jducoeur

So, this is the spot where there should have been an Arisia '22 post. Unfortunately, the timing of Omicron was almost perfectly bad, so the Chair Team had to cancel the convention on very short notice, after negotiating things with the hotel so that we don't get sued out of existence.

(Reminder for future-me reading this, years down the road: Omicron was the "tidal wave" variant of Covid-19 that swept the world in early 2022. It currently looks to be a little less deadly than the more "traditional" forms, but is vastly more contagious, with the result that a large fraction of the people in the Northeast currently have it. It's a bad time to hold a mass gathering. Anyway...)

With less than a week before runtime, there was no way we could move to a full-scale v-con the way we did for A'21; besides that, the Remote Team for A'21 was still a little burned out, having collectively put in thousands of hours of work creating that experience. It was great, but it was also hard.

But it would have been mournful not to do something, so Gail basically did an impromptu, "Let's build a barn!" for those who were willing. Arisia was formally cancelled, but in its place we held ACOG, the Arisia Community Online Gathering.

tl;dr -- that didn't suck.

Having so little time, ACOG wasn't remotely as ambitious as A'21; indeed, we didn't even call it a v-con. But in practice, it kind of turned into one.

They already had a Discord server partway set up for A'22, so that got repurposed for ACOG, as did things like the SignUpGenius account that Gaming had been planning on using, which wound up getting used to set up things like Help Desk and Moderators. Discord became the centerpoint for ACOG, much as it had been for A'21, and that was helpful: some of the better innovations from A'21 fell right back into place, including the #at-the-westin quasi-LARP (narrate what you are doing right now at the convention that doesn't exist) and #ten-forward (the 18+ channel where you could order e-drinks and snacks from the friendly local @bartender-bot, and mind the occasional animated coyote falling through the ceiling).

Gaming was, of course, very active -- the Minecraft server that had always been part of the A'22 plans was front and center, and a lot of online games sprang up. (Not least, because that is Gail's thing.) Streaming wound up a fairly major deal this year, with a bunch of sessions on Twitch and multiple excellent dance parties. (Not least, because that is Anna's thing, and she was very much Gail's partner-in-crime in pulling this together. And note to myself: DJXero spins a really great dance party.) Hobbit decided that there should be a music track, so he went off and built a separate Discord server specifically optimized for that, and gradually enticed folks over there to do some singing.

As for me, it was a surprisingly mellow weekend -- since there was no A'22, there was no Press, which means that I was not on-duty all weekend the way I usually am. (And, sadly, no Renaissance Ball outside of #at-the-westin.)

But I was part of the Remote Team (just not running it this year, and not doing any coding), so Gail asked me to help keep folks apprised of what was going on. We had "On the 50s" -- announcements of what was coming up, ten minutes before the start of each hour -- but she asked me to do a twice-daily "What's New" to supplement that.

As is my wont, I looked at it and said, "Sure, I could just list things -- but that's boring. We should make something chattier, that gets folks excited about stuff to come. And we could include news about what's going on around ACOG, and announcements and such. Andandand... I've just reinvented Clear Ether, haven't I?"

Hence, my main focus for the weekend was writing and editing The Erisian, the newsletter for the "con". I turned on Enthusiasm-Brain and went into Publicity Mode, which I haven't pulled out in quite a while but used to be quite good at.

It was rather fun, and over the course of four issues wound up being a sort of loose historical record of the event -- incomplete, but covering most of the highlights of what was going on. If you're curious, check it out!

(Frankly, it was enough fun that I'm tempted to get involved with the running of Clear Ether when things go back to normal. I've been doing Press Liaison forever, and could use a change.)

Anyway: what could have been a depressing weekend wound up being a rather fun one. It was more of a low-intensity relaxacon than the firehose of activity that is Arisia proper, but there was still constant chatter, things to do, and people getting to hang out and get their weird on. It was only maybe a third the experience of A'21 -- but was under 10% of the effort, so the bang for the buck was pretty good.

So -- one for the win column. Hopefully next year, circumstances will allow us to hold Arisia for reals...

Arisia 2021 is now done. A bit of quick braindump of what I've spent the past four months focused on. Forgive me if this isn't very organized -- I'm very tired, but want to get it written down while it's front of mind, before I get distracted by other things.

In late August, I was approached to head the new "Remote" division for Arisia -- basically, be responsible for creating this year's virtual convention. (V-con, for short.) We spent a couple of weeks figuring out what that meant, but by early September I had accepted.

