deal with the kinds of big-Ops activities that used to happen there. But if this year is indicative, Big Ops is withering away.

1. more on this in another post, because it is a brand new discovery for me.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/155379.html

Arisia has now run thirteen cons of more than 2000 attendees.
NESFA and MCFI between them have run nine.

We're still not ready to run a Worldcon. But I'm not worried about the comparison to Boskone 24. We're growing slowly enough to take the problems one at a time instead of all at once. And we've pretty much solved all the problems we've seen so far -- including some that were probably there but which NESFA didn't even perceive back in 1987.

Crossposts: http://totient.livejournal.com/155048.html

Day, um. 6, or 4. They have started to blur together.

This was Arisia party night, and also Art Show auction day. Got up in the morning and printed up some party flyers with the room numbers and put them on all of the message boards. Started to gather up party material and clean up the room, and delegated a bunch of party tasks to all of my fantastic helpers. Then I got a text that Circlet Press was offering the use of their suite. Awesome! And scary, because the last time that happened, at LAcon, we suddenly had to go buy a lot more groceries and dragoon people into party duty and all in all it only worked because we had a dozen people available to staff the party. But this is a smaller suite than that, and the newsletter had not gone to press with the room number yet, and it would have the side-effect of making there be a place for my still somewhat ill roommate to hide if he needed it (which, happily, he turned out not to). So after some dithering I accepted the offer, and sent off a bunch of texts to everyone affected. All this happening just as Art Show was getting busy was less than ideal and I bet Kerry thinks I am goldbricking. But I was able to help with closing bids, and a little with data entry.

By the time I actually made it up to the party suite it was nearly ready to go, and we opened the doors a few minutes early. At the very beginning the crowds came and went quickly, and the oscillation between super-crowded and nearly empty reminded me of a pulsejet. But things smoothed out and for the rest of the evening we had a great buzz going on without being intimidating. At any given time we typically had two and a half people working, so I sat the desk and served booze and sold memberships, and other people put out food and talked up the con, and we didn't bother with a door dragon.

The layout of this particular suite made running a party easier than it would have been in a guest room, and we had the right amount of food. Thanks especially to the Commonwealth party who gave us all the beverages we needed. No thanks to whoever "helpfully" donated the great big tote of useless crap just as we opened so that they wouldn't have to haul it to the dead dog themselves. I should have told them to haul it down there themselves.

We had a weird rush of memberships right around midnight. At one point we had a line to register! The Square app was great and people were impressed with how good their signatures looked on my iPad with the stylus. In the end we sold 27 memberships.

The plan had been to stay open until 2. But the party was going strong and the room hosts seemed OK with it so we wound up closing the doors to new partiers around 2:30, and didn't finish cleaning up and kicking people out until nearly 3. Good thing Monday isn't an early morning for me.

After a longer than usual summer doldrums, suddenly there is a ton of Arisia activity in my email inbox. I don't have a particularly significant role this year and that's fine; I'm using the time to clean some things up that have been languishing for a while, and I'm seeing some other things get cleaned up too which is nice. I love the feeling of having really mucked out some neglected corner, be it virtual or physical.

One of the things other folks are getting cleaned up is we're finally taking a good inventory of the films in our film archive. Expect to see some of these at this coming con. Maybe if I make my saving throw against a big at-con job I can even get to the film program -- I'm always sad to have to miss most of it.

Crossposts: http://palmwiz.livejournal.com/147794.html

A panel idea I suggested for Arisia, and which ran there, just ran at Wiscon. Same description and everything. I feel so validated!

Rachel Mello has been nominated for the Boston Phoenix's "Best Artist"!

Arisia has been nominated for the Boston Phoenix's "Best Nerd Gathering"!

(ETA:) Journeyman has been nominated for the Boston Phoenix's "Best New Restaurant"!

You know what to do...

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.

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.

phi

Entries tagged with arisia

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