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natalyadI am reposting this verbatim as written in April 2013 from my private blog to my public one as I think many of the points about change and supporting new organisers still stands
I too have my reservations and discomfort about the "Special Guests" at BiCon 2013.
However I'm not sure my reservations and discomfort means that special guests are a problem and I thought I would try and unpack my thoughts here.
Each BiCon is usually run by a different group of organisers. Some people like myself have run several BiCons with similar and different groups and even sort of heavily overlapped teams. This is I think a strength of BiCon. It is never the same, each year is different and each organising team and cohort of attenders brings a different look and feel to the overall event. BiCon is big enough that if you don't like something you can walk away and go and do something else because there's often plenty of something else's to do.
I will never forget lifting my head from organiserily wrangling venue-hell of 2011 to see attenders sitting around, chatting, enjoying themselves, chilling, helping the team and having a good time under the fantastic guidance of other members of my team. That BiCon was the most stressful I have ever run/attended (thank you venue) but also one of the most chilled I have ever seen for the majority of attenders. Despite venue troubles we managed as a team to communicate to attenders about the venue difficulties clearly, coherently and with a promise (which we kept) to FIX things given sufficient time and space. The attenders repaid our lucky communications strategy by remaining calm, and chilled and not getting angry or blaming us for venue fail.
Each BiCon is what the organisers, volunteers, attenders and individuals choose to make of it.
This is the 31st UK BiCon. There hasn't been a single year since 1987 I think which hasn't had a BiCon in it for better or worse. There are relatively few things that I think could destabilise BiCon totally or be so bad as to be worth not doing at all.
If the organisers follow the Organisers' guidelines in principle/spirit then I don't think most things should be stopped. I don't even think that most things are really all that worth 'worrying about' [Insert disclaimers for serious fail which we're still needing to learn to recognise and fix quicker/better].
There are things that many people have said "That'll never work" which have worked just fine. There are things which other people and I have been pretty pissed off about over the years but ultimately didn't actually cause the desecration that was feared.
There have probably been at least one thing I've thought "I do NOT like that" for every single BiCon I have attended. The same will be true for other people's unhappiness about something at every BiCon I've run. Sometimes the unhappiness has been a dealbreaker and I have called the organising team on it (and been called on similar by others). The question is perhaps "how big a deal is this"?
So, special guests...
Not my kink for sure. I don't do SF cons. I don't give a shit about celebrity guests or in real life celebrities. I don't read Kitty's blog and don't know much about Charlie Stross's writings. I may or may not go to their sessions - I may or may not find them interesting.
SF cons sell and market themselves on special guests and fans are understandably disappointed if someone pulls out or isn't as expected. Fans will pay £££ to queue up for 10s and a photo with some actor dude and a few snatched words. Celebrity SELLS. Why else do you think there are racks and racks of (in my view crappy) magazines about celebrities!?
Maybe selling Charlie Stross and Kitty Stryker (and future guests) is the best idea organisers have had since the stone age! Maybe, although more unlikely, it's the worst. The reality will be somewhere in the middle I am sure.
What's the worst that could happen?
Is it really likely to cause harm?
Might we get new attenders who are attracted by the societally normal "cult of celebrity"? Will we get more of the privileged and fewer of the less privileged? Surely our attitude of "I don't know who Cheryl Cole is and I'm proud of it" anti-celeberityism is a sign of our own privilege and priorities and not necessarily a good thing for a entire community. What about people who know who Cheryl is, or even like her? Do they feel that they can say that publicly at BiCon? I bet they don't! I have heard people saying they don't feel they can say they like football in BiCon/bi space cos it feels like there's a pervasive "We're too alt to like football" along with some unpleasant and not well recognised classism!
Now there are reasonable concerns about what a blogger who isn't even from the UK or UK Bi community can bring to us about abuse in alt communities. I haven't read her blog, and I don't know her so I don't know if Kitty is going to be annoying. I don't know if she's going to be one of those people who doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. We don't publicly do that about other workshop facilitators! We get complaints most years about some workshops being crap/annoying/patronising/ignorant. That's a choice BiCon by its very structure has made - workshops are run by attenders for better or worse. I personally see this as a strength, a way for people to try things out, get experience, make mistakes, worst case is it's 75 minutes of someone's life - less if they exercise their right (which we need to keep publicising) to leave the session.
Annoying people who think they know it all aren't the end of the world. They're only people after all. Last year I got into a debate with someone who was telling a group of us in a workshop that "BiCon should do ABC" as the solution to all our oppression problems. I was trying to explain the reality and challenges and being shouted down and accused of being an apologist for the status quo. Eventually it occurred to me to ask - "What is BiCon?" "WHO ARE BiCon?". This made the person realise that BiCon is a complex entity or realistically a collection of entities. If Kitty is annoying like this or similar then people can say that to her in her session...
