I may look back one day and realise I lived through the final years of LitFandom

[major_clanger]

"You are offering a room full of vintage first-edition hardbacks to a group of people who read books on their phones."

Madeline Ashby: 'Memento mori. (Or, how Worldcon’s youth problem will resolve.)'

If I had more time this would be a long post ranging over:

• how the people I see at conventions in my mid-40s are in large part those I went to cons with in my mid-20s
• the demographics and atmosphere at Nine Worlds as compared with Eastercon/Worldcon
• the lack of progress towards panel parity or meaningful anti-harassment policies at Worldcon

...and sundry related topics. But most of these are issues that are already being discussed, and I'll content myself for now with pointing to Ashby's very insightful post on how, unless these points are addressed, LitFandom's problems are going to end up being of purely historical interest.

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Interesting; perhaps US Worldcons might want to emphasize child-friendliness?

I wondered why Dragoncon doesn't offer child care. After all, my experience from Eastercons and UK Worldcons is that if you offer child care then the number of children for whom it will be used will be about 1% of the convention membership. If that scaled to Dragoncon, you would expect 500-600 children.

Yet this article suggests that Dragoncon stopped offering child care because of a lack of use. Edit to add: But of course if you make a convention awkward to attend with children in other ways, child care demand will fall off anyway.)

Mind you, I find the tone of that article rather odd; I get more than a whiff of the author somewhat resenting the presence of toddlers at conventions and/or seeing cons as an opportunity for a fun holiday without them.

Something that occurs to me is that there might be difficult legal complications with running child care in the US (or specific states), but I'd have to bow to local knowledge on this.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

After that, they have to go to the grandparents.

Oh the assumptions buried in that one!

[redbird]

I know that Wiscon uses a professional babysitting/child care service for children ages 6 and under, for on-site child care. That costs money, which is not charged to the parents but subsidized by the convention (there's a nominal $1/child fee for child care for the con, and parents are asked to sign up in advance, so the organizers know how many child care people are needed).

That's a pretty clear message that yes, parents of small children are welcome, with or without the children. I would guess that if it can be done in Wisconsin it can be done in Georgia.