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It doesn't seem to matter how every year the exact same issues are brought up at every freakin' Worldcon one after another, each year another team fails to solve the top 3 things any convention should ensure are solid for their attendees. This isn't just bad information sharing, honestly after 30 years of watching every single one of them fail again and again, it just comes down to outright lack of care for the members.
When you attend a convention, what's the top 3 things important to you?
1. Registering
2. Getting to (thing) you want to see
3. Finding food
These are in order they likely occur to you, rather than order of importance as #2 is critical to someone with accessibility constraints for example whereas #3 may matter more to someone with blood sugar issues, etc.
And how often do these problems appear? Well, if you attend the feedback panels at any convention you'll find that more than 90% of the complaints on most non-epic-tragedy years center around these three issues. Furthermore, if you work a table promoting a convention you'll find that these three issues dominate the questions asked of you. In short, you hear it coming and going over and over again how important these issues are.
So how well is Worldcon 75 standing up to the task?
1. Registration
- started a day late
- is apparently missing significant information (per other posts)
- has merged multiple registrations that contain the same name with least privilege winning out
- has no access to the original dataset, and no way to validate original membership confirmations
2. Getting to things. The maps of each level are
- rotated in different directions
- missing intersection of common details (no common staircases exist on both levels of a map)
- have labels with arrows that point opposite direction from where that thing is (do the Fins always walk away from where the arrow is pointing?)
Accessibility is a super-clusterpuff. There's a nice hotel for the accessible attached/merged with the convention center. It's less than 30 steps from the hotel's breakfast area to the registration desk. However, staff has decided to make all of the accessibility-constrained people walk/roll more than 700 steps out to the street and back in the south entrance "to ensure flow"
3. Finding food
OMG. So there is a whole book on finding restaurants. Nice! Well, except that the map uses a 3-point font for names, so it is unreadable EVEN WITH A MAGNIFYING GLASS. Furthermore, the only anchor points on the map are the restaurants, so there's zero ability to find how they relate to your positionn.
Wait, we have technology! We'll use Google Maps and find some common points of reference... So yeah, not a single restaurant with a number on the map is listed in Google Maps, so there's no way to overlay Google Maps so as to find the restaurants listed there.
Some of you are probably going to say "and nobody can fit into the panel rooms, they are overfilled" and yeah that's the same old same old as previous years too. Because god knows, sharing data gathered over the years couldn't possibly be in the member's interest.
When you attend a convention, what's the top 3 things important to you?
1. Registering
2. Getting to (thing) you want to see
3. Finding food
These are in order they likely occur to you, rather than order of importance as #2 is critical to someone with accessibility constraints for example whereas #3 may matter more to someone with blood sugar issues, etc.
And how often do these problems appear? Well, if you attend the feedback panels at any convention you'll find that more than 90% of the complaints on most non-epic-tragedy years center around these three issues. Furthermore, if you work a table promoting a convention you'll find that these three issues dominate the questions asked of you. In short, you hear it coming and going over and over again how important these issues are.
So how well is Worldcon 75 standing up to the task?
1. Registration
- started a day late
- is apparently missing significant information (per other posts)
- has merged multiple registrations that contain the same name with least privilege winning out
- has no access to the original dataset, and no way to validate original membership confirmations
2. Getting to things. The maps of each level are
- rotated in different directions
- missing intersection of common details (no common staircases exist on both levels of a map)
- have labels with arrows that point opposite direction from where that thing is (do the Fins always walk away from where the arrow is pointing?)
Accessibility is a super-clusterpuff. There's a nice hotel for the accessible attached/merged with the convention center. It's less than 30 steps from the hotel's breakfast area to the registration desk. However, staff has decided to make all of the accessibility-constrained people walk/roll more than 700 steps out to the street and back in the south entrance "to ensure flow"
3. Finding food
OMG. So there is a whole book on finding restaurants. Nice! Well, except that the map uses a 3-point font for names, so it is unreadable EVEN WITH A MAGNIFYING GLASS. Furthermore, the only anchor points on the map are the restaurants, so there's zero ability to find how they relate to your positionn.
Wait, we have technology! We'll use Google Maps and find some common points of reference... So yeah, not a single restaurant with a number on the map is listed in Google Maps, so there's no way to overlay Google Maps so as to find the restaurants listed there.
Some of you are probably going to say "and nobody can fit into the panel rooms, they are overfilled" and yeah that's the same old same old as previous years too. Because god knows, sharing data gathered over the years couldn't possibly be in the member's interest.
annoyed