General Meeting Minutes

March 4^th, 2001

Burnaby Radisson Hotel

Present: Chris Sturges (VCON 26 chair), Clint Budd (VCON Society President), R. Graeme Cameron (BCSFA President), David Hale (BCSFA Webmaster), Garth Spencer (Secretary), Brian Dubberley. (BCSFA treasurer Doug Finnerty arrived a little later.)

The meeting was called to order at 1:10 p.m.

Clint moved that the meeting waive the reading of the minutes of the previous meeting, and review of old business, although there is a lot of old business. This meeting was given only one hour before the VCON 26 committee meeting, and was slated to cover one item: the report from the current VCon committee. Chris seconded, and the motion passed.

The discussion that ensued covered:

• The Aurora award nominations.
• Progress Report 1 and 2, combined, have been mailed and emailed. #3 will be out at the end of March.
• Finances. The committee now has well over $3000.
• Web site. Lorna has not been active recently (due to legitimate commitments covered outside this meeting.)
• Confirmed GoHs: Chris gave a detailed list, including Lynn Abbey, James Ernest, George Dyson, the Bigelows, Candas Jane Dorsey, Alan Betz, and a detailed list of guests (program participants), notably including C.J. Cherryh.
• Arguably, everything is OK but Registration. Pre-registration numbers are notably low, standing at 150 VCON members to date. Chris went into some detail about plans for concerted VCON publicity, advertising, and recruitment. These include participation from some non-fannish organisations such as Uncommon Events and seeyouthere.com (to facilitate on-line registration), from the assistant editor of Common Ground, etc. (Chris prevailed upon me to give him more addresses, e.g. the raw data that makes up the VCON Society address database, the honkin' big Canfan list, etc., etc.) A chronic problem has been the continuing lack of a Publicity Coordinator.
• Dealers room participation looks good.
• Operations equipment loans have been agreed on.
• Clint had some specific questions about the meeting space, which were clarified.
• Clint offered to oversee Publicity, if the VCON Society meeting endorsed his offer. Chris said it was originally intended that the Society do VCON publicity, wasn't it? Discussion ensued over the fact that the VCON Society execs, per se, were not intended to work on specific conventions but on year-to-year support; it would take specific permission from this executive to permit Clint to participate this year. In fact all the other execs had been sucked in, I mean, induced to work on the convention.
• Garth moved that in this case, the VCON Society president Clint Budd be permitted to hold a committee position, that specifically being VCON 26 Publicity Coordinator. Graeme seconded. Votes were 5 for, 2 abstentions.
• Clint discussed publicity plans with an emphasis on local media, and local post-secondary institutions.
• Chris presented a budget analysis for VCON 26, which he handed around. A discussion followed on expenses and income, including preregistrations.

The meeting concluded at 2:05 p.m.

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