Meanwhile, In Los Angeles

[billroper]

Actually, we're in Anaheim, we've successfully moved into the Dealers' Room, and I understand from Rick Weiss that folks who are on three or more filk programming items are now going to be considered as Program Participants at LACon IV.

So far, so good. :)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

That's excellent. Good for the convention folks!

[chirosinger.livejournal.com]

ssshhhhh

(that was me forgetting I was incognito)

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Hope your trip out was smooth and you have a good con!

[billroper]

Other than the usual entertainment in the mountains west of Denver (where we always seem to drive through after dark), it was a very smooth trip. On the other hand, I hear that Glen Cook had two flats in the Mojave, one of which took out an important subsystem on his van. Ouch!

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

This is pretty random, but were you, by any odd chance, at the Red Sox / Angels game in section 425 Tuesday night? My husband and I came out from Boston for the con, but tok advantage of the convenient coincidence to catch a ballgame. Your userpic looks remarkably like the guy who was sitting behind us...

[billroper]

We thought about going, but decided not to try. I wonder who that was using my face...

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

I hope you read ALL the comments to your posting from Green River.
It was entertaining.

[billroper]

Oh, yes.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Have a great time out there, and at some point during the weekend, please take a moment to miss us.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

The whole filk-as-program thing is a complicated issue. Obviously a one-person one-hour concert is quite a bit more demanding than sitting on a panel, but there are a lot of other non-panel program items that are also more challenging than sitting on a panel. It's hard to draw a line that is both clear and fair, so the paradigm tends to be that an hour is an hour.

However, some participation in filking is a lot less effort than being on a panel. A panel will have four or five interesting published authors, but the seventh or eighth performer in a group may require a lot less short-term preparation and long-term background. So often there is not an exact mapping of "filk program participant" to "program participant". If this is (in my opinion) done correctly, what happens is that the names in the program schedule are the ones who are counted as program participants; if the filk program team decides to add people to a particular item above the number, that's pretty much outside the scope of the official program. But this varies highly from convention to convention.

Then there is the whole green-room question. While filkers and authors both benefit from preparation time, this doesn't always work in the same space. (Filkers want to make more noise than authors.) At Torcon we had lots of smallish spaces in the Royal York, so the filkers used one of the three rooms we gave them as a filk green room, and this seemed to work. That's really dependent on the function space.

But whatever the issues and policies are, this should be clearly communicated well in advance, so that questions can be answered, policy questions reviewed; if there is to be controversy or lack of consensus, it should be happening six months out, not at the con.

I'm just making a general comment about past Worldcons; I was not significantly involved in LACon program planning and I don't speak for the program team. The fact that this was quickly resolved does not surprise me, and indicates the basic goodwill and respect that Worldcon conrunners have in regards to filk.

However, speaking from previous experience in this area, I can say that filkers can be a little high-maintenance and may take some extra effort to avoid and resolve communication problems. I think most conrunners would consider it worth the effort, but many conrunners don't realize the extra communication needs to take place early. (For example for Torcon, we had a lot of discussion about where filk rooms were in relation to film rooms.) It just takes a little time when people start from different assumptions to get everyone on the same page.

I'm certainly not in a position to say what other committees will or won't do, and I can't even make statements about departments or functions I'm not in charge of. I can say that any convention that I'm a director of will listen to and take seriously the concerns and issues of filkers, and any convention that I'm in charge of maintaining mailing lists for will have communication channels to ensure that questions get to the right people. Fandom is a collective effort and we need to work together on working together.

[billroper]

I have noticed the occasional high-maintenance tendency on the part of some filkers, although -- to be fair! -- there are members of other fannish groups who can become high-maintenance at the drop of a hat. :) It depends on how entitled they're feeling at any given moment.

But I fully agree that fandom is a collective effort and we need to work together. I was just a bit annoyed with the situation and, when the song chose to wake me up, decided to post it and see what happened.

As it turned out, the right thing happened and the problem was fixed. I like it when problems get fixed. :)