Zooming toward Worldcon

[petrea_mitchell]

Despite all my posting about Gen Con, Worldcon does remain my priority for the days it's being held. There just hasn't been much to write about. Yesterday morning, though, I attended a Zoom training session for program participants.

CoNZealand program items will be held in webinar mode, which means the audience will not be able to engage in Zoombombing. There will be both text chat, for the audience to talk among themselves, and a Q&A feature for questions to be submitted to the panel.

The most important piece of information for me as a moderator is that every panel room will have host, separate from the panelists, who will be there to iron out technical difficulties and help block abusive or spammy comments or questions. Given that a Worldcon can have twenty program items going on at the same time, this is a huge commitment of volunteer time, and one I've very grateful that they're making.

For those new to Discord, CoNZealand's programming department has set up its own server for participants to try out.

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

That programming model is approximately what we had in mind to do for Westercon 74 even before the lockdown hit, although it will be easier for us as we only currently plan to have a single track. The tricky part will be that we intend to have a mixed model, with in person attendees in the one room we think we can appropriately equip, with people (including probably panelists) participating through Zoom. I'll be very interested to see how well this works out at Worldcon.

We'd intended to do a track of online program already on account of our site's relative isolation. We also intend to allow supporting members to "attend" those items.