Miri Baker

In the interest of fairness, I will begin with something that we already know: running a convention is hard. This is the one concession I will make: running a Worldcon really is hard. It’s hard in the ways that running any large event is hard, and it’s hard in a few unique ways (whose fault those are being the subject of another post). We’re all clear there.

However, we in this community—writers, artists, builders and makers of all stripes—should be very accustomed to doing hard things. A task being difficult is often a reason TO do it, to tackle it in all its complexities, to explore new techniques, to learn and take joy and fulfillment in the learning.

So why are we having this conversation again?

I attended the “Learning From Mistakes at Worldcons” panel at this year’s con in Seattle because I’m a process nerd, and because I’ve seen firsthand the struggles that cons in general and Worldcon specifically have with this topic. Institutional memory, standardization, and process adoption are not easy, and they are not automatic. I was curious to see what the current thought was regarding the gaps and ways to fill them.

What I got was an hour-long screed on how Worldcon organizers can’t possibly be expected to be perfect, how problems are all unique to the circumstances in which they occur, and how it is the responsibility of an upcoming concom or new director to know who to reach out to for assistance, based on a dense, informal social network of distributed subject matter expertise. Social media responses to convention missteps were referred to as “the mob,” and the primary problem stated by the panelists is the bizarre assertion that the social media team “isn’t seeing itself as part of the convention” and isn’t acting on the convention’s behalf. The discussion was made all the more opaque by referring to cons by their local name and number—“DenCon”, “DisCon III”—which made it very difficult for anyone in the audience to follow the chronology of what was being discussed.

Because I am a process nerd, and also a professional little shit, I raised the question, “If I’m a brand-new director, or someone pulled in last-minute, there’s no way for me to have access to this loose social knowledge base. How can we turn this social knowledge into actual knowledge, and make sure that everyone has access to it?” In response, I received platitudes about how, well, you really just have to make friends with people, you have to learn who to talk to. Oh, but there was one woman, the heart and soul of DisCon, she was so very good at meeting and introducing people and raising them up and training them, we really relied on her.

(It will come as no surprise to the reader that the panel was comprised exclusively of older white men, a makeup which was recognized aloud by the younger white male moderator. I do not harbor any of the panelists any ill will, but nor do I hold much esteem for many of their con-running viewpoints as stated on this panel.)

There is, we were assured, a Worldcon Runner’s Guide. It exists, so you can’t say that we don’t document our learnings for the future. Oh, but it’s not up-to-date. There hasn’t been any kind of quality check done on it. No one really uses it, no one really knows where to find it. But it exists! It’s there! You can’t say it doesn’t, your argument is invalid. But no, we don’t make any effort to make it actually useful.

This is, frankly, insane. This is embarrassing. And the fact that these panelists said all this with their whole chest without understanding that—that we can’t answer your questions, that we will not reflect or generalize or strategize for the future, that we cannot imagine there is someone in the audience who doesn’t know the chronology of every Worldcon, that we refuse to do this labor if there’s a woman we can trust to handle it—speaks to how deep the problem goes. You, the people responsible for this: you should be embarrassed.

(In full fairness, I believe that they are. But what we appear to be seeing is an externalization of that embarrassment: defensiveness, fighting back, saving face, self-deprecating giggles or jokes about gummies.)

Add that to the egregious mispronunciation and lack of respect for nominees and nominated works at this year’s Hugos ceremony (something for which George R. R. Martin was rightly excoriated in 2020, and yet, somehow, here we are again), never mind the entire exclusion of one are you absolutely kidding me, and the question I’ve seen asked over and over across social media is: is there something baked into Worldcon that makes it capital-L capital-T Like This?

To which, despite its bid system and decentralized nature, the answer is a clear and resounding Yes.

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Many years—we’re closing in on every year—there is a counter-programming initiative to Worldcon. This year’s Concurrent ran the starting Thursday of Worldcon with a full suite of speakers, accessibility accommodations, and respect for its participants, built on the determination to do things right. These efforts are incredibly impressive, and the people driving them work hard and think deeply about how to right these wrongs.

