Penguicon Nifty Guests

[nemorathwald]

I've been a bystander to some interesting conversations between Concom members about Nifty Guests at Penguicon. I've been watching the process of Nifty selection up-close-and-personal under four consecutive Conchairs. It has never been organized and usually nobody has the slightest clue what Nifty even means. Every year we made our share of mistakes in who we gave the status to. But I've listened to a lot of philosophies expressed about it over the years, and condensed what I thought were the most helpful, meaningful set of non-contradictory definitions into an answer on our FAQ page.

"Nifty Guest" is a status we confer on those who are not our Guests of Honor this year, but have been in the past, or they are celebrities in their own right. We only have about twenty or fewer Nifty Guests per year, although that number gets slightly larger each year from the original two. It is not simply to be used an award for people we like who have done things we admire. It is for two kinds of people.
- Celebrities or leaders within their specific subculture or internet community. They have a fanbase within that subculture to whom they announce, "you can meet me at Penguicon," so they are an attendance draw.
- Those who are going to attend Penguicon to provide a specific event which is so glittery and shiny for our attendees that it stands above our other programming. When we feel we can't do without them, but they can't attend without a little modest financial help, sometimes we have Niftified them. This second type of Nifty has been kept deliberately rare, maybe one per year.
"Program Participant" is a general term for anyone who delivers a presentation, is on a discussion panel, runs a scheduled game, or is featured in any other scheduled event at Penguicon. Those who are not designated a Guest of Honor or Nifty Guest receive a discounted admission rate for providing Penguicon content. The reality is, all our Program Participants are truly nifty in the sense of the English adjective. But each year I've seen us turn down several potential program participants because they couldn't show up without a free membership badge. As an all-volunteer not-for-profit convention (and one that is relatively new and still building financial security), we can't do that yet.

So you can see, as Conchair for next year I have some pretty well-defined ideas about it, and I'm going to be able to give some clear guidance to the people involved in Nifty selection. Others will disagree completely or have variations on it, and that's fine.

1. We have to limit it somehow.

What is the basic problem we're trying to solve by defining Nifties? We have all the supply of them that we need at a convention for creative and intelligent people; the problem we're solving is narrowing them down somehow! Nifty was invented to solve the problem of having more celebrities attend our convention than we could actually pay Guest of Honor travel and hotel expenses for. To deal with a surplus of qualifications. See, the thing is, the basic challenge presented to us by defining a Nifty Guest qualification is not "what is Nifty?" but is "which set of restrictions will succeed in narrowing this immense field down to about 20 people?"

Why is that? We have about a hundred Program Participants a year, and our Nifty designations are climbing to a silly percentage of that. Imagine that we completed saving our nest egg and we could let in all Program Participants for free like other conventions have done. (Whether to ever do that has compelling advocates on both sides, but that's a long discussion for another time.) Calling all 100 of them Nifty Guests becomes just another way of saying Program Participant. It loses its distinction.

A lot of people go to conventions to see their friends, so I'm hearing some local very popular friends say that maybe they ought to be Niftified as an attendance draw. As much as I like my friends and wish to tell the world how Nifty they truly are, I humbly suggest that this way lies madness. More and more people will expect us to follow through on that principle consistently. We'd go around labeling gold star stickers on the convention attendees who are well-liked and have a lot of friends who come to conventions to see them. The absence of a gold star would be the implied equivalent of a black dot sticker officially sanctioned by the convention, saying you are lackluster, not a witty conversationalist and a person of mediocre average fun. This would include many good and fine people.

Nifty is not simply to be used as an award for people we like who have done things we admire, or it would fail to narrow down the field to something meaningful. Sadly, the name "Nifty" is confusing on that point. I'd go back in time to change it if I could, but I can't.

2. We need clearer guidelines

From the outside, this looks like a corrupt buddy system. Heck, it looks that way from the inside when nobody has guidelines! But it isn't. The people involved are quite sincere.

3. We can be flexible with one or more guidelines at a time.

This point of the FAQ is ripe for abuse:

Those who are going to attend Penguicon to provide a specific event which is so glittery and shiny for our attendees that it stands above our other programming. When we feel we can't do without them, but they can't attend without a little modest financial help, sometimes we have Niftified them. This second type of Nifty has been kept deliberately rare, maybe one per year.

