Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing (with thanks to Diane)

Geri Sullivan on LiveJournal

The Genre Traveler “A New Con is Born”

File 770 “SFContario Comes to Toronto in 2010″
(thanks Murray)

“No Moods, Ads or Cutesy F***ing Icons (Re-reloaded)”
(Catherine comments on Peter Watt’s blog)

Donald Simmons on LiveJournal “Odds and Sods”

Lloyd Penney on LiveJournal “Fanzine letters of comment – December 5th, 2009″

ConTainment (convention list)

And of course the post on Boing Boing was copied in other aggregating sites.

All friendly links, but it’s a good start.

We’ve put a research survey on the SFContario web site at http://sfcontario.ca/conv/survey.php . We’d like to hear people’s opinions as to what they would like to see at the convention. Just one question so it will only take a minute. Please share your ideas with us.

I’ve also updated this blog from WordPress version 2.8 to version 2.9. The upgrade was painless, thank goodness.

Star player Michael Swanwick is coming to Toronto from Philadelphia.

The veteran started as a pitcher in the 1980s, with In The Drift, under Ace Special manager Terry Carr. The Ace team then included other future All-Stars, Gibson and Robinson and Waldrop.

Swanwick in the intervening years has been most productive at short (story).

Toronto is sending its ace pitcher, Doc Halladay, to Philadelphia. We wish Halladay and the Phillies well but we take comfort that Swanwick will be playing in our ball park this coming November.

And we expect Swanwick will be putting up good numbers, for years, after Doc Halladay has retired.

Swanwick has been elected to the Hugo All Star game multiple times.

For more Swanwick stats, see http://michaelswanwick.com.

Enjoy! Comments welcome.

Toronto science fiction author Peter Watts was arrested on December 8 following an incident near the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron, Michigan. He was stopped by US Customs and Border Protection on his way out of the US. Watts’s version of events coincides with that of the CBP in that his car was stopped for a search, and he got out of the car. Peter says he asked what they wanted, and he was punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, kicked, then arrested for assaulting a federal officer and held in a not-well-heated cell overnight before being released (minus car, laptop, paper notebook, and even his coat) on the Canadian side in Sarnia. Port Huron police claim that Peter exited the car “angrily”, that he was “aggressive”, and that he choked one of the officers during the incident.

At this point, if the story were brought to a writing circle, I would point out that words like “angrily” and “aggressive” are subjective and only convey information about the attitude (or preferred version) of the person making the statement, not about the facts of the situation. The idea that Peter initiated a violent confrontation with half a dozen armed officers is, well, difficult to imagine in any realistic way.

Cory Doctorow alerted the blogosphere via Boing Boing. Peter quickly gave a summary of the incident from his perspective on his web site.

Many people, including John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and our own editor guest of honour Patrick Nielsen Hayden commented in their blogs in support of Peter, not to mention countless other authors and members of the science fiction community, including David Nickle and Nalo Hopkinson, offered support for Peter. He was accepting for legal defense through PayPal via his “kibble” fund at donate-at-rifters-dot-com, though he raised enough money to handle his short-term expenses. Bakka also passed the hat at their Christmas party on the weekend, and they are accepting cheques for the cause as well.

A few of us on the SFContario concom also donated to Peter’s legal defense. At our concom meeting on December 12, there was strong support for the idea of helping with fundraising if the case continued, though of course we are hopeful the legal charges will be quickly dismissed.

Peter returns to Port Huron for a hearing on charges on December 22. If the hearing does not go in Peter’s favor, the community will consider how to help going forward.

From a personal perspective, this hits home because I sometimes cross the Blue Water Bridge, most recently in November to visit family in Michigan. Peter’s nationality is irrelevant to the issue; neither Americans nor Canadians should be treated this way. However, asking questions of police is a typically Canadian response which should not be a surprise to CBP agents near Canadian border crossings. Peter being a writer, or a marine biologist, is also irrelevant; we support him because he’s part of our community, just like SFWA raised funds for Effinger’s health care. But I feel this is an issue of concern to anyone who cares about crossing the border, and that should include every Canadian and every American who lives in a border state.

Peter Watts is author of the Rifters trilogy, and his work has been short-listed for the Hugo, Campbell, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards. He was a guest of honour at Ad Astra in 2005. His website is www.rifters.com.

We wish Peter the best and hope the case is quickly resolved in his favor. If not, a lot of Toronto fandom will stand by him.

