Bloody hell

[heidi]

Accio has decideded not to do an 07.
So this bunch - http://elanor-isolda.livejournal.com/96332.html - is. But where the hell nwere they when we were taking bids for an 07 event in london?

ETA: The above wasn't supposed to be public, as I said here. I am sorry that it was, because it was something I said in frustration, as I explain in the comments, here.
But to make it perfectly clear, here's a longer version of how I've been feeling about the incomprehensible hugeness of fandom these days, and the fact that it's now blindingly clear to everyone that most people have no idea what anyone else not in their corner of fandom are doing, unless they make an incredibly time-consuming effort to do so:

I am very, very frustrated, though, at a fandom that is so divided that people who have the exact same interests, ideas, thoughts, project-plans, etc., don't seem to know what, if anything, others are doing about the exact same thing(s).

There have been at least three occasions this spring where people have brought forward the idea of having a fandom wiki, which includes fandom concepts, trends, discussions, archives, etc - and none of the people proposing the idea, or, in fact, anyone commenting on the LJs in question, realised, until I mentioed it, that there actually already was a wiki which included fandom topics/discussion. Or look at the plethora of vidding communities here on LJ - there's at least five, and while some are slash-themed and others host everything, again, there's a tonne of overlap in what they do.

Personally, and I may be unique in this, I find it frustrating that there are so many people who would do well working together, but they don't know who else is out there, and honestly? It's not as easy as it should be to *find* who else is out there. I mean, what can you google for? Harry Potter conference London isn't going to catch everything, or in this case, given the wording in the bid announcement, it wouldn't catch that at all. And also, even if you read the newsletters a lot, if you miss a day, you'll completely miss out on an announcement like this, so a calendar, or another sort of listing service, like FA has tried to do with our Knight Bus forum, is handy in this way* but hardly anyone outside of FictionAlley knows about it, so it's not as useful a resource as, theoretically, it could be. And it's not because it's a resource that I am involved in that I think it's so handy - it's because of the content it contains, and what it could contain - like, if someone is having a full-day RPG in Australia, or a meetup in Los Angeles, or a conference in Copenhagen, why shouldn't it all be listed on a fandom calendar, where people who have even things that are just in the early planning stages can get their things tentatively calendared as well?

I think my RL experience plays a part in here - I'm very active with my synogogue's annual fundraising event. and last year, we had to change it because the local Chamber of Commerce, which has a lot of attendee-overlap, wanted to be the same day. But we knew before we got too far along the planning process. Of course, if anyone created such a calendaring thing, then they'd have to make sure everyone knew about it, because without knowledge, how can you know you need to use something? And sites like TLC and HPANA and MN are showcasing fandom things a lot less than they used to even a year ago, and because of that, thngs are just not hitting the radar screens of those who could and should know about it.

Comments

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Well, if they can make a go of it, they're entitled.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Well, of course they are. I'm just disgruntled becayse no matter how much we talked up hpef seeking bids this spring for an event, including hoping for a bid from the UK, people still had no idea we were actually taking bids re an event in the UK. I don't blame the organizers - not really - but it's not like it was a secret. It was in the Snitch and atop FA and in tlc and hpana and on yahoogroups and we still didn't have enough awareness to catch the eyeballs of those who were interested in it in the first place.

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

Excuse me? a) No one informed us that bids were being taken for an event in London, and b) we're only doing this because everybody wants an event in the UK in 2007 and no one else was doing anything about it. You're welcome to give your input to the event if you want to.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Well, I am frankly quite sorry that nobody ever informed you that hpef was taking bids. It was written up in late January in the daily_snitch and hogwarts_today, posted about on various HPfGU lists on Yahoogroups, as well as in the hpef livejournal, and we asked Leaky, HPANA, Mugglenet, Veritaserum and a few other news sites to post about it, but unfortunately, none of them seem to be posting fandom news anymore, so IIRC, none of them did. Oh, and it was at the top of FictionAlley Park for over a month, while bidding was open.

I'm not *angry* at you guys. I am very, very frustrated, though, at a fandom that is so divided that people who have the exact same interests, ideas, thoughts, project-plans, etc., don't seem to know what, if anything, others are doing about the exact same thing(s).

There have been at least three occasions this spring where people have brought forward the idea of having a fandom wiki, which includes fandom concepts, trends, discussions, archives, etc - and none of the people proposing the idea, or, in fact, anyone commenting on the LJs in question, realised, until I mentioed it, that there actually already was a wiki which included fandom topics/discussion. Or look at the plethora of vidding communities here on LJ - there's at least five, and while some are slash-themed and others host everything, again, there's a tonne of overlap in what they do.

