UCon 2009 Report

I served as the head of Ops (Operations) for U-Con gaming convention this past weekend. I also made the program book, which was a hit. I made it so that you could cut and glue the front cover into a 20-sided die with the Earth on it instead of numbers. Laura assembled one:

Here is my Ops report.

During the time I have been involved in conventions, Ops at ConFusion or Penguicon has most often been a warm body with a phone list of the convention staff. (For the Penguicon at which I was Chair, Garrett Kajmovicz and Mara Tynan rocked out Operations as a far, far more useful and organized institution than I am used to.)

At U-Con, Ops is actually what SF cons call the Registration department. Before I took on the job, U-Con Ops also incorporated event scheduling and facilities liaison. The previous U-Con head of Ops, Dora Furlong, remained in the event scheduling and facilities liaison roles this year, as well as taking pre-registrations. So as head of Ops I was essentially little more than a gopher who was trusted with money and unlocking, who had more hours of work than other gophers.

Two of greatest weaknesses were my phone which was deactivated for nonpayment, and a car that I can't drive due to expired insurance. I got a ride to Ann Arbor on Thursday, rides to and from a couch to crash on, and a ride back on Sunday. If I had been smart, I would have asked U-Con to provide me with a phone for the weekend. I would have put numbers in its phonebook for the appropriate staff members for Chair, Reg/Events/Facilities, I.T., Exhibitor Hall, Volunteer Coordinator, and Treasurer.

That would have alleviated my other weaknesses: inexperience and poor memory. It is said that you learn worst through reading, and best through doing. Throughout the weekend I was wrong about most things that I thought I knew. The head of Ops is the public face of the convention, so the attendees came to Ops with every question whether it was within my domain or not. I usually had no way of contacting the only person who could help. On-the-job training requires, at least for me, that I have to be willing to sacrifice my ego and image. :) That is fine.

The greatest strength that I brought to the convention was that I am good at recruiting. I recruited Ops volunteers who are more organized than me: Mara Tynan, Amanda Robinson, Jody Raiford, and Jen. This, plus the staff members who knew their jobs from long experience, is why the convention ran smoothly and received almost no complaints. I had nothing to offer in way of altering the Ops process, as it has been essentially perfected by Dora Furlong and Laura Hamel, the Chair. Laura wrote custom software for pre-reg, event scheduling, and cash register, which worked with a bar code scanner. It was a turnkey operation.

Some of the other staff thought that I should not have scheduled my shifts to close every night at midnight and open every morning at 8:30. This is because U-Con has no room parties, so 1AM is considered late. Normally that is when I crash anyway.

I kept playing games in Ops during quieter periods. They got interrupted a lot, or lost players midway through, or were not able to finish at all. When I was on breaks, I tried to put together pickup games, without much success. On Saturday I suspected the whole weekend was going to be a bust as far as fun was concerned, but that turned around Saturday night, and Sunday was great. I will make a separate post about my playtest of Ingeniators, which went wonderfully.

I had hoped to buy some 4-way rubber bands in the exhibitor hall, with which to hold game boxes closed. I didn't have enough money, and the dealers didn't carry them this year anyway.

I sort-of won a dragon. There was a contest in which your collection of dice is weighed, and the heaviest wins a handmade dragon about the size of a computer case, holding a knight in his claws. Sadly, no one thought they had any hope of beating every person at a game convention, so no one entered! When I discovered this, I got out the dice from my board game collection including World War 5, Kingsburg, and Stone Age. The contest itself had passed, so the contest administrator offered to make me a smaller dragon!

Comments

desfontaines on Nov. 17, 2009 8:52 PM

I was going to ask you... may I use that cool 20-sided globe in my social studies class next year? I can grab it from the program that you posted on an earlier LJ entry.

matt-arnold on Nov. 17, 2009 9:23 PM

You may, indeed!

sheryl67 on Nov. 17, 2009 9:51 PM

That cover is awesome! What a great idea.

sorcycat on Nov. 18, 2009 3:29 AM

You specifically told me that you weren't going to change things until you saw Ops in operation. In any case, you underestimate your value, because besides recruiting, you filled in the schedule and you handled the standard crisis that came up. I am sorry that your inability to contact me did not occur to me. That was a major oversight. Despite that you handled things beautifully. I disagree with your statement that you did nothing. You learned our system quickly and adapted. You participated in the U-Con process far more than I did my first year (which could be an unfair comparison). Anyway, you rocked, and I'm glad you got to have fun - next time you should know that you should build fun into your schedule if you want to be able to have it. :) That is what I did.

matt-arnold on Nov. 18, 2009 5:05 AM

Thank you very much.

vretallin on Nov. 18, 2009 7:55 PM

Wow. There is a lot for me to respond to here.

First I am sorry that you felt denigrated to nothing more than a glorified gopher. I am not sure why since in my view you were making decisions on how to handle scheduling conflicts new room assignments if needed additional games and other things I am sure I never even heard about. It has always been the role of ops chair to take over from con chair on site. Which con chair position ad I ever did it was more along lines of project manager.

Second Registration and scheduling are not and never have been ops chair responsibilities. They are separate duties. As is union liaison. It only happened to be me as ops chair doing it because last year there was no one else snd wasn't up to doing registration and sceduling as she normally did. Blair has done it in past as well. Not to say ops chair can't do them just that the roles are very independent and have never been combined as one responsibility.

Third the fact you felt all you did was lock unlock and supervise the volunteers is dhows just how smoothly things really did go. Honestly in a perfect ucon that really is all there is to do. Our concern, or st least mine, is that if you open and
d close ops you may feel burned out over the weekend and years. it can be very frustrating to feel as if you are stuck in ops. Like on Sunday folks were late and you almost missed your game. That is a problem I never figured out how to mitigate. People not communicating and letting you know they are late etc.

Fourth there was and probably always will be a phone in ops that can be dialed out from if we had all thought to give you our numbers. Which I had done I believe in Instsnt message before the con. Plus the con may discuss radio purchases so onsite communication not require phone use expense. The only issue was I spaced on identifying the ops phone number so peoplecould call you directly. No one poked me to remind me I spaced on it either. I apologize for dropping that ball.

I think you did a great job.