We decided that Remote would be responsible for the infrastructure side of things: we would build the website and set up the technology. The Tech division would do the on-the-ground running of individual sessions, and each division would do at least a variation of what they normally did.

In practice, I started thinking about it as creating a little software startup. I meant that as kind of a joke; I had no idea how true it would turn out to be. After spending most of my professional career working for "startups" (loosely defined), this turned out to be My Startup Experience in many ways, both good and bad.

Let's talk about the good first, starting with my staff.

I got staggeringly lucky, from very early on, in recruiting. It's a standard truism that a startup needs a "rockstar" team, and through sheer luck I wound up with one.

I'll first call out Raven for kudos. One of the things we did that was very, very different from most v-cons was to prioritize UX (User Experience) design. I advertised for a UX Designer, and Raven -- a very experienced one -- was the first person I hired. She made sure that we were thinking about the users first, and the technology second, and the result was a better experience than most.

Gail should also be highlighted. She came in fairly early as the frontend lead, complimenting my backend skills; later on, she took lead on the Discord side of the project, so I could focus on Zoom and the other integrations. In the last two months of the project, she wound up spending nearly as much time on Remote as I did, while simultaneously being the head of the Gaming division. (I suspect she was the single hardest-working member of the convention.)

Add to that, we had Em (a more junior but enormously disciplined and diligent UX Designer), Erika (as our UI Designer and Artist), Chris (Gail's right-hand on the frontend side, who did most of the work to take the UX/UI designs and turn them into code), and Deborah (who dealt with most of the thankless IT jobs so that we actually had things like a server and a database). Oh, and Gail's Mom, who I still haven't actually met, but who volunteered to do a ton of data-entry for the divisions that needed it.

All told, it was a software startup in every important respect: the team was the right size, folks worked together well, everybody was thoroughly professional and we generally worked together well. There were some debates, even some serious arguments, but overall I think it was a pretty healthy team, better than many I've worked with in my career.

The technology itself -- well, let's just say we got ambitious. V-cons have mostly colored within the lines of what you can easily do with the major tools like Zoom, using them in their standard consumer configurations. Folks have tweaked settings and stuff, but not many have tried to really push the boundaries.

I said (perhaps unwisely), "Hey, we've got four months -- surely we can do better". I basically set a mandate to the UX team of figuring out what we wanted this to do, and let me and Gail figure out how to do it. All of the glorious and terrible aspects of this project flowed from that.

The thing that was really different about Virtual Arisia (as it eventually became known) was that it was tightly integrated. The website tried to pull Zoom, Discord, Convention Master (the very old and rather clunky third-party commercial product that we use for Registration) and Zambia (the open-source scheduling software that originally sprang from Arisia and is now used by other conventions) together into something that I can't call "seamless", but at least tried to hide some of those seams. (The techies should take note: Zoom actually has pretty good APIs, and you can automate things enormously if you try.)

In particular, Arisia turned out to be very different because we the convention is very safety-focused: we try to create an environment that is relatively free from crashers and abusers. That meant that authentication was really important: you got into everything via your Arisia registration, and everything else flowed from there.

One downside was that that surprised the snot out of many people. We were doing things like creating Zoom meetings on-demand when the sessions were starting, and providing links to them directly in the schedule (redirected through the website so we could enforce security). That mostly worked well, but folks were enormously confused that we weren't doing things like emailing piles of Zoom links around. Overall, I thought our approach was good, but we didn't realize that we needed to do much more to highlight that this was not going to work the way consumer Zoom does.

More on the downside, we committed a raft of classic startup mistakes. We committed to too many features, with the result that our attention was too split, and the task got monumental. In the end, we managed to get most of it working, including pretty much all of the mission-critical stuff, but we were sadly unable to get to some of the more fun bits, and there were some corners cut under the hood that kept me up at night. I knew of several things that could have gone horribly wrong; we were fortunate that none of them did.

The most startup-y thing was that our deadline was almost impossibly tight, and as rigid as could be: we knew that, this past Friday, a thousand or so people were going to show up expecting a convention. As a result, I know that I worked about 250 hours over the past three weeks, about a hundred of that on my dayjob and the rest on Arisia -- Gail may have worked even more than that, and everyone on the team was tooling in the hardest possible way. It was the hardest I've worked in my life, and I'm somewhat angry with myself about it: I teach Agile Development processes specifically to avoid that, and I'm chagrined that I fell into the trap.