I've seen comments about how "all our contributions are valued and I like that we're not singled out". I am not sure I agree with that.
We have our own "celebrities" and "influential people" within our UK Bi communities. Ties of longevity, knowledge, charm, experience, power, privilege (tonnes of that) (and sometimes unprivilege tokenism!), partnership, friendship, sexual connections, location and more...
Anyone who says that some people are not listened to more than others in our community is full of shit or completely fucking deluded.
I should know, I'm one of the ones who is listened to.
Some of that being listened to is earned through community access-activism, organising on 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2011 BiCon teams, being around for a long time, doing my best to facilitate communication across disparate people in our "communities", doing my best to resolve conflict.
But some of that listened to is privileges, I'm white, middle class, appropriately geeky (esp as I can say when something is too geeky for its own good), like using a computer & the Internet, use text as my primary form of communication and can type faster than most people I know. I'm sure there's more privileges I can't see/articulate.
I bet I could guess 15+ of the 20 most influential people in the UK Bi Community off the top of my head. I'm probably on it myself. Not all of those people in that 20 want to be on it, want to believe they're on it, or realise but they are on that hypothetical list in how they are listened and responded to. Each one of those influential people is influential for different reasons. Many of them are justifiably influential and have contributed fantastic things to our community now or in the past. Many are influential because how they think and what they say. Some of them in my view shouldn't be on it cos they used up their currency years ago and haven't done anything since except try and trade on memories. And it's not a single cabal either. Many of those 10-20 most influential people don't even like one another all that much. I probably don't like or agree with all of them. But they/we are there and we're pretty obvious to anyone looking at us, no matter how much each of individually experiences imposter syndrome and because of our own pasts still think of ourselves as "out group" "outsiders".
We also have people we don't challenge when we should "Oh but it'll hurt them" "They will crack up" "They won't listen" and on and on which is another form of influence because there's a huge disparity in the people that will and won't get criticised by different parts of our communities.
We don't talk about this influence and power and the good/bad/other nearly enough!
What's the difference between a special guest and the not talked about enough "influential people in the UK BiCon Community"?
One advantage of special guests is that it's a different heavily marketed and responded to person from the usual. It's overt and for a specific purpose and when it's been done slightly similarly in the past the 'celebrities' have just mingled with everyone else. Some of us do and some of us don't know what Robyn Ochs looks like. I suspect more of us in the UK know what I look like.
Which leads me to:
One thing we are really bad at as a "community" is letting new people try new things.
We're too busy saying "Well that won't work" "I don't LIIKE that" "That's not the same as XXXX year!" and we don't realise we're stifling our event and community with every tweet, facebook status, blog, comment and thought.
We have a lot of people who don't like change. BiCon and the UK Bi Community is ME shaped. I don't have to change to fit in? I'm the circle. Many people are scared of change, because if BiCon becomes less them/us shaped we will lose our privileges and that hurts and I suspect many don't reason it out like this but they resist change because "I am scared of what it will become".
I've worked with newbie organisers who have had some great ideas that they were too scared to help make happen "Cos people won't like it" "people will be horrible about it" "People will complain". No amount of "So what?" "fuck em" "It's a good idea, it doesn't matter" or even "It's worth a try, if it doesn't work then so it didn't work".
We don't realise how scared newbie organisers are of "our collective opinion". I have had too many conversations in the last 6 years with newbie organisers or people with ideas who won't do it cos of fear of the community.
As a community we are horrible about failure. "I knew X wouldn't work" "I SAID X wouldn't work" "Well X was a load of crap then!".
Yet I have learned as much from my failures as my successes. Sometimes failure was bad idea, sometimes it was bad implementation and sometimes it was wrong place and time (nothing more maddening than someone else reusing your idea Z years later and it working and them getting the credit for originality when it was just the right place and time). And sometimes my failure made other people look at the same thing and come up with a completely orthogonal idea which actually fixes the problem I had as well as working!
Why aren't BiCon organisers/volunteers allowed to have failures? Why isn't there more "I'm sorry your idea didn't work out, I hope you're not too gutted" or "Well ok X didn't work out, but Y and Z were really good".
I can take criticism - I challenge any of you to criticise my failures more than I have myself.
I can say where I have learned from earlier failures and done better next time. I can talk about those times I failed and not worry about losing credibility in the face of the community. I am influential now. I have seen enough BiCons and learned (from failures) to manage conflict so it doesn't usually turn into an online shouty flamewar *shudder*.
