[TheForge] "Official" news from ABANA

[Mike]

I got a huge lift out of Carbondale in '76 but the last one I went to
was Alfred in '90.  I just don't much care for crowds.  But that's
personal whim.

> ......Just the tents at Richmond cost us $30k. Add to that
> bleachers, signs, BIG generators, BIG air compressors, wire, piping,
> PA systems, fork lifts, cranes, golf carts, fab tent and supplies,
> propane, coal, insurance, 30 walkie-talkies and daily battery
> changes, port-a-pots and service, and on and on and that is just for
> the demo area. Then we have dorm rooms (most folks do not want to
> camp out), food services, (most folks do not want to eat bologna
> sandwiches for four days) linen services, class rooms, meeting
> rooms, gallery rooms, auction arena, projectors, power point setups,
> more PA systems, areas for sales, area for registration, phone
> lines, computer lines, broadband lines, security, administration,
> and lots more that I can't think of right now..................  We
> have to change it, it's too much work for volunteers to accomplish.

What jumps out at me from this excerpt is that this was a centrally
organized, hierarchical arrangement.  And this is the same problem
that (typically) hierarchical corporations hit when they grow to a
certain size: middle management expands, costs soar and everything
tends to get out of control.  It's a critical juncture for
corporations. 

I would suggest that some thought be given to a much more unorganized
model.  I think (correct me if I'm wrong here, Phlip) that big SCA
meets depend on local organization and subsequent cooperation of the
many small groups that attend or form ad hoc from individual
attendees.  Speaking theoretically, large systems can self-organize if
the behavior -- the rules governing the behavior -- of the component
parts is right.  And they can become chaotic if not.

Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility for due diligence to
ensure that things go as planned and not otherwise.  The sort of
people who volunteer to run organizations like ABANA tend to be people
who see things in that light.  That isn't to slag the ABANA board as
corporatist a**holes.  On the contrary, that is the very kind of
person with the very kind of skills and outlook required to make a
top-down, hierarchical organization or event work.  By the same token,
to the degree that people see this as a problem in efficient
hierarchical organization, to that extent they are unlikely to think
of it as a problem lending it self to local or distributed
organization, or even to grasp the notion that things could work that
way. 

If you take the annual NOMMA con, that big computer industry show or
something like SIGGraph as a model, well, the ABANA members aren't
corporate entities or expense account execs.  We'll never reach that
level of slick, shiny industrial showpiece conference.  Nor should we
expect to.

If you take a New England county fair or one of the fairs of, say,
17th c. Europe as a model, it will never look as slick or 21st century
"professional", it will tend to be somewhat unpredictable, but it will
still get the smiths together.  Some umbrella services from the
ABANA office -- insurance, perhaps, and first aid come to mind
-- could be centrally organized and offered.  Do the NEB want to bring
in a Siberian demonstrator? Let them do it.  Do the good ol' boys from
Salt Hole, Utah want to set up a rivet forge next to their pickups and
teach how to make salt shovels?  Great.  Well, you get the idea...

If an example is called for, consider a comparison between Microsoft
and Gnu/Linux.  Microsoft has conquered the world with hierarchical,
central organization, at enormous cost, cost that has been offloaded
onto its users in numerous ways.  The teams that build apps for Linux
apps are all or mostly volunteers working ad hoc and loosely
coordinated.  Some projects fail or die, others fly and yet others
grind doggedly along to eventually become part of the infrastructure.  

This might be the time to consider the distributed model of conference
organization as an alternative.

Disclaimer (or is that mea culpa?): I'm not an experienced organizer
or facilitator or anything like that.  I may even be clueless in this
domain.  So the above is a think piece, not an offer to submit a
blueprint for generating the results.


FWIW,
- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^