SFContario will be having a party at Ad Astra in Don Mills on Saturday, April 10, starting at 9 PM. We expect to be on the party floor so we’ll be easy to find. Diane, Catherine, and Jeff will be hosting the party. Come find out about Toronto’s newest science fiction convention.

SFContario will also be hosting the dessert buffet at FilKONtario in Mississauga on Saturday, April 10 starting around 8:30 PM. The party will be in the hospitality suite after the Filk Hall of Fame banquet. Marah, Alex, and Sue will be hosting the party. The green alien will be consumed. If you’re at FilKONtario that weekend, come and have fun with us!

If you are on Facebook, join our Facebook page to get notified about what’s going on. You can RSVP to one of our parties to let us know you’re coming.

Robert J. Sawyer has been invited to be Toastmaster at SFContario, November 19-21 in downtown Toronto.

SFContario’s toastmaster Robert J. Sawyer is a futurist and frequent keynote speaker and media science commentator with over 500 appearances on Canadian and international radio and television. He is a favorite at science fiction conventions across Canada, the United States, and elsewhere; he has been toastmaster at VCON, Norwescon, and Con-Version.

When he is not doing public speaking, Rob is a prolific science fiction author, having written 19 novels (as of April 2010) plus assorted short fiction and non-fiction. He also works in television, currently as creative consultant for the ABC/CityTV series FlashForward (based on his novel of the same name. For his fiction, Robert Sawyer has won the Hugo, Nebula, Aurora, and many other science fiction awards in three decades in the field.

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.

[from archive Nov 23]

We have date! And a hotel! And guests! As we have mentioned earlier, it’s the third weekend of November 2010.

Date: November 19 – 21, 2010

Hotel: Ramada Plaza Toronto