And oh, how I long for a world where they are not necessary.

I do not accept that Worldcon is and must always be a fuckup forever. I do not accept that we must cede one of the premier events in our field to recycled mediocrity. No matter what you think of awards, the Hugos have built up enough cachet over the decades to mean something—to booksellers, to book buyers, to news outlets, to the nominees and recipients. We can make our own, and people have (the Ignytes being a recent and spectacular example), but I do not accept that we need to leave behind what’s already been built in the hands of people who don’t even seem to respect what they’re holding. Most conventions, even those run by imperfect humans, do not have a widely-accepted “Days since the Con Embarrassed Itself” counter.

Should it be the responsibility of those harmed to repair the harm? Nope. But when the alternative is giving up something of value, no matter how complicated that value is, there comes a point when it might be worthwhile.

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In quality and risk assessment, we have “the Swiss cheese model” of risk management. (We all got a good primer on this at the beginning of COVID, but let’s recap.) Each slice on the stack will have holes; this is the grain of truth at the core of the reflexive “well, you can’t expect us to be perfect” defense. The solution isn’t, as this defense assumes, to plug the holes. It’s to add more slices.

A diverse concom, across race and gender and class and lived experience. A review process for panel descriptions. A reliable accountability system between directors of different departments so that each doesn’t become its own little feudal fiefdom. The decision to treat accessibility across the spectrum as a first-class concern, and to build a diverse team able to make that happen. A built-in hour for the Hugos emcee to go over the pronunciations of the names that have been provided to them. And, crucially, a responsive, good-faith system in which to handle the things that will inevitably still go wrong. A system’s success is defined by how it handles failure.

All of these are slices that can be added, and most aren’t even that complicated to set up. But they will not happen on accident.

And if one convention does them, but does not push the next bid to do the same, then we’re back at the luck of the draw.

Money where my mouth is: once my convention season is over, I’m planning to write in with a request to get involved in that Runner’s Guide and bring it up to modern code. After that comes the process part. The part that the individual concoms have insisted in the past can’t happen, because after all it’s completely different groups, never mind the significant overlap. How do we get this information—our expectations, our learnings, and more than that, our aspirations—into the hands of the next team, and ensure that happens every year going forward, self-sustaining, into the future, without relying on a loose social network that we know perfectly well cannot accommodate everyone (especially non-US teams, lest we forget the “WORLD” in Worldcon)?

I’m not sure yet. But I suspect it starts with sending an email.

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After all that fire and brimstone, I need to make one thing clear: I love conventions.

DragonCon 2007 was the first time I knew what it felt like to be in a sea of peers, to be able to strike up a conversation with anyone, to make instant friendships just based on what fandom we were cosplaying or what panel we were queuing for. I’ve attended over eighty and volunteered at several dozen, and I’ve kept every single badge. My longest friendships are those formed at fandom events. My convention family feels like home.

Even with all the problems above, I had a fantastic time at Worldcon 2025 in Seattle. I saw and hugged people I only ever get to chat with online, I met and shared panels with incredibly eloquent and talented artists, I got to talk at great length about my passion for costuming and the effort-to-effect ratio because someone foolishly gave me a microphone five separate times. Even when Worldcon is bad, it collects my people in one place, and there are things to love. Even people who hate Worldcon have fun at Worldcon.

So imagine a world where Worldcon was good.

Where we treated it with the respect we pretend to afford it as the site of one of our major awards, honoring the fact that it might be the most important weekend of someone’s life to date. Where announcers and organizers understood the power they wield, and pledged to wield it responsibly. Where we held ourselves and our successors to a higher standard.

And where we stopped mispronouncing people’s goddamned names.

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Edit note: the prior version of this post said that Concurrent programming was held on Wednesday rather than Thursday, because I trusted my memory and didn’t check. It can happen to you.