"I like to see dat."

kestrell & I went to the doctor the other day. At one point, she had to get some lab work done, so we were hanging around in the waiting room for a while. I don't remember what we were doing or saying; nothing out of the ordinary. But after a while, a nurse came by who needed me to take care of some paperwork, so I got up and left Kes to wait by herself for a bit.

Later, she told me that, just after I had left, a woman with a Caribbean accent had leaned over to talk to her.

"'Dat your husband?"
"Yes."
"He *love* you. I like to see dat."

So now we have some new catch-phrases around the house :-)

Convention theory

Fascinating discussion going on over here about convention structure in general, and Readercon in specific. Lots of talk about what various types of panel structures either encourage or discourage. I asked a question asking for more data that started a sub-thread.

"discouraging small or individual book conversations among people who are not panelists"

I am not aware of any convention that has mechanisms in place to encourage such conversations, nor do I have any clear notion what such mechanisms might be. I'd be interested in having this ignorance corrected, if you know of any examples.

A bunch of examples were provided, though none of them seemed close enough for me to easily check them out.

The more I think about this, though, the more I realize that my problems with various panels don't *seem* (to me) to have anything to do with structure.

When I go to a panel, I want to hear interesting, non-annoying people talk. "Interesting" can include any of the following: Informative, Witty, Insightful. Conversely, "Annoying" includes things like: Pompous, Sexist, Self-absorbed. Qualities like Rambling and Off-Topic can be positive or negative, depending on what other qualities they are paired with.

The problem, then, is to give the Interesting people lots of time to speak, while squelching the Annoying ones. Unfortunately, 'being on a panel' is only weakly correlated with this divide. Someone on a panel is *slightly* more likely to be interesting, whereas an audience member is *slightly* more likely to be annoying -- but there have been plenty of times when an audience member proved more interesting than a panelist. Indeed, it was the feeling that *I* was more interesting than some panelists that prompted me to start being a panelist at Arisia.

The one significant thing on the panelists' side (to me, as a consumer) is that I can (eventually) have some advance knowledge of what they are likely to be like. I know that any panel with at least two of Greer Gilman, Faye Ringel, and Sonya Taafe (sp?), is going to be entertaining. I have identified a few people who (naming no names) will reliably piss me off if I attend a panel they are on. Audience members, on the other hand, are catch-as-catch-can.

Is there any structural way to promote Interest, and reduce Annoyance? I can't think of one off hand. Strong moderation is one approach, but that can fail drastically when the moderator himself turns out to be Annoying. Further discussion welcomed.