Westercon 77 Business Meeting & Site Selection

[kayla_allen]

Today was the Westercon 77 Business Meeting. Because Lisa didn't come to Westercon (she's preparing for her trip to Europe that starts on Wednesday of this week), she loaned me her camera gear and I was deputized to record the meeting. Kevin is the overall manager of Westercon Business (both Martin Pyne, chair of the Business Meeting, and I as head of Site Selection report to him), and he also maintains a YouTube playlist of Westercon Business Meetings. Here's the video from this year's meeting.

Watch on YouTube

I presented the results of Site Selection to the meeting at the start. The results of Site Selection were declared official when the meeting thanked me for my work and ordered me to destroy the ballots, which I will do when I get home where our shredder is.

A technical amendment that restores the official name of Westercon (accidentally deleted by a different change a few years ago) was ratified without objection.

Then came the Big Event: the motion that I authored with Linda Deneroff to Retire Westercon. I spoke first, and you can watch the video to hear my case. There was some debate, and while I feel sure that nobody really wants Westercon to end, the meeting appears to have been persuaded by my argument that it's time for it to retire, and for the retirement to be done in a dignified and orderly manner.

The motion to Repeal the Westercon Bylaws received first passage by a vote of "many to four." As with all bylaw amendments, it has to be ratified by the following year's Westercon to take effect. Should the motion be ratified, there would still be two Westercons left. Westercon 79 in 2027 will be in Santa Clara at BayCon. The possible Last Westercon would be Westercon 80 in 2028. That convention site will be selected next year at BayCon 2026.

I hope that we can persuade LASFS, which founded the convention in 1948, to host Westercon 80 and give Westercon a dignified and appropriate retirement.

Comments

[calimac]

Good speech. What I wonder is why interest in bidding for Westercon has declined. Yalow and Siladi both suggested that the rise of other regional/local conventions on the west coast has sapped interest away from Westercon, but as Yalow pointed out, that phenomenon dates back to the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Westercon was still flourishing in that period, as I personally remember. I'm thinking more of attendance figures than number of bids. This remained true as late as around the year 2000. But by the end of that decade something had changed, and I'm not familiar enough with the fannish milieu to have any sense of why, but Westercon had become small and obscure compared with other cons, where once it had been the king of the west coast convention calendar behind only Worldcon.

I also fervently endorse both keeping the historical website up and encouraging current conventions to maintain and update theirs. I've had occasional trouble as much as 15-20 years ago trying to make plans for conventions I wanted to attend that didn't have up to date information available.

[kayla_allen]

While LASFS owns the domain and the service mark, SFSFC has been paying for the hosting and Kevin has been keeping Westercon.org updated. (No, he hasn't updated it yet with the new information. I've been keeping him busy.) I think that as long as SFSFC and LASFS cooperate on this, we should expect to see the website stay up indefinitely

[scott_sanford]

I am watching similar things play out locally, where OryCon never recovered from the Covid era.