UCon 2009 Report
Nov. 17th, 2009 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldI served as the head of Ops (Operations) for U-Con gaming convention this past weekend. I also made the program book, which was a hit. I made it so that you could cut and glue the front cover into a 20-sided die with the Earth on it instead of numbers. Laura assembled one:
Here is my Ops report.
During the time I have been involved in conventions, Ops at ConFusion or Penguicon has most often been a warm body with a phone list of the convention staff. (For the Penguicon at which I was Chair, Garrett Kajmovicz and Mara Tynan rocked out Operations as a far, far more useful and organized institution than I am used to.)
At U-Con, Ops is actually what SF cons call the Registration department. Before I took on the job, U-Con Ops also incorporated event scheduling and facilities liaison. The previous U-Con head of Ops, Dora Furlong, remained in the event scheduling and facilities liaison roles this year, as well as taking pre-registrations. So as head of Ops I was essentially little more than a gopher who was trusted with money and unlocking, who had more hours of work than other gophers.
Two of greatest weaknesses were my phone which was deactivated for nonpayment, and a car that I can't drive due to expired insurance. I got a ride to Ann Arbor on Thursday, rides to and from a couch to crash on, and a ride back on Sunday. If I had been smart, I would have asked U-Con to provide me with a phone for the weekend. I would have put numbers in its phonebook for the appropriate staff members for Chair, Reg/Events/Facilities, I.T., Exhibitor Hall, Volunteer Coordinator, and Treasurer.
That would have alleviated my other weaknesses: inexperience and poor memory. It is said that you learn worst through reading, and best through doing. Throughout the weekend I was wrong about most things that I thought I knew. The head of Ops is the public face of the convention, so the attendees came to Ops with every question whether it was within my domain or not. I usually had no way of contacting the only person who could help. On-the-job training requires, at least for me, that I have to be willing to sacrifice my ego and image. :) That is fine.
The greatest strength that I brought to the convention was that I am good at recruiting. I recruited Ops volunteers who are more organized than me: Mara Tynan, Amanda Robinson, Jody Raiford, and Jen. This, plus the staff members who knew their jobs from long experience, is why the convention ran smoothly and received almost no complaints. I had nothing to offer in way of altering the Ops process, as it has been essentially perfected by Dora Furlong and Laura Hamel, the Chair. Laura wrote custom software for pre-reg, event scheduling, and cash register, which worked with a bar code scanner. It was a turnkey operation.
Some of the other staff thought that I should not have scheduled my shifts to close every night at midnight and open every morning at 8:30. This is because U-Con has no room parties, so 1AM is considered late. Normally that is when I crash anyway.
I kept playing games in Ops during quieter periods. They got interrupted a lot, or lost players midway through, or were not able to finish at all. When I was on breaks, I tried to put together pickup games, without much success. On Saturday I suspected the whole weekend was going to be a bust as far as fun was concerned, but that turned around Saturday night, and Sunday was great. I will make a separate post about my playtest of Ingeniators, which went wonderfully.
I had hoped to buy some 4-way rubber bands in the exhibitor hall, with which to hold game boxes closed. I didn't have enough money, and the dealers didn't carry them this year anyway.
I sort-of won a dragon. There was a contest in which your collection of dice is weighed, and the heaviest wins a handmade dragon about the size of a computer case, holding a knight in his claws. Sadly, no one thought they had any hope of beating every person at a game convention, so no one entered! When I discovered this, I got out the dice from my board game collection including World War 5, Kingsburg, and Stone Age. The contest itself had passed, so the contest administrator offered to make me a smaller dragon!
Here is my Ops report.
During the time I have been involved in conventions, Ops at ConFusion or Penguicon has most often been a warm body with a phone list of the convention staff. (For the Penguicon at which I was Chair, Garrett Kajmovicz and Mara Tynan rocked out Operations as a far, far more useful and organized institution than I am used to.)
At U-Con, Ops is actually what SF cons call the Registration department. Before I took on the job, U-Con Ops also incorporated event scheduling and facilities liaison. The previous U-Con head of Ops, Dora Furlong, remained in the event scheduling and facilities liaison roles this year, as well as taking pre-registrations. So as head of Ops I was essentially little more than a gopher who was trusted with money and unlocking, who had more hours of work than other gophers.
Two of greatest weaknesses were my phone which was deactivated for nonpayment, and a car that I can't drive due to expired insurance. I got a ride to Ann Arbor on Thursday, rides to and from a couch to crash on, and a ride back on Sunday. If I had been smart, I would have asked U-Con to provide me with a phone for the weekend. I would have put numbers in its phonebook for the appropriate staff members for Chair, Reg/Events/Facilities, I.T., Exhibitor Hall, Volunteer Coordinator, and Treasurer.
That would have alleviated my other weaknesses: inexperience and poor memory. It is said that you learn worst through reading, and best through doing. Throughout the weekend I was wrong about most things that I thought I knew. The head of Ops is the public face of the convention, so the attendees came to Ops with every question whether it was within my domain or not. I usually had no way of contacting the only person who could help. On-the-job training requires, at least for me, that I have to be willing to sacrifice my ego and image. :) That is fine.
The greatest strength that I brought to the convention was that I am good at recruiting. I recruited Ops volunteers who are more organized than me: Mara Tynan, Amanda Robinson, Jody Raiford, and Jen. This, plus the staff members who knew their jobs from long experience, is why the convention ran smoothly and received almost no complaints. I had nothing to offer in way of altering the Ops process, as it has been essentially perfected by Dora Furlong and Laura Hamel, the Chair. Laura wrote custom software for pre-reg, event scheduling, and cash register, which worked with a bar code scanner. It was a turnkey operation.
Some of the other staff thought that I should not have scheduled my shifts to close every night at midnight and open every morning at 8:30. This is because U-Con has no room parties, so 1AM is considered late. Normally that is when I crash anyway.
I kept playing games in Ops during quieter periods. They got interrupted a lot, or lost players midway through, or were not able to finish at all. When I was on breaks, I tried to put together pickup games, without much success. On Saturday I suspected the whole weekend was going to be a bust as far as fun was concerned, but that turned around Saturday night, and Sunday was great. I will make a separate post about my playtest of Ingeniators, which went wonderfully.
I had hoped to buy some 4-way rubber bands in the exhibitor hall, with which to hold game boxes closed. I didn't have enough money, and the dealers didn't carry them this year anyway.
I sort-of won a dragon. There was a contest in which your collection of dice is weighed, and the heaviest wins a handmade dragon about the size of a computer case, holding a knight in his claws. Sadly, no one thought they had any hope of beating every person at a game convention, so no one entered! When I discovered this, I got out the dice from my board game collection including World War 5, Kingsburg, and Stone Age. The contest itself had passed, so the contest administrator offered to make me a smaller dragon!