Personally, and I may be unique in this, I find it frustrating that there are so many people who would do well working together, but they don't know who else is out there, and honestly? It's not as easy as it should be to *find* who else is out there. I mean, what can you google for? Harry Potter conference London isn't going to catch everything, or in this case, given the wording in the bid announcement, it wouldn't catch that at all. And also, even if you read the newsletters a lot, if you miss a day, you'll completely miss out on an announcement like this, so a calendar, or another sort of listing service, like FA has tried to do with our Knight Bus forum, is handy in this way* but hardly anyone outside of FictionAlley knows about it, so it's not as useful a resource as, theoretically, it could be. And it's not because it's a resource that I am involved in that I think it's so handy - it's because of the content it contains, and what it could contain - like, if someone is having a full-day RPG in Australia, or a meetup in Los Angeles, or a conference in Copenhagen, why shouldn't it all be listed on a fandom calendar, where people who have even things that are just in the early planning stages can get their things tentatively calendared as well?

I think my RL experience plays a part in here - I'm very active with my synogogue's annual fundraising event. and last year, we had to change it because the local Chamber of Commerce, which has a lot of attendee-overlap, wanted to be the same day. But we knew before we got too far along the planning process. Of course, if anyone created such a calendaring thing, then they'd have to make sure everyone knew about it, because without knowledge, how can you know you need to use something? And sites like TLC and HPANA and MN are showcasing fandom things a lot less than they used to even a year ago, and because of that, thngs are just not hitting the radar screens of those who could and should know about it.

Hence, frustrated!heidi


*ANd when your plans are more concrete, do get it listed in TKB

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

OK, so the main problem is just when that announcement was made - i.e. when we all thought Accio 2007 was happening. It's entirely possible I did see it back then, but it wouldn't have registered because we were all planning to go to Accio.

And you have to remember that HP fandom is huge. And because it's new, and has therefore grown up almost entirely on the internet, it's inevitable that it's all subdivided.

For comparison, I come from LotR fandom. The Tolkien Society organise the cons every year, and that's all fine because there's only one TS in the UK and everyone expects us to organise it. There's nothing like that in HP fandom. And yes, maybe there needs to be, but because of the way this fandom has evolved, it's probably never going to happen.

See, to us, it's obvious that if anyone wanted an event in London they'd ask us, because we're the HP group in London. But other people don't know that we exist. That's just how the fandom works.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

What, the London_t00bs community? Afaik, such questions were asked last December and January, but again, the whole Accio thing trhrew everyone for a loop.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

There's nothing like that in HP fandom. And yes, maybe there needs to be, but because of the way this fandom has evolved, it's probably never going to happen.

There used to be - it used to be HPfGU - everyone was, at the very least, on the announcements list and would see information that came across that list. And that's a role the newsletters sort of serve, but it's a bit of a hit-or-miss one day news cycle kind of thing. I think if the newsletters tried to generate, jointly, and./or with other sites, a kind of informational list about pending projects and developing things, it would be that kind of centralized thing. I'm not sure they have the manpower or interest, but I know at least one site that would happily mirror the informational listing.

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

But how could one site cater for the huge variety of people in the fandom? There's far too much to report, and most of it (local events, for example) of little or no interest to the vast majority. And how would you deal with the factions of fandom who loathe each other? The vehemently anti-slash people, or the anti-het slashers?

It's not that I don't understand the nostalgia. The same thing happened in an incredibly short timescale in LotR fandom when the movies came out, and the fandom now seems to be irrevocably split into pairing segments. C'est la vie.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Okay, now have gone to your LJ, and clearly, none of you were thinking of this back in January and February when fandom discussions were taking place about the HPEF bid-process, which explains a lot. And, btw, Hijja's post was the first I heard that Accio was going to be cancelled. HPEF was initially going to work with them, and the reason we didn't strongly push for a UK 2007 bid was because they said they were planning to do a UK 2007 event capped at 300 people, which is smaller than HPEF was interested in being involved with (I mean, given Lumos's sell-out months ago, we thought the interest would be more like a 700+ attendee thing).

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

OK, in that case the whole issue's pretty redundant, because there's no way we can cater for even 300 people. Accio only managed about 250 IIRC, and we're not even looking at being that big, especially since we don't (expect to) have a book release to push interest. You just can't get that many people at a weekend event in the UK.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

But I know the attendence/signups for the Beyond Boundries UK tours, and I think that it definitely could get more attendees than that - look at Patronus in copenhagen this summer, for example. I'll betcha you hit 200 registrants three months before the event, and I'll toss an HP t-shirt in to seal the deal. ;)

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

Well, that would be rather nice if it happened, but I'm not going to stake too much on it. Patronus is only a small (100 or so?) con, after all. We shall see :-)

[annephoenix.livejournal.com]

Considering Patronus is in two weeks and we're at about 100 now, I doubt this will happen. I think only 12 or so people are going to the residential course ...

