You are reading Concom Minutes 9 Dec 2007.
Attending: Matt Strait, Kelly Strait, Keith Malgren, Peer Dudda, Andra St. Arnauld, Mark Richards, Carol Kennedy, Rachel Kronick, Seven
Keith has inventory info from locker clean-up
Registration: so far 187 adults, 5 kids, some supporting, plus paper stack (including 3 or 4 help-a-friends), gets us to ~210. Not a large response from PR1. Yet Mark said that last year we had fewer total regs at this point.
PR2: need text by Dec 15
Open Positions: volunteers head, art show head - Eve hasn’t really shown that she wants to do it, David is willing to help but doesn’t want to do it… kind of out of ideas at the moment. Could put it on LiveJournal, Natter, maybe try to hit up some Misfits people… ask Seven, Thadd.
Dealer Dollars: we made $1 denominations last time, for kids things - should do this again
Ads in The Rake ($530) or CityPages ($450/wk) are too expensive; $25-50/wk for side-bar ads on-line, but probably not very effective; should look into MN Daily
T-shirts: standard shirt is $8.70, up to $14-something for 5XL; $20 set-up fee (so ~$.15/shirt)
Going to check at Dreamhaven- what do we have left from last year, should we change the size numbers?
Keith has initial dealer dollar designs - adult dollars use “new” art like book; kid’s dollars use “old” natural history-like art.
Keith has CD of art for Bill (Matt will hang on to it for now - see if Bill comes; Matt may use it for our web page)
Could we have a room for MMORG: City of Heroes? Sharon used to play it. The company, CSoft (?), gives away free temporary licenses - might be able to get them for the weekend. The headache would be getting the hardware - Keith would like at least 6 computers, and you need a broadband connection. Could we ask Clay for computers (where does he get them for his gaming parties)? Could we get one wired connection from the hotel, and use our own router? How much would that cost? Would need a secure room, someone to go in early to set it up. CONvergence has a big computer gaming room, Con of the North does too - where do they get their stuff? What do they do? Maybe we could talk ads w/ company to off-set connection costs.
Related, could we get some people to bring in Wii(s) - something easy to get into?
Play-doh room back in the day (Minicon 12)???
How to clean up mailing list: suspect we’re wasting a lot of money on postage. Talked to 3 different people at different post offices, all of whom said they didn’t know whether they did that; last person is supposed to call Matt back. Current situation: Bad addresses come back. If we put on “address service required”, costs $.50 per if forward is active (first year - after that, they won’t forward, but we’ll get info.)
So, for PR2 - probably only need to print 1000; at the number of bounces that we get, it’s probably not worth it… last year, we processed ~60 bounces. The only thing that would change is that for addresses that during the active forwarding period, they ALSO send us info so we can update. Matt has decided: we are going to put “address service requested” on PR2, and if we don’t like how that turns out, we won’t do it again
Could we actually start mailing party at 2pm, so that it doesn’t cut into a lot of the MnStf meeting? Seems like that will be fine.
Film Room: Will Pell is maybe going to sit there to run the room, though we may to do all the work to organize it, but maybe not. He has sent mixed messages. We could maybe use the room next to the bar that we never use for something really anyway. Whoever does it would ideally do 3 things: choose how much time we should have movies running, choose the movies to show, and actually babysit the room. Everything else could be handled by someone else (e.g. Matt). Ask Eric Heideman if he has any ideas for people to run.
We have a list of public domain movies… Seven knows the guy who does the movie room at Marscon - Seven will try to talk to him tonight and see what he knows about copyright issues.
Other cons before Minicon: Confusion, SuperCon (get Clay to take fliers?), Capricon (Matt and Kelly are throwing a party), Boskone (Seth is going and will take fliers and bring back regs), Marscon (Kelly and Rachel are throwing party(?)). Bill wants all regs in his hands on Mar 6 - so we can probably allow mail-ins from Cap & Boskone, but not Marscon.
MCTC has last meeting of semester sometime soon - so would be nice to get them group info before then.
Kelly will look into sci-fi fan groups in neighboring areas (DMSFS?, Iowa-city group, Chicago-area groups) to send PRs to directly - kind of open invitations to groups, rather than to individuals. Matt will bring PRs to Seven at next meeting for distribution.
We don’t like WordPress - maybe we’ll just go back to Matt’s hand coded site for 44. Who needs access to the page - Matt, whoever does programming, Kelly, registration (assuming we want to put the “who’s coming to the con” list up)… maybe we should go back to Matt’s idea of using a wiki.
Programming: Lisa, Lydy, and Rachel met on Wednesday to go through programming ideas list, contacts have been distributed.
Rachel thinks she doesn’t want to do programming for 44, partially because it takes over her con experience… can we make this year better for her? Rachel needs a radio, maybe we need a programming ops… starting to run out of ideas, not clear who else might do it (Lydy is doing 4th Street, so will probably be too busy; Lisa is a possibility, she’s done it before, but don’t know if she’s interested or willing); Rachel may be willing to be sub-head.
New mnstf board elections in February - have to wait to find out who’s on it to send 44 bid.
***make sure there is SOMETHING about hall costumes in PR2***
Could e-mail the PDF of PR2 to groups like MRF-friends, etc., e-mail lists.