I wish I had not put that on the internet, and just kept it quiet, because we keep having to fend off the floodgates that it has opened. But somebody would point out when we had done it and ask "what's up with that?" Interpret it conservatively, please. Seriously, to qualify for this exemption a Nifty must have built a fusion reactor in their basement at the age of seventeen or something equivalent.

I'd like to replace that part of the FAQ with saying we can flex a little, and then we may as well put our guidelines out there once we're comfortable with them.

We can consider Nifty Guest a radial category. A radial category has a prototype which has all the traits, and other things that are still in the category even though they are missing some of the traits. (I got this idea from Eric Raymond in a presentation he gave at the first Penguicon.) To quote, a radial category

is not defined by any one logical predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or customary variations. As a simple example, in English the category "fruit" does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a botanist could recognize. Rather, the category has a prototype "apple", and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already been sorted into the "like an apple" category.

Radial categories have central members ("apple", "pear", "orange") whose membership is certain, and peripheral members ("coconut", "avocado") whose membership is tenuous. Membership is graded by the distance from the central prototype — roughly, the number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like the prototype to like the instance in question. Some traits are important and tend to be conserved across the entire radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while some are only weakly bound (bright color).

In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that are counterexamples to any single intensional ("logical") definition, but traits that are common to most of the core prototypes nevertheless tend to be strongly bound. Thus, "coconut" is a counterexample to the strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as "fruit" because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable interior with a sweet flavor.

There are strongly-bound traits and weakly-bound traits of being a Nifty Guest. To be in the category, a Nifty Guest can lack maybe one strongly-bound trait, or lack two weakly-bound traits. But at least we'll have a list of traits to compare to, as opposed to our current flailing our limbs about us. The cool thing about this is that it won't fracture when it runs up against real life.

4. The real purpose of the guidelines is to get an arbitrary number, but as long as they're there, each guideline may as well help us.

To be the least arbitrary, it's good for our limiting factors to help make the convention better in a way that it wouldn't have been already.

It's unromantic for me to say this, but if we're going to market them on our promotional materials, that has the word "market", which means we expect the Nifty's name should deliver the goods on a financial level. Show us their fan club mailing list with lots and lots and lots of rabid fans on it. Or a forum about them. Or their blog on which their readers comment so frequently that they make friends there. If we'll get at least two people in their fanbase who will attend because they heard on their email list/forum/blog that you'll be there, that means we made a lot more money on registrations than we spend on feeding the Nifty in the Consuite. That's a strongly-bound trait of Nifty Guests. That is a clear benefit to the convention that we weren't getting already, and helps limit to about 20 Nifites.

I suggest that a weakly-bound trait should be "they live far enough away that we don't see them at every con, or they were not already going to show up anyway". That is a clear benefit to the convention that we weren't getting already, and helps limit to about 20 Nifties.

Another weakly-bound trait could be that a prototypical Nifty is-- if not a pro-- then at least spending an amazingly large amount of time pursuing their area of expertise, comparable to a part-time job. We're a convention specifically for amateur contributions, so why have this guideline? Ironically, we need this guideline precisely because we're a convention about amateur contributions-- otherwise most of our attendees would qualify! Let's not say "pro", let's say "spends an amount of time on their avocation comparable to a part-time job." Let's say for example, Jorge Castro before he was hired by Canonical to do what he was doing already. Or Tom Smith before he quit his day job.

The code is more like guidelines, really.

So what have we got? Two or more of the following:

1. Strongly bound trait: Fan base who will attend for no other reason than they heard Nifty will be there
2. Strongly bound trait: Good to put on programming
3. Weakly bound trait: If not professional, at least spends an amount of time on their avocation comparable to a part-time job
4. Weakly bound trait: Lives far away and/or would not otherwise attend the convention
5. Weakly bound trait: Invited as a full Guest of Honor at other conventions

Remember, radial category! Most Nifties lack one or more of these, and that's fine. So a prospective Nifty really needs to meet at least one strongly-bound trait, and has to make up for it with weakly-bound traits. If they meet all of them they are the prototype Nifty of which other Nifties are variations.

This system should be tweaked some more. More ideas are welcome, but remember, does your idea solve the problem of limiting the number to 20? And does it do this in a way that squeezes maximum benefit to Penguicon out of the Nifty Guest?

Keep in mind before you comment, the suggested guidelines are about the prototype Nifty, not all Nifties!