Westercon

We won’t have a fan table, but we will be hosting a party Thursday night. Since the theme for Further Confusion is The Infurmary, we invite you to join us for The Mysterious Room Party of Doctor Moreau.

Further Confusion is being held at the San Jose Convention Center January 12-16, with the attached Hilton and Marriott hotels as host hotels.

The party will be at the Marriott in Room 403; we expect to open the doors at 9pm and shall tweet the room number and opening announcement as soon as we’re ready to go. If you are attending FC, be sure to check out our operation!

With Westercon 64 now all but completely wound down, we have deactivated most of the convention’s e-mail addresses ending in @westercon64.org. Only the website, info, and chair addresses are currently active.

Have you seen the spiffy new website for Westercon 65: ConClusion? Take a look, it has a lot more details there including hotel registration information.

As soon as they get an RSS feed going on the new site, we’ll start to import news directly from the site.

The next two planning meetings have been scheduled:

October 16, 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Razzis Pizza
8523 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA

November 20, 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
Razzis Pizza
8523 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA

We expect to have a Skype call for these meetings. Details will be posted to our mailing list, W65-Conclusion@yahoogroups.com.

An information and staff meeting has been scheduled for Sunday, September 18:

Shoreline Library
345 North 175th Street
Shoreline, WA 98155

Meeting Details: Large Meeting Room, 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM

Issue the Next (#2) of The End Times was released (unleashed?) at Renovation! You can find a copy on our website on the Westercon 65 Publications page. Hightlights include:

• Art Bozlee’s take on the next phase of American space exploration
• Bobbie DuFault’s thoughts on The History of Coffee
• Tour reports of the Science Fiction Museum and the Seattle Underground Tour
• How to easily get to downtown Seattle from the convention site

and more!

Copies will be mailed to members who have requested paper publications, other members will be sent links in email, and the rest of you are free to download it as well. If you have ideas for the following, next-to-last issue, or if you’d like to contribute, let us know! While you still have, y’know, time…

Memberships went on sale this weekend at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention. Current rates are $50 Attending, $30 Supporting. Visit the Membership page for more details, or go directly to the secure online registration forms to get your membership to Westercon 66!
The Early-Bird rate of $50 will go up to $65 on December 1, 2011!
Oops — we discovered the reg server was running on Mountain Time. Early-Bird has been extended through December 1.

The price to upgrade from Voting to full Attending is $25 and does not change on Dec. 1. If you voted, drop a note to registration@westercon66.org to get your voter’s authorization code.

For people who might not have heard, Westercon 65 is hosting a party at Worldcon tomorrow night. Details are on their Facebook event page but we’ll recap them here:

Time: Thursday at 7:00pm – Friday at 12:00am
Location: Renovation – Atlantis Hotel – Suite 1638 (Reno, NV)

Westercon 65: ConClusion

in 2012, One Cycle of Time Ends, and Another Begins…

Come join Westercon 65: ConClusion (2012), Westercon 66: Zellacon (2013), and the Utah in 2014 Westercon Bid as we Party While the World Burns… Lots of End-of-the-World fun for everyone!

Pinatas and Family-Friendly Activities from 7:00 – 9:00 PM
Adult Beverages Available after 9:00 PM.

One of the very important goals for the new Westercon site was to make it a useful place to find information about all Westercons. This wasn’t as easy as you might think, and involved evolutions of thinking to come up with the solution we have chosen.

Westercon doesn’t have a centralized group that controls Westercon from year to year. The way Westercon works is that the Westercon committee which you have voted in for a given year has been responsible for all promotion of Westercon. As each committee hails from a different city, the means that the committee running a given westercon usually has little in common with the committee who ran the previous Westercon. This has worked wonderfully to bring Westercon fans to a diverse set of sites and experiences throughout the Western region. However it has made it difficult for the fans to find the latest information about Westercon.

We wanted to increase the ability to promote Westercon events and Western-region publishers and authors, but we absolute didn’t want to take power or control away from the elected Westercon committees. The committees from each city tend to utilize their own local resources and do things their own way. We want to support and enable this, not detract from it.

Following is how we have decided to aggregate All Things Westercon in a single place while also supporting and promoting each of the seated Westercon committees:

1. For any Westercon which has their own website, westercon.org will syndicate (show) the posts from their website or blog’s RSS feed and provide a link back to the original article.
2. For any Westercon which has their own twitter account for announcements, westercon.org will retweet their announcements to all followers of the Westercon twitter account.
3. For any Westercon which has their own twitter account for announcements, westercon.org will syndicate (show) the tweets on the home page.
4. Any Westercon bid or seated convention which does not have their own website will be given an Author account on westercon.org to post information about their bid or convention.

One of the great things about the new WordPress CMS on westercon.org is that it separates the permissions to edit the site from permissions to host and administrate the site. This makes it easy to provide Author accounts for any Westercon committee so they can write directly to the site without having to go through the webmaster or systems administrator.

If you are unfamiliar with the Westercon selection process, details are available in the Westercon Bylaws & Traditions document.

You can also find:

• A list of the Seated Conventions (already voted on)
• Bids for future Westercon locations

One of the really neat things we did was make it really easy to find the westercon website you are looking for. It used to be that you had to remember that westercon65 is hosted at http://2009.westercon.org but Westercon 62 (FiestaCon) was hosted at http://lpreconlorg/w62. Now, you need know only the number of the westercon, or the year it was or will be held, and you can go directly there.

http://62.westercon.org or http://2009.westercon.org
http://65.westercon.org or http://2012.westercon.org
http://66.westercon.org or http://2013.westercon.org