Posted by Sari
Drink of the day is Antons äppel cider med lime and jordgubb. Tastes like apple cider with strawberries, you are hard pressed to find the lime notes. Even so, nice and dry. Defenitely a keeper. Jukka agrees with me.
Today I want to talk about Finncon. the Finnish national SF convention. It is an odd bird amongst the convention. Traditionally, in the anglo-american world cons are financed by memberships (and dealers’ room), the big commercial gate shows are finaced by tickets (and dealers’ room). You might even pay extra for certain programme items or photo op with a star. That means that fannish conventions tend to be smaller, and commercial shows bigger. Finncon is on the range of a large fannish con. It has about 2000-5000 individual visitors. However, it is organised by a non-profit and does not cost anything for the visitors. Which makes the financial structure challenging.
Roughly about half the money it takes to put up the con comes from dealers’ room and ad sales, and half from grants from the state or private foundations. And there seems to be an increasing amount of people and events competing from those grants. Every year it is an adventure to see if how the finances pan out.
But even if one would like to take a pass on that particular adventure, organising Finncon is fun. We just had a committee meeting for Finncon 2022 in Espoo, and it reminded me of that fandom is actually pretty wonderful thing. Lets hope Covid-19 eases off and lets us put on a great one in Espoo next summer!
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