Similarly, we were flying without a net. The only real test harness we had was some unit tests from Chris; there was no automated testing at all on my side. It says a lot about the professionalism and skill of the team that the whole thing didn't completely crash and burn on Friday.

As it was, the first 24 hours were seriously rocky. It started okay, but things started getting confused and meeting-management largely melted down for Friday, forcing Tech and Programming to scramble and come up with backup plans for getting the Zoom links to people. That worked, but it required a lot of manual labor that I had been specifically trying to avoid.

By mid-Saturday, things were settling down and mostly working right from an attendee POV; by Sunday, things were actually stable and working more or less exactly as designed. (Suffice it to say, Sunday was when I got to stop programming for 16 hours a day and actually start mostly attending the convention.) Which underscores what happened: the convention itself was essentially the first real alpha-test of this software, and we got what we deserved.

The moral of the story is a familiar one to any experienced software engineer, that Agile processes exist for a reason. Stay focused on getting things done a few features at a time, in priority order, fight scope creep, and Test, Test, Test. We pulled it off, but only by the skin of our teeth.

All that said: Arisia happened, and it was pretty damned great. It was of course different from an in-person convention, and that lack of presence hurt. But nearly all of what you expect from Arisia was there -- not just the programming and events and artists and dealers, but most importantly the sense of community. (I didn't appreciate until we were really in it just how important and central Discord would be to the experience.) It was fun, and that's not a small thing.

Yes, the entire thing is open-source -- you can find the repo here. I'm pretty sure that no other convention will be able to just take this software and run it -- it is very specific to Arisia 2021 -- but I strongly encourage folks to dig though it, adapt it, turn parts into libraries, strip it for parts, and so on. (It would be delightful if somebody was motivated to evolve this into a more genuinely reusable platform: it would take a lot of refactoring and evolution, but the seeds are here.) Questions are warmly welcomed, and I'm planning on writing a bunch of documentation in the coming weeks.

So -- that was the end of 2020 and the beginning 2021 for me. Now I get to refocus on other things (not least, getting serious about Querki again for the first time in ages), which will be nice. But this was a win, and a much-needed one: I'm quite proud of what the team accomplished, and I hope it inspires others to take this Virtual Convention thing seriously, and ask what sort of experience you would like, and how to get there...

I've spent today trying not to be depressed about the news by making one last large donation to the presidential and senatorial funds, and otherwise working on Arisia. Which reminds me that I've been remiss in my diarizing.

So -- a few weeks ago, I was invited to become the Div Head for the new Arisia Remote Conference division. Now that we are confident that (a) Arisia will be entirely online next year and (b) Marriott Corp isn't going to sue us for not using the hotel, that's starting to seriously ramp up.

Basically, I'm in charge of making Arisia as a 100% virtual convention possible. The new division will be basically in charge of the online infrastructure, working with all the other divisions to produce the best experience we can.

In principle, there's no longer anything revolutionary about that. Ever since the pandemic hit and conferences starting moving online (starting with NE Scala, which we turned into an online conference on 48 hours' notice), there have been many proofs of concept -- we know this can be done.

That said, we have a lot more than 48 hours here: we've got four months, enough time to do this right. Some v-cons have been better, some worse, but I haven't heard of any that were really excellent yet, so I think there's still a lot of room for learning and experimentation.

Which is where y'all come in.

First of all, I need help with this. Lots and lots of help. I need IT/Ops help (Ops is not my specialty), I need some adventurous programmers who are interested in helping with this new platform I'm going to be building, I need web designers to make this pretty, I need UX designers to make it usable -- heck, I could use a good project manager so that I don't have to do all that myself. If you'd been interested in getting involved with the project, drop me a line.

Second, your thoughts would be welcome. If you've been to any online conferences or conventions this year, tell me what you thought worked, and what didn't. If you have crazy ideas for how to do things better, talk to me. While we're constrained by available time and labor, I am totally hoping to be able to do some Mad Science here, and Show Them All How It's Done. (Bwahahaha, but seriously -- I think there are a lot of ways we can improve on the state of the art, and produce some great open-source stuff.)

The goal is to not just have an adequate Arisia this year, but to have a great one -- to help folks come together and have a really good time. If you're interested in joining in on that, or even just have ideas, I'd love to hear from you, in comments or privately.

