Welcome to the Friends of Eastercon website. This website exists to provide an on-line forum for discussion of the future of Eastercons. We hope that you will find the information and links you need to join us in the conversation. We would welcome your input, and this website provides a permanent site with options for posting your views and emailing us.
Follycon was a great success, but there was no bid for 2020 to vote on because the Manchester bid had to fold. A scratch bid, to hold the event in the Birmingham NEC Metropole (site of Innominate in 2017) as Concentric2020 had formed but felt it was too soon to present a formal bid, so they will be planning a one year bid for Ytterbium next year.
Pat ably provided a very brief FOE update, and got no questions, so what little we are doing must be right!
The survey we did a couple of years back wasn’t the first of Eastercon members, I’ve unearthed another one preserved at the Internet archive http://www.cooky.demon.co.uk/survey/* which was done by Kathy and Ian Taylor at Evolution, the 1996 Eastercon.
The Mancunicon team have decided to not bid for the 2020 Eastercon at Follycon in Harrogate, so currently there are no bids for the convention at all. Gulp!
As all we’ve done this year is move the eastercon wiki to a new hosting service, and have no particular plan to communicate, I don’t think we need a slot in the programme and take up people’s time. We might have an informal meeting in the bar.
John
Caroline, Steve, Judy and Tim are stepping back from their roles in Eastercon Options, as they all have Eastercons to plan. Pat McMurray, Chris O’Shea and John Bray are stepping up to the plate, and thank them for their hard work.
We have moved the Eastercon wiki from Alex’s machine to wikia, http://www.eastercon.org redirects to http://eastercon.wikia.com. Thanks to Alex for his efforts supporting the site for all these years.
We plan to rename “Eastercon Options” to be “Friends of Eastercon”, as discussed at the Innominate panel. The aim is still to provide support to Eastercon like all friends groups do, there is no power grab, as we have no power nor money at present. More on this to come
We are changing the way we work as we split into three groups to do three different things. Emails will be going out shortly to people who have previously volunteered to see what they might like to get involved with. If you were thinking of joining in over the next year or so, now would be a good time to get in touch.
The Future of Eastercon group will continue meeting, and will be responsible for reporting on what we do via the internet and at future Eastercons.
The Eastercon Support group will research and discuss options for setting up an organisation to support Eastercons. Note: We do not assume that an organisation is necessary or desirable, and options will include ‘do nothing and let Eastercon committees get on with it’. We expect this group to be busy from July until shortly after Eastercon 2017, but it will be a one-off project.
The Eastercon.org group is taking responsibility for the existing Eastercon.org wiki as a permanent resource for UK fandom.
We will continue to post updates to this site, which also has the background and history of this discussion, and any more permanent material we produce. We also now have a Future of Eastercons Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/FutureOfEastercons – if you are a Facebook user please go and ‘Like’ this to be kept informed or get in touch.
We expect to soon publish an anonymized version of the responses to the questionnaire. Unfortunately this has meant a few responses have had to be removed where we felt that they identified individuals and could not be edited in such a way as to prevent this.
