post-BiCon, etc

[memevector]

Well that was BiCon that was. In a way I feel like I've only just surfaced from it. Started an impressive cold the day after I got back - sore throat, coughing so much I could hardly speak, etc. - which I'm still not completely over. Today's the first day I've been swimming since then.

The BiCon flavour was extended for me the following week by Nottingham Pride, so my "get ready for BiCon" segued neatly into "get ready for Pride". And then after that it probably still took me another week to finish unpacking from BiCon (though that's hardly a record :-) ).


One of the themes of this week has been transferring the Uncharted Worlds web site onto 36's server.

<complaint>
It's been hosted by DomainCity (aka DesignWeb) for the last three years. DomainCity used to be excellent, but I have very little faith in them now. Email that's forwarded via them has been unreliable for the last few months (on apparently random occasions bouncing back to sender claiming I don't exist, a particularly annoying kind of error), and I haven't had any experience of them taking the problem seriously, or even apologising. There's always some reason why it wasn't their fault or it was a rare and unlikely to be repeated occurrence, but it's funny how I've never heard of anyone having the same problem with any of the mail coming direct to my Demon account. So then I wrote DomainCity an email to express my concerns about their service, and didn't get an answer to that at all.

Plus the site itself has been behaving oddly since before BiCon - what it's been serving is some obsolete cache copy and not what I can see via FTP that I've actually uploaded!
</complaint>

So I'm very happy to be moving the site. Loads of thanks to 36.

Not exactly to my surprise, the transfer of the site is not proving entirely smooth either, so if it behaves oddly or disappears in the next few days, don't worry - should be fine again shortly. If you get email bounces and need to contact me, use memevector at material dot demon dot co dot uk (or any other material demon addresses you might already have), which will be unaffected.


Now some BiCon reminiscences...

If I had to describe my BiCon in one word it would be "non-stop". (Well OK that's two words hyphenated together.) Every now and again I'd think to myself "Maybe I'll head back to my room now and get some time out" and then someone would walk past and I'd be like "But there's someone I wanted to talk to" :-) I think at most BiCons I've spent at least some time reading or listening to music, but this time I was hardly ever in my room except to sleep, shower or change clothes. So this one was very satisfying but also very exhausting. By late Sunday night I was getting that faint "the floor is going up and down" thing which I only get when I'm really tired.

I'd also say it had an unusually activist flavour even for me - a lot of the conversations were about plans for possible future things.

One high point was definitely the conversation with "the Diva woman" (Louise). I do have the go-ahead from her now to write something for the magazine and so does gemoon. Yay!

That came out of the blue, but fits something I've been thinking about a lot recently: how to get more overlap between activism and paid work. (The badges were one step in that direction, although they take a lot of time to make and manage so they're still partly a labour of love.) I'm self-employed so it's rather temptingly easy to spend less time on work and more on activism, but then I end up skint! So the obvious elegant solution is to look for more things which can be both.

The article I'm thinking of writing first for Diva is about partnerships between lesbians and bi-women, and the whole territory around that of being in the two communities. So any lesbian/bi couples (or people who've been in such in the past) who'd like to have their say on that, let me know :-)

My first idea was one on coming out as bi from having identified as lesbian, and I know several people who could have waxed eloquent on that subject ::grins:: but Louise says they've covered that too recently to do again just now.

Very pleased that the Special Needs Guidelines got voted in OK. A lot of my attention during the run-up had been on that. I've got this little project on at the moment to cease fantasising unrealistically about how long things take, and it was one of my sample items that I was timing to acquire realistic data, and my timer program tells me I spent about 30 hours on it in the three weeks before BiCon. That was mostly on turning baratron's original essay into checklists and making it into HTML. Although since then, 36 and I started talking about automating some of the formatting, so some of what I did then may not last :-)

I was also satisfied with the outcome of my BiCon stirrings-up on the anti-racism & cultural difference front. Had some interesting conversations with plumsbitch and others, and I feel pretty confident now that we'll come up with some cool contributions to the programme for next year. Anyone else who wants to play, let me know. More on that in the fullness of time.

Having slept in on the Monday morning of BiCon, I went to the last part of lovingboth's workshop on the bi phone line, and I've written something about how I think that might go forward. (It's not that I'm planning to take on running it - what I've written is kind of a summary for general consideration, which may or may not prove useful in future discussions.) I plan to stick that bit of writing up on the web as soon as my web site's reliable again.

Aside from all my activist excitements at BiCon... Went to both of 36's Plurality workshops and found both very interesting. Most of the theory I knew already, from previous conversations with 36 and stuff I've seen on the net, but it was fascinating to hear the wide range of personal experiences that the participants described.

Would have liked to spend a bit more time at BiCon with ippola and with Sarah C, but it didn't happen. (Though I've since spoken to both on the phone, as we so often do.) Did have an interesting conversation with artremis, whom I'd seen around on the net but hadn't met before in person - looking forward to hanging out more another time.


So... much credit and thanks to the BiCon team for their immense and often innovative efforts!

Tip of the hat to djm4 for the quality of the workshop timetabling information. The "on the wall timetable" was the best I've seen - in particular, the idea of including the descriptions there, which is very very useful when you haven't quite decided which to go to next. A3 timetable/map plus A5 programme is another "best of breed" i.m.o. Having biogs of session leaders in the programme has been done before, but not always, and I strongly favour it. (The nature of a workshop depends at least as much on who's leading it as on the nominal topic.) And the idea of having the next few session names listed by the doors of the workshop rooms was a wizard wheeze. I really hope djm4's up for writing down a full account of all that for future teams to draw upon.

I hope the "plenary proposals must come from a workshop session" rule is kept for future BiCons as well. I don't think it entirely compensated for not having a proper decision-making plenary separate from the closing ceremony, but as I've said before, i.m.o. working through the details of proposals beforehand is definitely the way to go.

Thanks to vicki_t_veg for battling the forces of entropy to acquire the wheelchair for 36.

Shower/loo podules were indeed super-cool, and I thought the rooms and facilities in general were pretty good, except for those bizarre high beds in the so-called accessible rooms.

Personally I really appreciated having the bar be non-smoking. I don't think the ents room layout was perfect, because I'd have liked non-smoking quiet space, but I think it was a good compromise given what was available.


Nottingham Pride was good too, but I don't think I'll write about it right now. Off to London tomorrow for the Civil Partnerships meeting. While I've been writing this I've also been printing out notes for that.

Comments

[mankylarry.livejournal.com]

How was the meeting on the Civic Partnerships

Laurence