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Featured Article - Communications

Effective Internal and External Communications is critical to a smooth running convention operation.

To the Membership

Most communications to the membership will be written, in the form of Progress Reports and websites pre-con or daily newsletters at the Con.

As technology progresses, many cons have begun to use blogs, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, and other such social-networking and -communications services both for pre-con and during-con membership communications: Twitter can be especially useful for this, as you can define an at-con twitter address (@Necro09-Announce), and recommend that members device-follow it (joining up if necessary), which allows you to announce major changes to a statistically signification fraction of your attending membership directly and quite quickly - the messages will be delivered by SMS directly to members' cell phones.

Among Staff

In addition to progress reports and newsletters, the staff will probably need more immediate and interactive forms of communication. Email, restricted access websites, and good old telephone communication work well pre-con. Make a phone list to call the person(s) you need to reach, or set up a phone tree to broadcast a message to everyone in the staff.

Bulletin Boards, literally a piece of paper hung on a cork backboard with a thumbtack, might work for passing messages at-con. Erwin "Filthy Pierre" Strauss is famous for bringing the Voodoo Message Board to Worldcons and some regionals for general attendee use, but chances are you'll want a more sophisticated approach for staff. A central messages desk might work. Put it in a secure place, away from member access.

Handheld radios, or cell phones with person to person modes might work well too. Be sure to check coverage, clarity, signal strength and restrictions before you commit to a solution.

Remember, you never want a disaster. More important, you especially never want to explain a disaster by saying, "I couldn't reach ..."

Central Dispatch

One particular tactic that might be useful for operational communications, whether you have radios or phones, is to have a centralized dispatcher -- usually located in your ops facility -- with the complete list of contact phone numbers sorted both by position and name. This list can include numbers which will generally actually be used by various interface coordinators like security and logistics, at your discretion; if you do so, you should probably set a policy as to when dispatch should call outside the con directly.

If you have someone in this position who has some experience in the job, this can be a *very* effective method of communications, as it relieves everyone in the field of such things as "they were on the phone"; "couldn't get through"; "didn't know who to call", etc, etc, and the dispatcher can answer the top 10 FAQs without having to refer the call.

If possible, this person should have a couple of house phones available, or a multiline phone -- preferably hunting off the same phone number, which is a public direct-inward-dial -- as well as a log book to note down who's called, who and or what they needed, and whether the message has been delivered or not. (If you can computerize this, so much the better.)

If they have SMS and email connectivity at their position, so much the better. It may not seem economical to tie down an entire body for this job, but the benefits generally outweigh the costs.

Tools for committee collaboration

• Discord
  • chat system widely used by conventions
  • Threads possible
  • Searching
  • Multiple servers on one screen encourages more visits

• Zoom
  • Market leading video chat
  • Screensharing
  • Breakout rooms (paid feature)
  • text side channel

• Google Docs
  • Useful for sharing files, collaborative editing
  • Text files
  • Spreadsheets

• Google Forms for forms/polls
• Microsoft Teams for video chat
• Slack for text chat
• Groups.io for mailing lists

• Dedicated web servers
  • if you have the resources to host your own site, with collaboration features, go for it.
  • Content management systems (such as Drupal)
  • Ticketing systems (such as RT)

• Wikis
  • Mediawiki, as used by this site.
    • can make site invisible to those not logged in, except a few named pages
    • Easy to self host, but many companies offer paid hosting, or insert ads
  • There are many other wiki systems, all with good features, but different enough from mediawiki to trip people up

FRS Radios

About Family Radio Service radios in general: [1]

FRS radios are a must for con staff. They can often be purchased or rented by the con at discount from professional communications companies, if done in bulk. Within a broad range of circumstances, they are all inter-operable among brands and type. Advise your staff of the virtues of the units for everyday life. A good set of dual radios with a recharging station is a must for the modern family. They can talk to the kids in the neighborhood, or use them for road trips and camping. Also they can bring them to the convention when they volunteer. Practice is essential, so think up excuses to use them in preliminary sessions. Advise your staff what frequency you will be using before they travel, so that they can be "live" the moment they hit the perimeter, without having to wait to talk to you to get a radio on the right circuit.

So called Privacy Codes are a misnomer. They do not keep your conversation private or secret. They prevent you from being interrupted by the conversations of others. Everyone else can hear you just fine if you use the codes. But you can't hear them if they don't use your codes. Codes are not universally supported. If all your staff's radios supports the same codes, the you can use them to filter out the non-members who may snoop and barge in on your frequency.

Most radios will display their frequency and code to anyone who chooses to look carefully. Trying to keep them secret from non-staff is a pointless exercise, but if you must, you could tape over the relevant portion of the display. However most good radios have a scan function and anyone can soon discover your frequency.

Most good FRS radios usually come in dual sets with a combined charging station. However they are vulnerable to wall wart crowding as anticipated in Logistics#Power Requirements

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. Or a department may split, as the needs of the convention grow. Do what works for you, and recruit reliable department heads. Create, publish, and maintain a clear set of objectives and methods to document continuity of what works, what doesn't, and why. Check on the senior staff regularly to make sure they're getting whatever support they need from you and the rest of the committee, pre-con and at-con. Department heads then recruit what staff and at-con volunteers they need to accomplish the goals of the department.

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:

You can easily see how Volunteers might also go under Operations, 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.