[quasi-hayley.livejournal.com]

Why not? The Discworld convention is nearly sold out at 800 for this August.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think that's strictly fair - Trek conventions are still running AFAIK at 500+ people (when I was first involved with them we used to get over 1000) and I used to be involved in a Dr Who/Blake's 7 event which ran at 500 people on average. redemption_con is also quite large (300+ I think) and for two non-current shows (Babylon 5 and Blake's 7).

I think a well advertised general-interest adults-only HP convention in Britain in (say) 2008-9 could generate 700 memberships. From my experience running slash conventions, I reckon a well advertised HP slash con in the UK in the same years could probably generate 70-150 memberships depending on where and when. General slash cons get 50-70 memberships depending on the weekend and the level of advertising in the right circles (ladies of a certain age with spare money).

[wildfyre.livejournal.com]

Well, we'll have to see. We got 700+ people at Tolkien 2005, but Oxonmoot is around the 200 mark. Things like DW have the draw of Terry Pratchett attending. We will see what we can do, though :-)

[son-of-darkness.livejournal.com]

Well... that's rude. What bid? And why do you assume that we would have seen it?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, it wasn't meant to be public - it was meant just for Cedar, who's on the HPEF board with me.

And the reason I assumed you would've seen it is because (a) some of the people involved, afaik, are also regulars on FictionAlley, where the call for bids was splashed atop the Park for about six weeks this spring, and (b) it was also in the daily snitch, hogwarts today and a bunch of other LJs, and then that was reiterated last month when the announcement was made re the Toronto event we're doing in 2007.

[lizardspots.livejournal.com]

When were you taking bids for a 2007 event? It's unfortunate that we didn't see it, but you're being unnecessarily rude when all we're doing is organising something for the enjoyment of others when it seemed there was no UK event.

Remind yourself that HP fandom is humungous, and it can easily happen that a small bunch of friends may not have come across your journal's posts about a con.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

As I said above, the reason I thought people would have seen it is because it was in the daily snitch, hogwarts daily, the top of FA, and at least a few dozen other LJs. We asked the news sites to report on it as well but none of them did so, which was very frustating at the time. Plus, it was discussed on at least a dozen yahoogroups, and the Lumos LJ - it wasn't some deep or clandestine secret on a few tiny and unseen LJs.

The HP fandom is humungeous, and as I posted above, I have been frustrated for a very long whiel that there is no longer a central resource for information about fandom events and happenings, because the news sites seem more concerned with the travels of the cast than things done for and by the fandomers.

As we're discussing above, btw, it seems clear that none of you were really thinking about self-organizing back in January and February when we were taking bids, because Accio was telling y'all, and telling HPEF, that they were still going to do something in 2007. WHich is completely understandable. Frustrating, but understandable.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I understand your frustration, and I'm not trying to pick an argument or anything, I swear.

But.

Part of me wants to ask who gave HPEF the right to organize every single HP-related fan meeting? If we organize a fan get-together in Texas, do we have to get HPEF's approval?

Again, not trying to pick a fight here, but seriously -- no one owns fandom. That's the way it works, you know? Fans get together and decide to do things, and none of us are getting paid for it. We're all just here for fun, aren't we?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

That's not the point at all. There have always been events by hpef and events that aren't. But we specifically sought bids this spring and mentioned the UK as a potential and it's clear to me that a lot of people didn't even know we were seeking bids. So when one of the things some Sectusers are griping about is not wanting to deal with WB, and the first thing I think of is, "but we'd've been able to help with that!" I'm going to regret the fundamental breakdown in interfandom communications because people should have awareness of all the options before them and in this fandom, that's just not happening anymore. And it once did.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

But the Sectumsempra folks are really just organizing a fan get-together in lieu of Accio, and that's all. At first, it was just a "Hey, there's no Accio, but let's get together anyway!" And enough people responded positively that they realized it was going to be a bigger thing than they'd imagined. And so they started imagining bigger.

I'm sure HPEF could have helped with that, but there were better ways to deal with it than a snarky post. (I doubt they'd be interested in asking for help now.) And yes, I realize that this post wasn't intended to be public, but the sentiment of it is stil a bit disturbing IMHO. It comes across (regardless of your intentions) as HPEF pitching a fit because the Sectumsempra folks didn't seek permission before organizing a fan get-together.

That's all I'm trying to point out. And I'll shut up now, because my intent really wasn't to start an argument.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Well, it's just me posting here, obviously personally, so anyone who would presume anyone else was being spoken on behalf of is reading far too much into it.
And the thing is, I think HPEF's toronto event is going to be amazing, but on a completely personal "I love london and miss the hell out of it" level, it would've been *nice* to have been able to get some interest from UK people re any sort of an HP event back when we were looking for said interest.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

To be fair, Heidi, although I am as frustrated by this news as you are, this is what we sent out for our press release (the beginning of it, at any rate):

HP Educational Fanon (HPEF), the organization behind Nimbus-2003, The Witching Hour and Lumos, is accepting bids for a symposium in the mainland United States for 2007.

