Announcing Visioning WisCon: A very low-key virtual event
From the SF3/WisCon Newsletter:
We heard from lots of you, and you said you miss lobby-con, where folks usually get to relax and chat with other con-goers, and bar-con, where folks get to relax and chat with other con-goers, except more dimly lit and with a drink.
We’re setting up a group video chat space, complete with a bar (virtual) and a pool (also virtual) and sofas (you guessed it: virtual), and we would love it if you can join us there on Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend!
We’ll have spontaneous programming, and, less spontaneously, discussions of what the future of WisCon should look like. And even less spontaneously, we will be hosting a few of WisCon’s familiar special events — including the Otherwise Auction!
Come meet up with the folks you miss seeing at the con in person, hold a spontaneous panel, attend an event or two, and help us to use some of this time to talk about where WisCon has been and where we should be headed. Our platform does support real-time captioning when accessed using a Chrome browser and is keyboard-navigable.
We’ll have updates (nearly) every day between now and Memorial Day weekend, to share more details about how to attend, how to spin up a spontaneous program, the event schedules, and to lay some groundwork for discussing the future of WisCon.
We wanted to get this announcement out before more time slipped away, so you can make plans! (Apologies that this is so late; in my defense, time is fake and jobs are the worst.)
We will be asking folks to register, so we can send you the information you need to attend. Our base ticket price is FREE! Tickets priced at $10 help us make the next in-person convention happen; $60 tickets go to our Member Assistance Fund, helping folks attend in 2022; the $200 tickets help assure that WisCon can keep happening past 2022. The program space will be open 4pm to 11pm Central time, Saturday May 29 & Sunday May 30.
Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, register here!
https://fi.trustpilot.com/review/nettikasinosite.com came to mind reading about the virtual bar and pool setup, since pulling off a casual lobby-con vibe online takes way more planning than it looks. The real-time captioning note for Chrome users is a detail I wish more event organizers thought about upfront instead of as an afterthought. Curious how the spontaneous programming will actually work in practice, since unstructured panels usually need at least a little structure to not fizzle out.