But newbie BiCon organisers don't have that credibility (within our community). The majority and visible components of this year's team don't have that. Sam, Katie and Elizabeth are all first-time BiCon organisers. They are all new blood. Each one of those people has done interesting things in other communities, has bought in enthusiasm, energy and their spoons to making this year's BiCon happen.
After my first BiCon organising experience in 2004 I nearly never came back to BiCon, it was a significant factor in my not going to 2005 BiCon. I thought I had failed. I was SCREAMED at by one attender, and bitched at by others and moaned at by more. I thought it was my responsibility to fix every single gripe they had. All I perceived that entire five days of BiCon was the ways that we fucked up, should have, could have been better.
In desperation I had to ask for help from "influential people" who I was terrified of, who turned out to be lovely, helpful, kind and incredibly supportive and human. Influential people said things to me which kept me on the "staying" side of the UK Bi Community - told me about things they thought I'd done well. Eventually the things they said sunk in and made me realise that my attempts to fix fuckups were noted even if the fuckup shouldn't have happened. That as an individual team member I had absolutely not failed and despite some legitimate criticism of the event as a whole that it was a good BiCon. It took a long time to exorcise the perception that in 2004 I personally had failed.
I never, ever, want any BiCon organiser to feel as bad as I did during and after 2004. I never ever want anyone to walk away from a BiCon they organised with more on the "fuckup/fail" than on the "did well/nice try" list.
Criticism will often be louder than praise and we are not good at supportive praise as a community towards people who are spending hours of their "free" time doing a lot of often boring work for the community/event. We're not good at saying "thank you for replying to ALL those registration emails" or "thanks for wrangling venues, that must be hard work" "thank you for doing number crunching which so many people don't want to do".
Are we going to stifle organisers and surround them with more criticism than praise and support?
Are we going to let organisers trying new ideas - even the ones we don't like and think are a bit tacky or not our kink?
My conclusion is that the celebrity attenders aren't that big a deal, at least no more so that an ents theme which I don't care about, or workshops about scifi or meditation which I won't go to...
I don't think we shouldn't talk about this stuff, in fact I think we should but we should be examining our own attitudes and thinking about how big a deal anything actually is.
I don't know what BiCon 2013 will be like. I have booked my ticket. I'm looking forward to it.
I hope it will be different. Each one is. I hope I'll be envious of some of their ideas.
I too have my reservations and discomfort about the "Special Guests" at BiCon 2013.
However I'm not sure my reservations and discomfort means that special guests are a problem and I thought I would try and unpack my thoughts here.
Each BiCon is usually run by a different group of organisers. Some people like myself have run several BiCons with similar and different groups and even sort of heavily overlapped teams. This is I think a strength of BiCon. It is never the same, each year is different and each organising team and cohort of attenders brings a different look and feel to the overall event. BiCon is big enough that if you don't like something you can walk away and go and do something else because there's often plenty of something else's to do.
I will never forget lifting my head from organiserily wrangling venue-hell of 2011 to see attenders sitting around, chatting, enjoying themselves, chilling, helping the team and having a good time under the fantastic guidance of other members of my team. That BiCon was the most stressful I have ever run/attended (thank you venue) but also one of the most chilled I have ever seen for the majority of attenders. Despite venue troubles we managed as a team to communicate to attenders about the venue difficulties clearly, coherently and with a promise (which we kept) to FIX things given sufficient time and space. The attenders repaid our lucky communications strategy by remaining calm, and chilled and not getting angry or blaming us for venue fail.
Each BiCon is what the organisers, volunteers, attenders and individuals choose to make of it.
This is the 31st UK BiCon. There hasn't been a single year since 1987 I think which hasn't had a BiCon in it for better or worse. There are relatively few things that I think could destabilise BiCon totally or be so bad as to be worth not doing at all.
If the organisers follow the Organisers' guidelines in principle/spirit then I don't think most things should be stopped. I don't even think that most things are really all that worth 'worrying about' [Insert disclaimers for serious fail which we're still needing to learn to recognise and fix quicker/better].
There are things that many people have said "That'll never work" which have worked just fine. There are things which other people and I have been pretty pissed off about over the years but ultimately didn't actually cause the desecration that was feared.
There have probably been at least one thing I've thought "I do NOT like that" for every single BiCon I have attended. The same will be true for other people's unhappiness about something at every BiCon I've run. Sometimes the unhappiness has been a dealbreaker and I have called the organising team on it (and been called on similar by others). The question is perhaps "how big a deal is this"?
So, special guests...
