Westercon 76 Site Selection Opens
So this afternoon I got the news online that Westercon 76 Site Selection is now open. The site selection ballot is online, and you can vote by postal mail (no electronic voting), designate someone to carry your ballot to Tonopah, or vote in person on July 1-2, 2022, the first two days of Westercon 74.
One catch: there are no bids filed to host Westercon 76. The deadline for filing to be on the ballot was April 25, 2022, and nobody filed. That doesn't yet mean there are not bids, because you can file a write-in bid right up until the end of voting at 7 PM PDT on July 2.
If no eligible bid wins — which will happen if no bids file — or None of the Above wins, then the selection of the site of Westercon 76 falls to the Westercon 74 Business Meeting. That meeting will be at 11 AM on Sunday, July 3, 2022, and because it is likely to be of significant interest, we're going to hold it in the Main Hall, not in one of the programming rooms. (Also, we don't know how long it will take, and doing it this way means we're not interfering with programming or potentially bumping panels. OTOH, the Main Hall is also Fan Tables and Hospitality, so it may be a little chaotic.
Further complication: no groups have stepped forward to express interest in running Westercon 75. As some of you will recall, Lisa and I were made a committee to try and find a group to run Westercon 75 when nobody filed for it and thus nobody won at Westercon 74/Loscon 47 last year. If we are unable to find a group by this July, we'll have to report failure to the Business Meeting, which will need to figure out what to do next.
Lisa and I have some ideas, but we're trying to hold back while we continue to ask for anyone interested in hosting Westercon 75 to step forward. Any place in western North America west of 104° west longitude is eligible to host Westercon. There are lots of possible sites; there's a shortage of groups willing to host the convention.
One catch: there are no bids filed to host Westercon 76. The deadline for filing to be on the ballot was April 25, 2022, and nobody filed. That doesn't yet mean there are not bids, because you can file a write-in bid right up until the end of voting at 7 PM PDT on July 2.
If no eligible bid wins — which will happen if no bids file — or None of the Above wins, then the selection of the site of Westercon 76 falls to the Westercon 74 Business Meeting. That meeting will be at 11 AM on Sunday, July 3, 2022, and because it is likely to be of significant interest, we're going to hold it in the Main Hall, not in one of the programming rooms. (Also, we don't know how long it will take, and doing it this way means we're not interfering with programming or potentially bumping panels. OTOH, the Main Hall is also Fan Tables and Hospitality, so it may be a little chaotic.
Further complication: no groups have stepped forward to express interest in running Westercon 75. As some of you will recall, Lisa and I were made a committee to try and find a group to run Westercon 75 when nobody filed for it and thus nobody won at Westercon 74/Loscon 47 last year. If we are unable to find a group by this July, we'll have to report failure to the Business Meeting, which will need to figure out what to do next.
Lisa and I have some ideas, but we're trying to hold back while we continue to ask for anyone interested in hosting Westercon 75 to step forward. Any place in western North America west of 104° west longitude is eligible to host Westercon. There are lots of possible sites; there's a shortage of groups willing to host the convention.