The Turku International Book Fair was this weekend and, as usual, much
of it was spent meeting friends and talking about different
fandom-related things.

The Turku science fiction societies’ display booth (it used to be the
“Finnish science fiction” booth, but this year just the local societies
were invited) looked very nice. It was at a new location (in the hall
with the second-hand book stores, where it felt, at least to me, more
at home than in the big hall with the publishers, book stores, etc.)
and very well organized. There weren’t too many things there so
everything was on display where you could actually read the info
posters and browse the products. And the sofa plus table were great,
creating a cozy space to sit down for a moment, rest, and talk to
people.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent so little time browsing the book stores
as this year (I mainly grabbed a few small press books here and there
and skipped the rest), but there seemed to be so much to do on the one
day I spent at the fair this year, and I kept bumping into people I
knew and stopping for a chat. This year I was also involved in one
program item: a panel discussion about the future of books I put
together. We discussed mainly e-books and their impact on writing,
publishing, and reading books. The discussion went very well and we had
a few positive comments from the audience afterwards. There was also
considerable interest in the e-book readers we bought with us: after
the discussion many people came to see and try them out and ask many
questions.

The book fair always brings friends from across the country to Turku,
and this year was no exception. Suffice it to say that Thursday,
Friday, and Saturday nights were spent eating well, smoffing (hopefully
something concrete will follow in the near future), and drinking bheer.
Thanks everybody for the great company, you know who you are!

A meeting of the Finncon association was held on Saturday, where the
agenda was to iron out some bugs found in the association’s rules and
make some modifications to accommodate things that were discovered not
to work so well. I think we have it now; there will be a second meeting
in December where the new rules will (hopefully) be ratified.

On Saturday there was a big town hall–style meeting about the future of
the different sf societies in Turku. Three societies were represented:
TSFS, The Turku University sf club, and the Finnish Science Fiction
Writers Association. The societies have a problem with active members:
too few people are doing too much, and they are getting burnt out.
There were many members of the active fandom from Turku and other
cities too, and I think a lot of good discussion was had.

In my opinion it seemed the local societies had realized the problem
very well and had quite rational a perspective on it—a lot of the time
it seemed others were commenting and suggesting things the actives
themselves already knew to be true. But perhaps it sometimes helps to
have somebody “from the outside” say things out loud.

Maybe the biggest issue that was singled out was that quite a few
people were active in many societies at the same time. It is of course
always easiest to recruit new people from friends that are already
active, but this creates two problems that were discussed: first, if
you’re active in two or three societies, it often means you’re able to
only give half or one third to those activities each, thus lessening
the amount of actives they have (providing that a replacement could
have been found to take care of some of the tasks). Admittedly, one
third of a very active person’s effort can be a lot, but even in those
cases the years tend to add up and the person might gafiate a lot
sooner because all the activities just require too much time and
energy. The second problem is that when different societies are doing
projects together, if you have a few people who are active in all of
them, there’s a danger that they will just try to work things out
between themselves and forget to tell the others, thus accidentally
shutting out even those who are active in only one society.

One of the things many people pointed out was that since this was a
meeting of the Turku societies, the FSFWA shouldn’t have been there in
the first place since it is supposed to be a national association. In
recent years, it has gravitated more and more towards Turku, found new
actives there and organized a lot of events, but at some cost of
activities elsewhere. It was recommended that for the next year the
association will concentrate on extending its reach outside Turku and
finding actives in other cities. That would make it easier to function
on the national level and also would tax less the people in Turku. A
very good first sign of this is that the association’s meeting where
next year’s things will be decided will be held outside of Turku
(October 24 in Helsinki).

The role of different societies (besides FSFWA) was also discussed and
I think there were many good points about each finding their own focus
and concentrating better on it. You can still do cooperation where
advantageous, of course, but by finding “your own thing” the different
societies might better attract different kinds of people to their ranks.

A lot was talked about communication and distribution of information.
This seems to be one of the biggest problems with the societies. People
hang out together and talk about stuff, but they are lacking official
channels and information isn’t forwarded to all people (this is
something that has also popped out in conversation several times
earlier, even concerning communication within the board of one society,
not just between different societies). I hope the actives found at
least some suggestions useful and are able to do something about
this—they seemed very aware of the problem, so the will to fix it will
hopefully also be found.

Another part of communication that was criticized (and rightly so) by
the “ordinary” members was informing the members and the public about
the dealings of the societies. There isn’t a lot of information about
what the board members are doing, and the e-mail lists are too silent.
(A good example was the starting time of the meeting: it apparently was
changed in face-to-face planning between local people, but nobody else
planning to attend wasn’t informed until the new time almost by
accident came up in e-mail conversation a couple of days earlier.) This
is something I’ve seen also on the Finncon 2011 planning list: there is
virtually no traffic there so if you don’t hang out at the club house
it’s very difficult to participate. There was talk about some upcoming
fancy information portal, but what it will be and when it will
materialize remains to be seen. In the meantime, it was suggested the
e-mail lists be used more, but this is one of the things I don’t think
very likely to happen.

All in all I think the meeting was productive. One of the biggest fears
beforehand, that there won’t be enough people to form the boards of all
the societies next year, was in my opinion alleviated effectively:
there seemed to be some interest in the matter and I don’t think this
will be a big problem if the current boards don’t shut out the people
willing to participate. And besides, the TSFS “emergency plan B” didn’t
actually sound half bad—something along those lines should perhaps be
considered for promoting into part of a working plan A. It even
generated some outside interest of participation after the meeting.

I think calling together this open meeting to discuss things was an
excellent idea. The critical next step is to think hard about all that
was said and be prepared to actually effect change, even if it means
doing things a bit differently from what comes naturally to you. I
really hope we will see this happen!

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Posted By Tero to Partial Recall at 10/05/2009 09:28:00 PM