"Hello, Concom Member"

Rev. 10-Jul-2000

Chaz Boston Baden/Erik V. Olson, webmaster@chicon.org

This page is of interest to members of the convention committee, including Division and Department Heads, and anyone else working in a staff position of some kind. If this doesn't apply to you, please move along, there's nothing to see here.

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HQ/OPS

To all Chicon Dept. Heads-

I will be heading HQ/OPS again and am seeking your input. Per past Chicon practice HQ/OPs will be a clearing house for problems, channeling them to the respective departments. As we have all experienced at past cons there will arise instances where for some reason OPS will need to handle some problem for you. It may be due to temporary unavailability of relevant personnel or simply time constraints. For those times and to better aid you I am asking for your inputs as to guidelines, general facts to take into account, or anything you can think of that will help my people handle things as close to the way you would as possible. I have experienced people willing to help you as needed and am seeking the best information I can get to aid them in doing that job.

Any information gleaned will be on file at the con so if con reality does not match preplanning you can update as needed. We will also as usual be keeping an event log so you can reference it if needed.

Jim Green HQ/OPS

Some information about www.chicon.org and your department.

Writing Articles about your Department

There are basically two ways to get information on your department onto the website.

Write an article, send it into Publications, so they can put information in the next Progress Report. When the Progress Report comes out, I'll copy the information from the PR and put it on the web page.
Or, you can send me a copy of your information at the same time you send it into Publications, or whenever you are ready (or, that is, the convention is ready) to announce it.

And, in either event, if what we have online is incorrect or out of date, you can always send me more information or corrections for the web site and I'll make the revisions.

If you've had something printed in a PR already, you should probably check out the website's Table of Contents to see where it turned up on the website. (If you don't see a heading that makes sense for your department, there's a keyword-search option at the bottom of the page.)

The Infobot News

We have an announcement list (CHICON-NEWS) called the Infobot News, which comes out intermittently; when we get closer to the convention it'll come out every week. About 25% of our members subscribe to this e-mail list. Anything you send to me to put on the web page will also be sent out to the mailing list, unless you tell me otherwise.

Special Forms

Suppose you have a special form of some kind, such as a ballot or a sign-up form, and you want it reproduced exactly. I'd like to have those on the website as PDF files, so that anyone with the Adobe Acrobat Reader [www] can print it out and have it look just like you want it. (Of course, if they fax it back to you, it'll wind up kind of grainy anyway, but at least it'll start out legible.)

If you don't have the capability of outputting a PDF file, then just send me the document as an attachment and I'll take care of it. Any sort of registration form, voting form, or reservation form that we produce, I'd like to have in PDF form.

I can also put a fill-in form on the web site, like our Change of Address Form. This way, a fan can fill in the form from their web browser, and their information will be e-mailed to you. If you'd like something like this, let me know. (If you have some sort of paper form that gets printed in the Progress Report, please let me know whether it's okay to convert it to a web page.)

Staff Listings

We have a Staff and Committee Roster online. I'd like it to be accurate. If you could take a moment to check over how your department looks and make sure it's all right, I'd really appreciate it. Please send me e-mail if you find anyone missing, misspelled, or otherwise misfiled. If you have a very large department, I can easily list your helpers on the page that talks about your department, instead of or in addition to the Staff and Committee Roster.

Convention E-mail Addresses

I've set up an E-mail Directory for the convention. The way it works is fairly simple. E-mail addressed to so-and-so@chicon.org is automatically forwarded to so-and-so's "real" e-mail address. This means that we can give out a "chicon.org" e-mail address, and if you change your address before the convention starts we only have to update the database, instead of having to issue a bunch of updates to everyone who reads the progress reports.

It also means, when in full operation, that if you want to send e-mail to Chaz Baden, for example, all you have to do is spell the name correctly with a period to splice the first and last together, and voila - chaz.baden@chicon.org will work just fine to send me e-mail. This means if someone's working for the convention, you don't have to look up their e-mail address - just spell their name correctly and you can send it via our e-mail system.

Now, there's also departmental e-mail addresses. Suppose that you're in charge of gaming, just for example. I can set up the address gaming@chicon.org and then e-mail about Gaming at Chicon 2000 will go to you. Or, to you and your assistant, if you desire it set up that way. (Your own little departmental mailing list or "exploder.") Then, if you have to give up Gaming down the line (because you've lost interest in games, or have been transfered to Jakarta, or something), we can reassign the e-mail alias to whoever takes over. As an example, webmaster@chicon.org is another valid e-mail address for myself.

I'd like to urge everyone to give out their chicon.org e-mail address whenever they need to mention receiving e-mail about the convention.

Special Needs: If you'd like your e-mail address to automatically reply with a canned message, as well as forward the e-mail to you, please let me know. I've done it before, so I know it's feasible.

E-mail printouts?

If you get something in the mail that looks like it's a copy of something you already received via e-mail, it probably is, and if so it may be safely discarded.

All the e-mail that goes through the web form is copied to an archive file here. If the e-mail was misaddressed, for example if your department or name was misspelled (for example: webmister@chicon.org), we'll attempt to figure out who it was meant for, and send it along. We might do this via the U.S. Mail. Also, from time to time I'll go through the archives and mail out printed copies of what's in there; this is a failsafe mechanism, because e-mail can be unreliable. (The archived copy here is filed by the CGI script before it's sent out into the e-mail stream.)

See also:

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