Matt Arnold's Law

Any sufficiently advanced program book creator is indistinguishable from Conchair.

Now granted, I have never yet witnessed this level of advancement-- to my knowledge, it has never taken place. But I became head of programming of Penguicon for no other reason than to solve problems I had when making the program book. Then the program book person couldn't really do it that year. I tried becoming Minister of Communication for 2008 so that I could take charge of the entire chain. But the conchair won't back me up in asking the whole chain to answer to me, and I lack the power to make effective change. So I volunteered to be Conchair of Penguicon 7 in 2009 to be in charge of the entire chain, and in this way I'm going to avoid duplicating a lot of work.*



In order to become a sufficiently advanced program book creator, one has to become indistinguishable from Conchair.

The degree to which you know who is responsible to provide content, and the degree to which you are aware of which facts need to be communicated to attendees, is the degree to which you may as well be providing that information to attendees yourself. Otherwise a person far more ignorant than you is going to have to duplicate your knowledge-gathering work before they communicate it for you. The degree to which they don't start off knowing what you know is the degree of disappointment and failure you should naturally expect.

Program books are a natural failure point because of the clash of two realities:
A. The reality of the physics of time and space:

1. It takes a week to lay out, assuming you can spend every evening on it, which you can't.


2. It takes a week for a team of volunteers to properly proofread a COMPLETED collection of content. If it's incomplete, version control starts to increase your work geometrically.


3. It takes a week to print and bind it.

B. The psychological reality of content contributors:

1. They are ignorant of the above limitations of time and space. They honestly think you can dash off a 48-page book in an hour, the printer can print it the day before the convention, and it won't suck.**


2. They don't know that when you add one sentence, it can re-flow the entire book, creating massive additional work, meaning massive additional time.


3. They do not really get excited about the convention until two or three weeks out, so they will not even notice your deadline.

I could act like the R.I.A.A. and try to force reality to fit the traditional model, or I can adapt fandom's traditions to fit the clash of realities. Going forward, Penguicon will have two books: a schedule with map, and a "souvenir book" (for lack of a better term) containing everything else. Conchair report, GoH bios, policies, restaurants, LUG list, Ops, Volunteers, ConSuite, hotel info, Dealers hours, small version of the map, etc. We will begin laying out the souvenir book this week. I have already begun riding people to get first drafts of all non-schedule content by the end of January. I already know 90% of the content because I'm wading up to my armpits in everything that's going on. This book will be out of beta-testing and have a viable release candidate before we even start the alpha version of the schedule book.

*Some people think the Conchair should be for hotel selection, guest of honor selection, and budget. I've delegated those tasks among the pre-planning core dedicated team. I have not distanced myself from those tasks and vanished from supporting them! I'm still available to them and attend all their meetings. But I made sure there were people in charge of those things who care about them more than I do and are far better at them than I am.

**Brendan's ConFusion conchair report actually contains the statement "It's the moment of truth. The time has come to put the program book together, and everything is still being worked on. What's a Chair to do? Do Not Panic. I've got my towel. What else could I need? Oh yeah, a program book." No, the time has not come, the time has passed, a month ago.