C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

“I'm driving back from NOTACON, and it's gonna another couple of hours that I'll be on the road. My MP3 audio player has run out of power, so I'm looking for somebody to talk to. Call me at # if you'd like to chat. It was a good weekend, although whenever I'm in a new environment with a lot of people who I don't yet know, and I'm not on my own home territory where I can be introducing them to all of my friends, I feel like it's more of an investment in future enjoyment and community building, rather than an immediate reward in getting to see my friends here and now.

And this was definitely a case of that. Clearly this is a community at NOTACON of hackers and makers and technology artists that I feel like I belong with. Clearly. And the nice thing is that several of the people who I met actually live within a frisbee-tossing distance of me, or somewhere in southeast Michigan. So it would be cool if in the future I could find a way to hang out with them. But actually the people who live in Cleveland, I was disappointed to discover that most of the NOTACON planning meetings actually take place over Internet Relay Chat. Which is highly efficient but doesn't really create community integration the way face-to-face convention committee meetings do. Not that that's wrong, or that they should change the way they work, but that it just isn't going to work out the way I'd hoped to go and build some more ties in the Cleveland area.

'Cause these people have got it going on. They've got a bunch of things that Penguicon has previously done fairly well but not really super-spectacular, but that they know how to do really, really well. And I'd really just love to have some kind of collaboration. I talked with a couple of staff members about the possibility of maybe when each of us closes off our programming block to take the volunteers for presenters that we continue to get after the deadline and pass them off to the other convention to see if they'd like to use them. So I think that could be a useful form of collaboration.

And also I'm really glad that I changed the weekend for Penguicon 2009 to May 1 through 3, to get farther away from the NOTACON date. Because as I expected, a lot of people said that they just couldn't attend two conventions that closely tight in a row, because money would be too tight.

Altogether, an enjoyable weekend. I'm glad that I went to NOTACON specifically to sit at the Penguicon booth and have everybody walk by and come up and talk to me. Like putting a big sign on yourself that says "Hi, I don't know anybody, talk to me", which I love to do, and it was very enjoyable.

Thanks to all the NOTACON organizers who were just so cool and put on an event that was so effective. And I'm looking forward to seeing some of them at Penguicon in a couple of weeks.”

matt_arnold