Not my kink for sure. I don't do SF cons. I don't give a shit about celebrity guests or in real life celebrities. I don't read Kitty's blog and don't know much about Charlie Stross's writings. I may or may not go to their sessions - I may or may not find them interesting.
SF cons sell and market themselves on special guests and fans are understandably disappointed if someone pulls out or isn't as expected. Fans will pay £££ to queue up for 10s and a photo with some actor dude and a few snatched words. Celebrity SELLS. Why else do you think there are racks and racks of (in my view crappy) magazines about celebrities!?
Maybe selling Charlie Stross and Kitty Stryker (and future guests) is the best idea organisers have had since the stone age! Maybe, although more unlikely, it's the worst. The reality will be somewhere in the middle I am sure.
What's the worst that could happen?
Is it really likely to cause harm?
Might we get new attenders who are attracted by the societally normal "cult of celebrity"? Will we get more of the privileged and fewer of the less privileged? Surely our attitude of "I don't know who Cheryl Cole is and I'm proud of it" anti-celeberityism is a sign of our own privilege and priorities and not necessarily a good thing for a entire community. What about people who know who Cheryl is, or even like her? Do they feel that they can say that publicly at BiCon? I bet they don't! I have heard people saying they don't feel they can say they like football in BiCon/bi space cos it feels like there's a pervasive "We're too alt to like football" along with some unpleasant and not well recognised classism!
Now there are reasonable concerns about what a blogger who isn't even from the UK or UK Bi community can bring to us about abuse in alt communities. I haven't read her blog, and I don't know her so I don't know if Kitty is going to be annoying. I don't know if she's going to be one of those people who doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. We don't publicly do that about other workshop facilitators! We get complaints most years about some workshops being crap/annoying/patronising/ignorant. That's a choice BiCon by its very structure has made - workshops are run by attenders for better or worse. I personally see this as a strength, a way for people to try things out, get experience, make mistakes, worst case is it's 75 minutes of someone's life - less if they exercise their right (which we need to keep publicising) to leave the session.
Annoying people who think they know it all aren't the end of the world. They're only people after all. Last year I got into a debate with someone who was telling a group of us in a workshop that "BiCon should do ABC" as the solution to all our oppression problems. I was trying to explain the reality and challenges and being shouted down and accused of being an apologist for the status quo. Eventually it occurred to me to ask - "What is BiCon?" "WHO ARE BiCon?". This made the person realise that BiCon is a complex entity or realistically a collection of entities. If Kitty is annoying like this or similar then people can say that to her in her session...
I've seen comments about how "all our contributions are valued and I like that we're not singled out". I am not sure I agree with that.
We have our own "celebrities" and "influential people" within our UK Bi communities. Ties of longevity, knowledge, charm, experience, power, privilege (tonnes of that) (and sometimes unprivilege tokenism!), partnership, friendship, sexual connections, location and more...
Anyone who says that some people are not listened to more than others in our community is full of shit or completely fucking deluded.
I should know, I'm one of the ones who is listened to.
Some of that being listened to is earned through community access-activism, organising on 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2011 BiCon teams, being around for a long time, doing my best to facilitate communication across disparate people in our "communities", doing my best to resolve conflict.
But some of that listened to is privileges, I'm white, middle class, appropriately geeky (esp as I can say when something is too geeky for its own good), like using a computer & the Internet, use text as my primary form of communication and can type faster than most people I know. I'm sure there's more privileges I can't see/articulate.
I bet I could guess 15+ of the 20 most influential people in the UK Bi Community off the top of my head. I'm probably on it myself. Not all of those people in that 20 want to be on it, want to believe they're on it, or realise but they are on that hypothetical list in how they are listened and responded to. Each one of those influential people is influential for different reasons. Many of them are justifiably influential and have contributed fantastic things to our community now or in the past. Many are influential because how they think and what they say. Some of them in my view shouldn't be on it cos they used up their currency years ago and haven't done anything since except try and trade on memories. And it's not a single cabal either. Many of those 10-20 most influential people don't even like one another all that much. I probably don't like or agree with all of them. But they/we are there and we're pretty obvious to anyone looking at us, no matter how much each of individually experiences imposter syndrome and because of our own pasts still think of ourselves as "out group" "outsiders".
We also have people we don't challenge when we should "Oh but it'll hurt them" "They will crack up" "They won't listen" and on and on which is another form of influence because there's a huge disparity in the people that will and won't get criticised by different parts of our communities.
We don't talk about this influence and power and the good/bad/other nearly enough!
What's the difference between a special guest and the not talked about enough "influential people in the UK BiCon Community"?
