Can-Con 2010: The Little Con that Could
The convention may be over (as of Sunday), but suffice to say that it was awesome and (as the contemporary idiom still goes) totally rocked!
For me the con started on Friday with popelaksmi picking me up to corral supplies for the Con Suite. The run-up had been going on for weeks, and the concerns over it - after all, this con has been on hiatus for nine years now - had been dogging us on Con-Com for almost as long. But we persevered, and by Gadfrey (or “Gallifrey”, if you prefer) we made it all come together. As Head of Programming and Scheduling, I was worried that there would be major glitches with panels. Nevertheless, we still made it all work.
Between those of us on Con-Com (kallisti, tasmonicus, Tim, popelaksmi and yours truly), our Guests (Marie Bilodeau, Larry “the Doctor” Stewart, Eric Choi, Hayden Trenholm, Jean-Louis Trudel and Matthew Johnson) and many others, we put together an awesome celebration of fannishness. Honorable mentions, IMHO, go to people like pheloniusfriar, who founded the con in the first place and designed our website (but was overloaded by Real Life this time around) and Christian Sauvé, who corrected my attempts at writing French in the Pocket Program; they also go to “taper Glenn” Simser and kattale, who helped me with the filking on Saturday night (when I feared that we filkers would miss each other yet again); nor should I forget panelists like TSivia and dewline who kept the discussions going. The discussion topics were popular, the discussion panels were on time (or, at least, were only slightly on “fannish” time), the other two conventions in the same hotel space did not faze us [a Pentacostal church service just down the hall can give a boiler factory a run for its money in terms of decibels, as tasmonicus can testify], the dealers were apparently happy, and the book “launches” - especially Marie Bilodeau’s of her new book on Friday - went off perfectly.
Not everything went quite as planned. I assumed - bad idea - that sign-up sheets would appear auto-magically at Registration for our Writers’ Workshops. Then the fact that the Steampunk Social would come first and music that was “danceable” would not come till rather later was apparently not well communicated to the attendees. We had difficulty with connecting our PC with the hotel WiFi and the Internet at large. But the glitches assuredly did not slow us down, and that is what counts.
One of the suggestions raised at the end of the con was to start a discussion on what we want the con to be (or where we want it to go) in the years to come. I for one will welcome comments here. I should note that the con will not occur at quite the same time next year, as next year’s Worldcon will occur at this time in August 2011 and a few of us may be going there.
What do others think? As always, this inquiring con-com member would like to know.