[ST] Arisia '08 Filk Report

[Ellen Kranzer]

Report of the Filk Track - Arisia 2008

Filking went well this year. In general, there seemed to be a slight
increase in participation over last year.  The high point for numbers
at open filking occurred Saturday around 11:30pm when there were
approximately 30 people in the room.

Friday night, open filking ended about 2  am, which is fairly
typical.

Saturday night, open filking ended earlier than usual, with the circle
packing up about 4 am, rather than the usual dawn. This was in part
because of the expanded schedule. Several people commented that the
reason they were stopping when they did was that they wanted to save
their voices so that they had something left for Sunday night. (This
did not necessarily mean that they went to bed any eariler, as several
people headed off to the gaming when the filk broke up.)

Sunday night, open filking ended around 3 or 4 am.

Putting the NESFA Hymnal Sing, which in the past has been on Friday,
on Sunday night worked very well. Attendance was higher than we've
seen in serveral years. Also, this year the hymnal sing was more
successful at serving as a spring board for the open filk than it has
on Friday. Most of the people attending the hymnal sing stuck around
for at least some of the open filking which helped the open filking
get started at a high energy level. 

Filk 101 drew more experienced filkers than newcomers, but is worth
continuing to run since there are new people every year. Since this is
mostly a talk panel sound isolation isn't as critical and it could go
in a smaller room.

Day time theme circles:
I didn't make it to all of them, but from what I did see:

- The pirate theme filk drew several families with kids.  
- The Sea Chanty session seemed to be well-received
- Almost nobody showed up for the Ninja theme circle on Monday. 1pm
Monday is probably not a good time for a filk circle. Many of the
hard-core filkers were out of gas. About 1/2 the people at the
previous hour's filk circle left saying they needed to deal with hotel
checkout.

The coffee and tea setup for open filking was well received and should
continue in the future if the budget allows. Filkers tend to be tea
drinkers and the hot water for tea ran out long before the
coffee. Consider ordering two urns of hot water and one of coffee in
the future. 

There were a few glitches during the weekend, none of which were major:

-- Saturday night, the coffee & tea set up did not arrive. When it was
20 minutes late I contacted the hotel liaison on duty who said he'd
look into it, but I never heard back from him that night.

-- Slightly earlier on Saturday, open filking was forced to start late
because the Masquarade Kids didn't have there stuff out of the room on
time. My understanding is that the underlying problem was a change in
masquarde procedure which resulted in the young fans getting back to
the green room to pick up their stuff later than expected when we
planned out the room use times.

-- I made arrangements to get the NESFA Hymnals to the con. The
original plan was the same as it has been for a number of years. The
person running filk at Boskone (Gary McGath) would pick up the hymnals
from the NESFA clubhouse, deliver them to Arisia, collect them, and
cart them to Boskone. Due to some weather-related issues, I wound up
making the pick rather than Gary. Somewhere along the line, someone
else also made arrangements to make sure that hymnals got from the
NESFA club house to the con. The person who dropped off the 2nd lot of
hymnals wouldn't stop to answer my question about where the box had
come from. Gary wound up taking both boxes of hymnals with him since I
had no idea the 2nd box was expected on the truck back to NESFA. That
caused a certain amount of anxiety and extra work looking for the
"missing" box until a series of emails clarified what happened. Two
things for the future:

1. If you're make arrangements for supplies for a particular activity
make sure the person responsible for that activity knows what's going
on.
2. It's been suggested that it might be easier just to plan include
the loaner hymnals with the rest of the supply pickup/drop off from
the NESFA clubhouse.

-- Ellen Kranzer
   Filk Czar
   Arisia '08