A Tourist's Tale: NADWcon 2011
Going west across the ocean, your intrepid Chairman visited a ...
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A Lot Goes In To Launching...
Posted by Brian Nisbet on May 13, 2011, 12:37 p.m.
Launching a convention is just a matter of picking a venue and setting up a website, right? Our Chairman explains that it's a little more complicated than that...
Launching a convention is a funny business. I’ve known, since April
2010, that I would be Chair of the Discworld Convention 2012. During
the con in 2010 Terry agreed to be our Guest of Honour, the initial
committee was formed and we announced, at the Closing Ceremony, that
we would be doing it all again, but we were very, very far from
launching. After 2010 had been finished up (a few months after we all
said goodbye in Birmingham) we got into 2012 in earnest. The rest of
the committee were signed up, some discussions were had on location
and theme and we settled on a launch date of March/April 2011. All
seems so simple...
At that point we had to make a variety of decisions on pricing,
finalise our theme and logo, sign contracts with the hotel and build
the all important website, along with setting up communications plans
involving several centuries of media evolution. There was one point,
sitting on a snow delayed plane in Dublin Airport, trying to reach the
UK to meet with folks from the Hilton and the con Hotel Team, that I
wondered if we’d ever launch, but such thoughts are always fleeting.
And all this time the information fell into place and the website was
build.
There is a urge, on occasion, to leak parts of all of this out to the
world before the launch, to reassure people that we’re working hard,
to show them the fantastic mock-ups we have to choose between or
simply to exclaim “This is going to be amazing!” Those of you who
follow @dwcon on Twitter will have noticed that I’ve failed to
restrain myself on the last one, but I can live with that.
In March we were almost ready to go, but there was tweaking yet to be
done, but a hard deadline had been set (by me) of Easter. There were a
few reasons for this, but the UK Science Fiction con Eastercon is
perhaps the biggest. A lot of Discworld fans go to this event and it’s
a great opportunity to tell the world that we’re good to go once more.
I’m very happy that due to the extremely hard work of my committee, we
made the deadline and the con launched on April 13th. There is a
rumour that I sat at my computer clicking refresh on the membership
list and watching the numbers climb while giggling quietly, but I’m
sure none of you can imagine me doing something like that.
So we launched and, at time of writing, around 350 of you have signed
up to join us in Birmingham in 2012, with another 500 or so to come.
Preparing for the launch was hard work, but we’ve already seen how
well it’s paid off and we know, without a doubt, that the really hard
work started on April 13th, making sure we organise an event worthy of
the time of all our members. The buzz of preparing for launch is great
and that moment when the site goes live always sends a shiver down my
spine, but it’s nothing compared to the feeling that hits me when the
lights come on for the Opening Ceremony and another convention really
begins.
