Post by jarrow on Jun 26, 2013 19:18:49 GMT -5
Hey folks,
Many of you are probably surprised by the schedule for West and how it's different from East, so I want to give you a little insight. Karyn and I talked for several hours about how best to serve the con and all of you attending, and we feel really solid about what we designed.
The panel voting for East was interesting in that there were about 5 panels that were clearly wanted, another 10 that were moderately strong, and then a stack at the bottom that were clearly not really wanted. Plus, we had a long list of nominations in the first place. So, that was a solid mandate, we felt, to have a few stand-alone panels (that everyone wanted) and then a lot of siimultaneous panels (where people choose).
West, however, has been different. First, we had fewer nominations, but many more votes! Second, the voting was, almost without exception, really even across the board. The "winners" didn't have the same runaway numbers. About 8 panels were all 1 vote apart. Everyone wanted to be everywhere, basically. We tried designing a schedule with simultaneous panels, but it was just too painful -- the choices would be too hard.
Plus, we wanted to avoid the situation where we have 2 panels but everybody goes to one, leaving the other mod feeling awful. That sucks.
SO!
In order to squeeze in as many of the desired panels as possible, we started by combining three pairs of panels into power hours, where the topics were closely related enough to justify doing so. We feel this will not only strengthen the quality of the conversation, but also make other conversations less repetitive. We didn't know we were going to do this until after the poll, otherwise we would've consolidated beforehand.
We realize that some of you may have just wanted to talk about College Faberry and don't care about AUs, for example, but it made more sense to combine those than have two separate conversations that might only stay strong for 30 minutes. Please trust us, we've done this before.
We then looked for a natural flow of topics and alternated general/fic track panels as best we could, thinking about what made sense for morning/afternoon on particular days.
In the end, we have what we feel is a stellar schedule that's strong from top to bottom. Everyone will get to be a part of every conversation, and that's super exciting! (And if you aren't interested in the panel, hey, extra sleep time. I'm jealous.) As cool as it is to offer choices, we don't have the numbers (yet?) to justify splitting the group and know that we'll have people in both rooms. If we get to 60, we will revisit this, but at ~45, we can all be comfy together still. We hope you're on board with us and psyched to attend EVERYTHING. ;D One big happy family!
So hey, let's get pumped! FABERRYCON WEST, BABY.
Many of you are probably surprised by the schedule for West and how it's different from East, so I want to give you a little insight. Karyn and I talked for several hours about how best to serve the con and all of you attending, and we feel really solid about what we designed.
The panel voting for East was interesting in that there were about 5 panels that were clearly wanted, another 10 that were moderately strong, and then a stack at the bottom that were clearly not really wanted. Plus, we had a long list of nominations in the first place. So, that was a solid mandate, we felt, to have a few stand-alone panels (that everyone wanted) and then a lot of siimultaneous panels (where people choose).
West, however, has been different. First, we had fewer nominations, but many more votes! Second, the voting was, almost without exception, really even across the board. The "winners" didn't have the same runaway numbers. About 8 panels were all 1 vote apart. Everyone wanted to be everywhere, basically. We tried designing a schedule with simultaneous panels, but it was just too painful -- the choices would be too hard.
Plus, we wanted to avoid the situation where we have 2 panels but everybody goes to one, leaving the other mod feeling awful. That sucks.
SO!
In order to squeeze in as many of the desired panels as possible, we started by combining three pairs of panels into power hours, where the topics were closely related enough to justify doing so. We feel this will not only strengthen the quality of the conversation, but also make other conversations less repetitive. We didn't know we were going to do this until after the poll, otherwise we would've consolidated beforehand.
We realize that some of you may have just wanted to talk about College Faberry and don't care about AUs, for example, but it made more sense to combine those than have two separate conversations that might only stay strong for 30 minutes. Please trust us, we've done this before.
We then looked for a natural flow of topics and alternated general/fic track panels as best we could, thinking about what made sense for morning/afternoon on particular days.
In the end, we have what we feel is a stellar schedule that's strong from top to bottom. Everyone will get to be a part of every conversation, and that's super exciting! (And if you aren't interested in the panel, hey, extra sleep time. I'm jealous.) As cool as it is to offer choices, we don't have the numbers (yet?) to justify splitting the group and know that we'll have people in both rooms. If we get to 60, we will revisit this, but at ~45, we can all be comfy together still. We hope you're on board with us and psyched to attend EVERYTHING. ;D One big happy family!
So hey, let's get pumped! FABERRYCON WEST, BABY.