So I do understand people who might have been interested in bidding for a UK event for next year not realizing that, at that time, we would have considered a bid for that part of the globe. Unfortunately, we--and many others--were under the impression that Accio had plans to do a 2007 event in the UK, even though they sent us mixed signals for months and months, before we decided that a 2007 Accio event and a 2007 HPEF would not be the same event.

In retrospect we probably shouldn't have counted on the possibility that we could do a combined Accio/HPEF symposium, especially given the very different structures of the organizations, but hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. If we had in fact put out a press release not long after TWH saying that we were open to receiving bids from the North America OR the UK for 2007 I could see being enormously agrieved that this event has now been announced, but, sadly, we didn't do that.

The reason that it seems this is being announced now is that Accio took so very long to figure out their plans, and that DOES frustrate me a great deal, because it would have been lovely to find out sooner that there might have been other groups in the UK with whom we could have worked on a 2007 event. So, yeah, I'm not too much with the fluffy bunny feelings about Accio right now, but I'd rather not blame another group of people who are probably equally disgruntled about how long they took to figure out that 2007 wasn't going to be an Accio year. I'd rather concentrate now on making Prophecy 2007 the best event we can and observe the tenth anniversary of the books with a wonderful celebration of the books and author that brought us all together in the first place.

I hope all of that makes sense, since I'm suffering from a good bit of sleep-deprivation. ;)

[lizardspots.livejournal.com]

You're right, this London 2007 event was thought up as soon as the attendees of Accio 2005 were sent an email to say there would be no event. This was completely the brainchild of elanor_isolda as of a couple of days ago.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought. Which means that a lot of folks in the UK who might not be interested in traveling to North America for an HP event are probably more than a little frustrated with Accio announcing no 2007 this late in the game, I assume. So, realistically, even if we'd included the UK in our press release in January, because most folks in the UK thought Accio had 2007 locked, up it probably wouldn't have occurred to anyone to send us a UK bid before the deadline and we would have been considered exactly the same bids before deciding on the Toronto event (which is already shaping up to be great!).

Frankly, I'm glad to know that there are others in the UK willing to be proactive and plan an event. Too bad we didn't know sooner! Please don't think poorly of Heidi; we were extremely frustrated about not being able (we thought) to have a UK 2007 event. We never technically solicited bids for the UK for next year after we thought that combining with Accio wasn't feasible, since the country is much smaller than the US and we worried about the UK being able to "support" more than one symposium in a given year. Which is probably why no one announced this BEFORE Accio finally said what their plans were; others probably shared that opinion of how many HP events the UK could support in one year.

So all of us would have loved to know Accio's plans much sooner and now there's, understandably, a good bit of frustration at work here. HPEF does not think that all HP events "need" to be run by our organization. Far from it. We're always on the lookout for motivated, inspired people to bid for events and it's too bad that we didn't just put out a general call, with our press release, for bids from the UK or North America, rather than leaving the UK out of the equation. Ah, well. Live and learn.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

Except we didn't choose a mainland US locale - we chose Canada :)

Otherwise, yes, sense and sensibility. And amazingly, all this happened before either the nonoccurence of Accio or the Sectus poll made it into the newsletters.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

That's true! Which means that we're lucky that the Toronto folks decided to bid anyway, since we preferred that bid over the ones from the US. I just wish we hadn't wasted months and months on something that didn't pan out, but there's nothing to be done about that now.

Try not to let it get you down, Heidi. We did well and got a great bid. Have a nice cup of tea and admire your lovely children. :D

::hugs::

[rookie131.livejournal.com]

Although I certainly run the risk of sounding like one of my grandparents here, I really do miss the good-old-days of the fandom. Back when we all used to chat on Sunday afternoons and come up with outlandish theories of what was going to happen in the next book. I'm a little overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the fandom now, which explains why I have taken a step back. Maybe sometime we could organize a small get-together for the old-timers or have a list just for us or something.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to seeing you on 8/2 with my Mom in tow (with her new curly post-chemo hair). Keep me in the loop on dinner choices...

[underlucius.livejournal.com]

As you say, fandom is huge and incomprehensible and people can't be everywhere at once. I never heard of any previous fandom/conference/meetup - I knew of Accio 07, but that was only because a couple of my flist had been to Accio 05. Unless it's pimped everywhere, people won't see things, and the whole "word of mouth" thing that LJ operates under only works as long as everyone passes it on.

I'm sorry I missed your original bid, I certainly would have have joined/attended/pimped.

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

There is a group that's already working on plans for a 2010 event in the UK (and I think you should be able to access the messages without signing in - let me know if you can't). I'm sure they'd be thrilled to have more help on it.