One advantage of special guests is that it's a different heavily marketed and responded to person from the usual. It's overt and for a specific purpose and when it's been done slightly similarly in the past the 'celebrities' have just mingled with everyone else. Some of us do and some of us don't know what Robyn Ochs looks like. I suspect more of us in the UK know what I look like.
Which leads me to:
One thing we are really bad at as a "community" is letting new people try new things.
We're too busy saying "Well that won't work" "I don't LIIKE that" "That's not the same as XXXX year!" and we don't realise we're stifling our event and community with every tweet, facebook status, blog, comment and thought.
We have a lot of people who don't like change. BiCon and the UK Bi Community is ME shaped. I don't have to change to fit in? I'm the circle. Many people are scared of change, because if BiCon becomes less them/us shaped we will lose our privileges and that hurts and I suspect many don't reason it out like this but they resist change because "I am scared of what it will become".
I've worked with newbie organisers who have had some great ideas that they were too scared to help make happen "Cos people won't like it" "people will be horrible about it" "People will complain". No amount of "So what?" "fuck em" "It's a good idea, it doesn't matter" or even "It's worth a try, if it doesn't work then so it didn't work".
We don't realise how scared newbie organisers are of "our collective opinion". I have had too many conversations in the last 6 years with newbie organisers or people with ideas who won't do it cos of fear of the community.
As a community we are horrible about failure. "I knew X wouldn't work" "I SAID X wouldn't work" "Well X was a load of crap then!".
Yet I have learned as much from my failures as my successes. Sometimes failure was bad idea, sometimes it was bad implementation and sometimes it was wrong place and time (nothing more maddening than someone else reusing your idea Z years later and it working and them getting the credit for originality when it was just the right place and time). And sometimes my failure made other people look at the same thing and come up with a completely orthogonal idea which actually fixes the problem I had as well as working!
Why aren't BiCon organisers/volunteers allowed to have failures? Why isn't there more "I'm sorry your idea didn't work out, I hope you're not too gutted" or "Well ok X didn't work out, but Y and Z were really good".
I can take criticism - I challenge any of you to criticise my failures more than I have myself.
I can say where I have learned from earlier failures and done better next time. I can talk about those times I failed and not worry about losing credibility in the face of the community. I am influential now. I have seen enough BiCons and learned (from failures) to manage conflict so it doesn't usually turn into an online shouty flamewar *shudder*.
But newbie BiCon organisers don't have that credibility (within our community). The majority and visible components of this year's team don't have that. Sam, Katie and Elizabeth are all first-time BiCon organisers. They are all new blood. Each one of those people has done interesting things in other communities, has bought in enthusiasm, energy and their spoons to making this year's BiCon happen.
After my first BiCon organising experience in 2004 I nearly never came back to BiCon, it was a significant factor in my not going to 2005 BiCon. I thought I had failed. I was SCREAMED at by one attender, and bitched at by others and moaned at by more. I thought it was my responsibility to fix every single gripe they had. All I perceived that entire five days of BiCon was the ways that we fucked up, should have, could have been better.
In desperation I had to ask for help from "influential people" who I was terrified of, who turned out to be lovely, helpful, kind and incredibly supportive and human. Influential people said things to me which kept me on the "staying" side of the UK Bi Community - told me about things they thought I'd done well. Eventually the things they said sunk in and made me realise that my attempts to fix fuckups were noted even if the fuckup shouldn't have happened. That as an individual team member I had absolutely not failed and despite some legitimate criticism of the event as a whole that it was a good BiCon. It took a long time to exorcise the perception that in 2004 I personally had failed.
I never, ever, want any BiCon organiser to feel as bad as I did during and after 2004. I never ever want anyone to walk away from a BiCon they organised with more on the "fuckup/fail" than on the "did well/nice try" list.
Criticism will often be louder than praise and we are not good at supportive praise as a community towards people who are spending hours of their "free" time doing a lot of often boring work for the community/event. We're not good at saying "thank you for replying to ALL those registration emails" or "thanks for wrangling venues, that must be hard work" "thank you for doing number crunching which so many people don't want to do".
Are we going to stifle organisers and surround them with more criticism than praise and support?
Are we going to let organisers trying new ideas - even the ones we don't like and think are a bit tacky or not our kink?
My conclusion is that the celebrity attenders aren't that big a deal, at least no more so that an ents theme which I don't care about, or workshops about scifi or meditation which I won't go to...
I don't think we shouldn't talk about this stuff, in fact I think we should but we should be examining our own attitudes and thinking about how big a deal anything actually is.
I don't know what BiCon 2013 will be like. I have booked my ticket. I'm looking forward to it.
I hope it will be different. Each one is. I hope I'll be envious of some of their ideas.