First post for the news blog for SFContario! In fact this is posted well before the blog actually goes public. Part of the reason for this post is just to have some content for other test users to look at before we go live with this.

But since I’m here, I might as well say something. I’ll answer three questions:

Q. Why start a new convention?

A. The truth is that each person is going to have their own answer to that question. As I write this, fifty weeks until our convention with 49 paid members, it seems clear that some people want us to do this. I am reminded of Henry Ford’s answer to the question of whether buyers could get the Model T Ford in different colors. His answer was, “Any color that they want, as long as it’s black.”

Ford’s point was that building a new thing is expensive and that one’s choices are limited by the resources, people, and technology available. In his day, it was a miracle to have these machines produced at a cost people could afford. (My father’s first car was a 1930 Model A Ford, and today my brother works for Ford in Detroit, so I can use these examples.) However, one of the things I was taught in business school was that the key to success was to give people what they want, especially if it was something they couldn’t get other ways.

So having considered a lot of variables, costs, obstacles, and options, I found a couple of simple things. A lot of people wanted more fandom. Toronto’s convention calendar has gone from March to July. There have been conventions in the fall in the past, but nothing current. Many people also wanted a convention easy to get to, or in a location that was convenient to the amenities of our amazing city. Evaluating on just these two factors, it seemed clear that there was a demand in our community waiting to be filled. All I then needed was a group of people willing to help. Fortunately I found some people who had a fair bit of convention experience outside Toronto, some who were working on other conventions in Toronto who wanted to do something different, some who had worked on local conventions in the past and wanted to get involved again. And that was enough to get started.

These aren’t the only factors, but they are the main ones. Certainly there are people, including me, who want to do a few things differently. There are a few best practices widely used outside Toronto that don’t happen in some local conventions. A few self-styled “Canadian Conrunners” are Canadians first and conrunners second, and don’t seem interested in what works at US conventions. But this isn’t important, not enough reason to go to the effort of starting a new convention. Really the important points that we all agree on is just having a convention in the fall and having a convention downtown. The rest is trivia.

In particular, we don’t see what we are doing as being in competition with other local conventions. We may not do everything exactly the same, and a bit of friendly rivalry can help us learn what approaches works better. But our goal is to expand and deepen the community of fandom, by bringing in new people and by giving fans currently active more to do. We  think a rising tide will float all the boats, that bringing new activity to the Toronto community of fandom will be good for everyone in the long run. I’m personally active in Chicago fandom, where they have three general-interest science fiction conventions as well as several more special interest conventions, and what I have observed is that there are people who will support all the conventions as long as they are at least a couple months apart, so ultimately the success of each convention is the result of its own plans and practices, not because of what any other concom might be doing in the same area.

Q. Why have a blog?

The suggestion came from Murray Moore. I had to figure out what we might do with a blog that we can’t do with LiveJournal, Facebook, Google Groups, our internal committee intranet, our main web site, or other channels (I’m playing with Twitter this week). Based on a good panel at Smofcon this past weekend (Diane was a panelist), I came to the conclusion that each channel reached a different audience. The idea of hammering out exactly the same message through every communications channel is a 20th-century paradigm; in the new age, the idea is that different voices and techniques will appeal to different groups of listeners.

This blog will be our most “official” voice, used for announcements that will be pushed out via RSS to anyone who wants to listen. Our LiveJournal community will be a more lateral channel used for people to talk to us and to each other. This is important, so we will integrate it as a widget into this blog. Facebook will be a secondary channel that will help us update the massive community of Facebook users. Twitter will have two purposes; before the convention just to remind people we exist by bringing little announcements or just “re-tweets” of items we think people might be interested, and during the con just to let people know how things are going. Facebook and Twitter will also be used to link to our blog posts and any interesting discussions that arise on our LiveJournal community. Our Google Groups list will be used for our committee (and anyone really interested) in what we plan to do for the convention, and our intranet forum will mainly be used for storing documents, or occasionally for issues not ready for public discussion.

Q. Why not make the blog public now?

It’s not ready yet. Well, I installed a theme that almost does what we want, but by default it’s set up with a lot of red colors that are the exact opposite of our usual green. There are places we can put proper graphics, but it will involve finding theme directories and manually editing various CSS and PHP files. It should all get done by early in the new year, though we may roll this out kind of slowly and incrementally between now and then.