The con committee will be meeting shortly to review our accomodation and facility options and at that point we will be ready to announce the date shortly thereafter. Right now, our best options are in San Francisco and Berzerkly, with San Jose, CA, being a dark horse candidate.
Program and food wise, though, we would like your input. Whether you are definitely planning on attending this summer, or just musing about it, please fill out this survey so that the committee will be able to focus on what you would like to see.
If there is anything that you would like to tell me about that is not covered by the survey, please feel free to send me a personal message and I will make sure the info gets reviewed by the planning and program team.
If you were a past participant and have already filled out a similar survey, don't worry about this survey, it will just double-count some results.
A couple of people have already asked, so I'll just post here:
In terms of major planning jobs, the postions are filled. All help is appreciated and welcome, but task leaders have been chosen and are already working. There are some discrete tasks that need to be done, but won't be needed until the February or March timeframe.
For those who would like to take on the role of a story guide, please do contact me through personal message. Generally, the time blocks are 2 hours, 4 1/2 hours, and 9 hours. Please include a direct e-mail address, minimum and maximum number of players, and whether the session can accomodate inexperienced players or whether special experience/knowledge is required (for example, "one player should have a strong knowledge of canonical Criamon Mysteries").
Just a quick aside - the UK Grand Tribunal 3 will be taking place next year in Cambridge, UK on the weekend July 31st to August 2nd 2009. It's a "thread" within the larger convention Constitution, rather than a stand alone event as in previous years. I'm taking a maybe deserved break from organizing, and it will be nice ot be somewhere other than my home town which has hosted the two previous GT's.
Full details from Pitt Murmann's excellent wiki here, in as far as they are known at the present moment. gt09.ekkaia.org/page/About
If anyone signs up for Constitution in order to attend Grand Tribunal 2009, please add your name to the relevant page on the wiki, or email me to do it for you.
Dates: 31 JUL -- 2 AUG
Location: Courtyard Marriot San francisco Airport
We will be launching a webpage shortly with all key information, downloads, programming, and swag as well as payment and reservation links as soon as we confirm pricing with caterers.
As a note on the dates, we were not able to get a different weekend since we did not want to go up against ComicCon the previous weekend and other weekends had some "local" obstacles. For those that wanted to attend both the UK con and this one, I am sorry but it wont work out this year.
For those looking for a repeat of Berkely, we decided to go elsewhere. We made many attempts to work with them, but they gave us the "slow no" and since we wanted to put together a good program AND stay within the pricing guidelines that we received through the surveys, we had to go somewhere else.
Many thanks to Erik D for providing the coaching and perspective.
Also, and most especially, many thanks to Toshi C for some truly spectacular research and negotiating. When it became clear that Berkely was unwilling to work with us, she spent a lot of time looking into an overwhelming array of options and all of them hopelessly overpriced and she somehow got us a really outstanding deal for the space and location.
She also has the task of negotiating for the food and just based on the preliminaries we've discussed, I think attendees will be very pleased.
Will update this space as soon as the website is ready for launch.
