Eleri seems to have beaten me to it, but as Eleri's other half (planning-wise... as was noted at Mysterium, we're married, but not to each other ), I figured I'd toss my two cents in too.

Anna Catherine wrote:

This will mean that, including this coming one, 3 out of the 4 most recent times Mysterium was held, it was on the West Coast. I may be biased because that's so far from where I live, but the location does seem to be skewing pretty heavily in favour of one region in the last few years. I'm pleased to hear the year after will be more central-- but if every third year is always on the West Coast, maybe it would be better to lean toward other parts of the country for the remaining 2/3 in general for however long Mysterium continues, rather than focusing on making only the next one central? 3/4 in the same general area seems a little much, even though there is a very valid reason for Spokane.

As Eleri noted, we're working in time zones rather than having nation-wide nominations each year to try and alleviate this issue to some degree, but even then, sometimes things will be weighted more toward one side of the country than the other every few years because of the Spokane tradition.

In the interests of challenging preconceptions, how important is it to people that we return to Spokane every 3 years? For some, it's the only time they come to Mysterium because of the opportunity to visit Cyan HQ, and it has historically been the most well-attended location every time it's held there (so much so that we tend to leave it out of the "how many will show up" metric when doing attendance projections for other locations). However, on a 3-year rotation, it's difficult to divide up locations evenly across the country from year to year, because just one western Mysterium throws off the balance, and two east-coast Mysteria back-to-back does the same... at the very least, every 3 years the weighting will shift from one side of the country to the other (which it has in the past... the 2003 - 2005 circuit was Spokane, Toronto, and Chicago).

If we changed the Spokane rotation to every 4 years, this balance would be a lot easier to maintain, but would also fly in the face of 10 years of Mysterium tradition; something we've been hesitant to do too much stomping upon. I don't expect answers immediately - heck, we've got until 2011 before this question is even all that important of an issue - but some initial thoughts and opinions would be appreciated. This is, after all, your convention as much as it is ours, and if people think that breaking from tradition in this arena can make Mysterium better, I personally have no issues with building our own traditions for the next 10 years.

On the other hand, if the feedback is more in favor of sticking with the 3-year rotation, we'll do our best to make this next 3-year rotation a more eastern-friendly set, which would push the possibility of another New Mexico event back to 2013 at the earliest. What say y'all?

Quote:

Quote:

~The gathering will happen sometime between June 1 and Sept 1, 2009

I think the later part of that range is problematic. Once you get past about mid-August, people are going to start going back to school-- essentially cutting out our younger folks, who can't just take vacation time whenever. While I understand and appreciate that it's too early to pin down specific dates and you're trying to give a range, if you're seriously considering that whole range, you should be aware of the major logistical problems... and if you're not, you might want to give a narrower range for the sake of accuracy. I think choosing a date in late August would be very unwise given it would greatly limit who could attend.

At the moment we're painting with broad strokes while we gather feedback from the community and go over our options in Spokane (in essence, we've pretty much bracketed off the entire summer as a possibility, which isn't really earth-shattering news ). I don't see any reason why Mysterium '09 would need to be held so late in the summer (especially since August/September can get pretty brutal weather-wise), but until we have something more definite lined up, we don't want to pain ourselves into a corner when it comes to scheduling. The back-to-school situation is definitely something we will keep in mind, though, and I appreciate you bringing it up .

Quote:

I think a registration fee is a good idea, and I had no issue paying a fee this year. I'd rather that than money coming out of the Committee's pocket. So that wasn't a concern for me...

...Till that roundtable discussion thing at Mysterium, which made me a little nervous. I'm assuming I can talk about this since it was a public event. Anyway, multiple people were talking about how paying $15 is "nothing" and tossing out the prices for other conventions. The numbers I heard ranged from $45-$85 for what people were paying for those other conventions.

I agree that $15 is reasonable, more than reasonable, but I wouldn't call it nothing. And I'm very concerned that I'm going to get priced out of Mysterium if the rates jump dramatically. Especially if I'm traveling all the way to the West Coast, which is massively expensive for me, shelling out a large conference fee when I get there just isn't going to be able to happen. I'm not saying Mysterium isn't worth it to me-- just that I only have so much money. I wouldn't be able to go to those other more expensive conventions either.

So what I'm wondering, purely unofficially, is if you're planning to keep the rate about the same as it was this year or raise it slightly, or are you planning to charge significantly more? A major price difference would be a good thing to know about as soon as possible, even if only in general terms.

At the moment, I see no reason why the registration fee in '09 would be much (or any) higher than it was this year. I think the registration fees being tossed around were largely from people pointing out how affordable Mysterium is comparatively, and that's something we don't want to change. The only thing I can see having any sort of marked impact on registration fees is if (and I do want to emphasize the if) we start having a guest of honor at the convention, and interest in the event remains at its average non-Spokane level (i.e. 40-70 people). A guest of honor would need to have their air fare and hotel room paid for, something that's easier to defray the cost of the more people attend. The earliest I think we'd even contemplate having a guest of honor is in 2010 - since in 2009 we'll be up to our armpits in local guests of honor at Cyan - and even then, it's up to community feedback whether or not we decide to go for something like that.

Put simply, we're very much aware that Mysterium could easily get priced out of a lot of people's budgets if the registration fee were to bump up to the level of other cons (for example, I'd love to go to PAX, but even that's spendy for me, and I live 5 hours away!), and we'd really rather not have that happen. There is a lot we can do with the registration fee we've got right now, and the more people we can get to attend at that price, the easier it'll be to make even more cool stuff happen. As Eleri said, though, it's dependent upon what people want out of Mysterium, and we're going to be asking that question a lot moving forward.