Departments

There is no One True Way to organize your committee into departments. Often times a convention will run for a few years one way, and then combine departments that share a lot of the same resources or purpose into a single department. See what works for you, but do recruit reliable department heads. Make sure they have the same notion of the purpose of what they're doing that you do, and check on them regularly to make sure they're getting whatever support they need from you and the rest of the committee. Department heads then recruit what staff and at-con volunteers they need to accomplish the goals of the department.

If you can, have your department heads document the procedures of running their department, and train people under them so that you have a pool of people ready to be future department heads, and you are capturing knowledge from one year to the next.

A common way to split a science fiction convention into departments is like so:

• Guest Liaisons

• Programming
  • (Often programming has sub-genres, such as kids' programming, lit, media, film, science, filk, art, gaming.)
  • Program Operations

• Events
  • Masquerade
  • Concerts
  • Dance

• Art Show and Auction

• Dealers (Hucksters) Room

• Operations
  • Information
  • Transportation / logistics
  • Security / Emergency response

• Registration

• Hospitality
  • Green Room
  • ConSuite

• Publications
  • Website
  • Progress Reports
  • Program Book, Pocket Program, etc.
  • At-con newsletter

• Publicity

• Volunteers

You can easily see how Volunteers might also go under Operations, Registration under Hospitality, Masquerade and Dance under Programming, etc. A small enough convention may not have a person dedicated to publicity separate from their publications head, or an information desk, or whatever. And of course, some conventions don't have Art Shows, or Charity Auctions, or whatever. Try to pick a structure that best supports what you do and how you want to do it.