In about a month, I'll be participating in the BARCC Walk for Change, raising funds for the Bay Area Rape Crisis Center, as part of Team Arisia. It's a good cause, and particularly dear to Arisia: we work with BARCC to train our staff.

Please consider tossing a few dollars in to help out, at my fundraising page. Thanks!

(NB: I'm staff at Arisia, but not speaking for it in any official way here. This is just my quick, unofficial take.)

Quick signal boost for anybody who didn't get the email (it was sent widely, but I'm not sure it will get to everybody): Arisia will be changing hotels this year. The hotel strike against the Westin Waterfront is still in full force, and much of the Arisia staff (not to mention many attendees) aren't willing to cross the picket line. So we're going to be moving back to the Boston Park Plaza (where the convention was held for many years) for this go-round.

This is just for this year, not a permanent move. But we're now close enough to runtime that we had to make a decision, so the board cancelled the 2019 contract yesterday, and formalized the move.

As to the Renaissance Ball that I usually run at Arisia: things are still in flux. We have a lot of function space at the BPP, but not the same spaces as at the Westin, so the expected schedule has kind of gone into the shredder, and everybody's re-jiggering everything now. Hopefully we'll have space for the Ball when all is said and done.

See this FAQ for more details. For those fretting about "The Park Plaza isn't big enough!", note that it's been heavily renovated since we were last there, and has a good deal more capacity than it used to.

ETA: yes, even if the strike is resolved, this move is happening -- we set a hard deadline of Friday and made it very clear to the hotel, and by now the contracts have been changed. So that particular ship has sailed...

(While I'm still Processing, let's reflect on happier stuff.)

This weekend was Arisia. I believe I have finally hit a reasonable limit on how much is sane for me to do at-con. I took considerable pride in doing stuff for six different divisions this time around, which serves as a pretty good overview of my convention. The significant bits were:

• Communications: My primary job for the convention is currently Press Liaison. Basically, I wrangle the reporters and photographers, make sure they sign the "I promise not to be an asshole with these photos" contract, and generally help them out. I had a deputy this year, which made things work a lot better.
• Programming: I got pulled in slightly late, because they were down a Track Manager for Gaming and I was insufficiently reluctant. Fun, slightly insane process. Assigning people to panels is basically a logic puzzle, but scheduling those panels is a really intense one. (I gather that the unofficial slogan of the Programming Division is "Scheduling is where dreams go to die!".) But given the other stuff I was doing, I didn't have much at-con responsibility except serving on the panel "Play That Book!", which was a good deal of fun.
• Staff Services: HQ is pretty much my home base at Arisia these days -- it's the room where we try to match volunteers to needs, give out timesheets (and do data entry on Monday), hand out ribbons, help people trade ducks for Fabulous Prizes, and so on. Basically the center of the whirlwind: it's quite a bit of fun.
• Events: As usual, I ran the Renaissance Ball; as usual, it was a hoot. The Waytes provided excellent music, we got a great crowd, and I came out of the whole thing quite exhilarated. One of the high points of my year.

On top of that, I volunteered for a couple of little jobs: helping match the Enormous Pile of Incoming Food to the invoices we had from Sysco (Food Div); and helping tape out spaces for strollers and wheelchairs in the ballrooms (Member Services). Both fairly short jobs, but volunteering is a great way to meet new folks and learn more about how the con works.

Aside from the obvious crisis, it was a pretty great weekend. I'm pretty sure over-scheduling myself is part of why it was so great: I was so busy doing stuff that I didn't have time to think (a glorious change of pace at the moment), and there was a lot of satisfaction in helping make things tick without being excessively in-charge. I need to reflect on the implications of that...

• Comics Year in Review (Friday, 7pm) -- hmm. What *has* come out this year that was especially noteworthy? I have fewer ideas than usual.


• When Comics Creators Go Off the Deep End (Friday, 10pm)


• Worst Episode Ever (Saturday, 1pm) -- suggestions solicited. I can think of some ripe examples, but I'm sure I'm missing a lot.


• Future Directions in Personal Computing (Saturday, 5:30pm) -- with Alex Feinman, among others


• SCA Ball / Renaissance Dance (Sunday, 3pm) -- everyone is strongly encouraged to come to this. We need both dancers with some clue to spread around the floor, and folks to explain the SCA.


• The Finite vs. Open-Ended Story (Monday, 1pm) -- the one comics panel I'm really looking forward to