So the Bay Area Worker Cooperative Conference and Festival was a success. Almost 190 registrants by the time it was done. A 3-day film fest and a weekend-long conference with 20 workshops was an ambitious thing to organize with a volunteer group that started with five of us.
But I like to dwell on the negative. I’m that type of person. I feel like I learned a lot about putting on a conference in an urban location. I have a lot of experience with organizing destination-conferences, but doing something in a city has unique challenges. Like, if it’s boring, people have the choice to leave.
I like thinking big. It’s a problem with the left that no one thinks big enough. But we definitely bit off more than we could chew with this thing and it became obvious a couple weeks ago. So I went into my panic/stress/work-all-the-time mode which is my usual defense mechanism. We pulled it off, but I think every individual part of the conference could have been improved if we had more time to concentrate on it. A one-day conference instead of a two-day one, one night time event instead two, a day of movies or a series NOT on the three days immediately leading up to the main events.
Then again, it would have been helpful to not schedule myself to facilitate two workshops, be a panelist on another, interview an author for a night time event and have my "band" perform at the auction. I have a hard time saying "no" sometimes.
Again, overall it was really good but a couple of things prevented it from being the obvious, momentum-building event I had hoped for. I think the biggest reason was the location. The Women’s Building was great to us. They gave us a nice discount and were the most helpful event hosts I’ve ever met in ten years of sporadically putting on shows and conferences. Having childcare on site was also one of the biggest positive evaluation comments we received, enabling people to participate who wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
But man, that main auditorium is BIG. At the opening introduction, I kept feeling, "No one is here. This is gonna be a disaster." Then I counted the people. 80 people gathered around on 10 AM on Saturday morning to talk about co-ops. That should have been easily recognizable as a victory. If the same number of us had been crammed into a classroom everyone would have been all, "This is so great to see this many people here" instead of "Where is everyone?" It’s a basic organizing rule, but we had forgotten it.
My only Women’s Building complaint is that the Audre Lorde room has horrible acoustics. Like, if someone scoots their chair you miss what is said. Combine that with the murmur of constant simultaneous translation and a workshop can get pretty frustrating and exhausting just from struggling to hear what is said.
Since one can not hold a public event in the Bay Area without wingnuts, we had a good one show up. Luckily he was dealt with what one participant described as a "surgical strike" of facilitation. Evidently, he drove all the way from Sonoma to attend the "Co-ops and Labor Unions" discussion and interrupt with a sermon about the evilness of unions, the atrocity of eating animal flesh, the meaning of
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anarqueso’s shirt, cleansing the world of usurers, and a few other topics. When finally made to stop speaking, the facilitator said, "Do you have an actual question?"
"Do
you have a question?" he replied.
Momentarily stumped, the facilitator said, "Ok, you’ve had your say. You can sit quietly for the rest of the workshop or you can leave."
He got up to leave and said, "Thank you. You’ve been very polite." Obviously he was used to getting thrown out of these things. Maybe it was performance art.
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