A comment written by me in discussions in 2021.\u00a0 Still relevant, so I thought it would be useful to have it documented in public here.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n Source:\u00a0 my recollection of the discussions\/arguments\/concerns which were current around 1995-1998, and the meeting itself where the Guidelines were first voted in.<\/p>\n To me the Guidelines are, or were meant as, a framework for creating shared expectations<\/b>.<\/p>\n The point wasn’t that you had to do<\/em> them all.\u00a0 The point was that you EITHER had to do them OR you had to say up front that you weren’t gonna, which might mean that the DMP didn’t vote for you to run BiCon.<\/p>\n (There was no BiCon Continuity in those days.\u00a0 One team would hand the money direct to the next team.\u00a0 If more than one group wanted to run the next BiCon, then either people would talk it out like “Okay, you do next year and we’ll do 2 years from now”, or the DMP would vote on it.\u00a0 The formal hand-over was at a DMP.\u00a0 That’s a bit oversimplified but that’s the gist of it.)<\/p>\n The point of having Guidelines was so that when, as a BiCon participant, you voted in a team to run a future BiCon, you knew what you were getting<\/b>.<\/p>\n (Or at least, you knew what the team was committing<\/em> to, even if in practice there were reasons why they didn’t manage to deliver.)<\/p>\n The concern* which the Guidelines would answer was like:\u00a0 “But what if someone says they’re doing BiCon, and then they decide that their<\/i> BiCon is going to be a cruise to the Bahamas which costs like a thousand pounds each.”<\/p>\n Or, for a less far-fetched example:\u00a0 any team could decide not to have the sliding scale fees, and nobody would have any comeback – because they’d never said in the first place there would<\/i> be sliding scale fees, all they’d said was “we will run a BiCon”.<\/p>\n I think since 1998, there has been a kind of, not exactly “scope creep”, but some kind of “people forgot what these were really for”, which has turned them into RULES. They weren’t meant to be rules. They were meant to be a starting point for a negotiation between a potential team and the wider community<\/b>.<\/p>\n Original comment was made 18 August 2021, as part of discussions about making BiCon better, especially as regards anti-racism.\u00a0 Lightly edited for clarity.<\/p>\n * “The concern”:\u00a0 I might’ve overstated this; maybe it was “a<\/em> concern”, and there were some other concerns floating around too.\u00a0 However, the potential of “people could do any<\/em> old thing and call it BiCon” was certainly central to the discussions I remember.<\/p>\n \nCopyright © Jennifer Moore 2023. All rights reserved.\n<\/p>\n This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds<\/a> blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it<\/a>, giving the web address where you found it.<\/p>\n\n
This bit is the actual comment from 2021<\/h2>\n
Notes<\/h2>\n
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