RUNNING A WORLDCON, RUNNING A BILL:

 

 

Things Worldcon-runners should know about Acts of Parliament

(CB)

OK, this is either an analogy that’s going to work naturally or it’s going to look strained from the start. The one key variation it’s worth pointing out from the beginning is that the timeframes are different: with a Bill, the bidding stage typically takes about a year, the ‘running’ stage up to another year, and the ‘event’ stage doesn’t always have a defined stopping point. There are a few bits of the Parliamentary process that I don’t believe have direct analogies in a Worldcon process, and no doubt some aspects of running a Worldcon that I’ve missed out.

But the parallels are both extensive and instructive, and it alarms me that I never noticed this while I was working on a Worldcon and a Bill at the same time(Hint: This is a Bad Idea). I think it’s because I didn’t have sufficient control of either process that I couldn’t see the shape of them; now I’ve had two Bills of my own to take through Parliament, I realise that some very important elements of the work and above all the skills that people need have a lot in common.

 

The people

The following groups of people will all be involved in a Bill and will all think it’s theirs.

Government Ministers – the public face of the project; the ones whose role it is to win the bid, convince both the experts and the public that the Bill’s going to work and that they want it to work in the first place, and the people who have ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the whole thing. They’re also the people who make the big decisions.

Bill Team – a small team of people who manage the project; it’s their responsibility to know everything. They need to know how all the different stages of work on the Bill are progressing, they need to know how Parliament works and what the implications of this is for the overall timetable, they need to know what the other people involved are capable of and how to help them. They’re responsible for the timetable although they don’t control events; they have to anticipate all the eventualities and be prepared. They make decisions about process and about what people need to do. And, since they know everything, they have to make sure everyone else knows everything they need to know, when they need to know it.

Officials – the people who do a lot of the work, and who know the details of the actual policy that the Bill will give effect to. There are a lot of them, including policy experts (from a number of different Government Departments), lawyers, and Parliamentary draftsmen. They’re the ones who work up the options and advice for Ministers so that they can make decisions, who provide the information Ministers need in Parliament, and who are responsible for all the details of the Bill which will make it work in the end – or not. They effectively take decisions on the policy, but they need to persuade Ministers to agree. Many of them don’t get on desperately well with one another and are suspicious of what the others are doing and whether they’re any good at it.

Parliament – the people who need to be convinced that the Bill is going to work in the way that Ministers say it will, and that that’s a good idea in the first place. Some of them will be experts in the subject covered by the Bill. Some of them will be expert in the way that Bills work. Some of them will just think it’s their responsibility to make sure Ministers aren’t doing anything stupid. Some of them will think that everything Ministers do is stupid.

The public – the people who are actually going to be affected by the Bill and for whose benefit it’s actually being taken forward. Different Bills will affect different groups of people, be they employers, children, companies in a particular industry, people working in England, or absolutely every citizen of the UK

So a rough read-across would be:

This won’t hold up at all stages, e.g. in some parts of the bidding stage I’ll describe below. And it doesn’t make a split between the bidding committee and the operational committee, because for a Bill that would create a lot of problems. But bear with me.

One further point: for the sake of argument, you might think of the House of Commons as conrunners and the House of Lords as fanzine fans. This is actually an analogy which works astonishingly well and I could keep myself amused for some time developing it, but I’ll spare you.

 

The process

Bidding

If officials realise that they need legislation, they first have to convince their Ministers to bid for a Bill. They provide sufficient information to make Ministers think they’ve got a good case, and Ministers then argue for it in Cabinet. If the Bill is accepted into the provisional programme (which would happen about a third of the way through this stage), a Bill Team will be set up to manage the project and officials will start work to develop the detail of the Bill. Throughout this stage the Bill Team needs to make sure officials are keeping up with the timetable and to get as much information from them as they can in order to convince Ministers that everything’s on track and that it will all be ready in time.

About two months before the end of the ‘bidding’ stage (i.e. with about five-sixths of this stage completed), Ministers will begin to get serious about the provisional programme to decide what wins and what doesn’t. They’ll make their decision on a range of factors, including:

A great deal of information needs to be provided for Ministers at this final stage, and even more information needs to be provided to Parliament for introduction of the Bill if Ministers decide to go ahead with it. This involves a lot of work in a short space of time by officials and by the Bill Team, and when it’s all over everyone heaves a huge sigh of relief and wants to go off for a long holiday. But they can’t, because now the Bill’s in Parliament.

(This is a point which demonstrates, I think, why splitting the bid committee from the operating committee is a good idea. But the amount of expert knowledge of both policy and process bound up with a Bill means that it is impossible in this case.)

The Bill in Parliament

First of all the Bill needs to go through the House of Commons. The Government has a majority in the House of Commons, so if the Opposition force a vote on any aspect of the Bill the Government would usually expect to win. However, they need to keep all their own supporters on side; some MPs who are on the Government side may find that measures in the Bill would disadvantage their constituents, and will want something changed to take account of that. Some MPs might think that the Bill threatens an aspect of Life As We Know It which is very important to them – they may even think that the Government is betraying its principles. So supporters of the Bill will still need to be convinced that some of the detail is right; and opponents of the Bill will also raise valid arguments which need to be addressed – as well as sometimes trying to wreck it.

Real opponents will be in a minority. Sometimes their opposition comes from a principled objection to what the Government’s trying to do or the way it’s trying to do it. Sometimes it’s just because they’re on the opposite side to the Government and it helps to point out all the ways the Government are in the wrong. Sometimes they, like concerned Government supporters, want to correct things about the Bill that won’t work in practice or that will cause problems for people who shouldn’t otherwise be affected by the Bill.

The point is that they all get the opportunity to argue a lot about whether, when the Bill becomes law, it will work in the way it’s meant to so that the people who are meant to benefit do so, and they have a chance to improve the way it’s working. Behind the scenes, the officials are working away to take account of all the proposed changes and to work out whether the suggested problems are real and whether they need to make more changes to take account of them.

And everyone also needs to bear in mind what the public think. Has the Government convinced them that the Bill’s a good thing? Has something the Opposition have said convinced a lot of members of the public that the Bill’s a bad thing – even if that’s really not true? What needs to be done to keep their support? Sometimes the Bill won’t have been quite ready when it got through the bidding stage and entered Parliament, so officials are trying to get Ministers to fix things in Parliament without making people think that they don’t know what they’re doing and shouldn’t be trusted.

The Bill Team just needs to control all of this… They need to make sure that everything’s ready in time to keep the Bill on track, that no one’s having a nervous breakdown, that everyone’s co-operating who needs to, that things are being done which will be important in three months’ time are being done as well as the things which are really important right now, and that all of the arcane rules and procedures of Parliament are being attended to.

So eventually the Bill emerges from the House of Commons a bit changed, a bit improved, a bit more ready to do what it’s meant to be doing – and then it goes to the House of Lords. The Government doesn’t have a majority in the House of Lords. This is only partly because of party politics; the Conservative Government did have a Lords majority but they still lost votes, because the Lords are strong-minded (or sometimes bloody-minded) and take the whole process of scrutinising Bills very seriously. There are also even more rules and strange procedures in the Lords, and if things aren’t done just right the Government will have lost points before anyone even looks at the Bill.

The Government have to work very hard to convince the Lords that the Bill is not only a good thing in principle but that it really is going to work. They need to talk to them, and write to them, and meet them on their own terms. The Government will have to provide a lot more detail to individual members of the House of Lords than they might in the Commons – and the key thing about the Lords is that they are individuals. So the Government needs to convince their own side, who might otherwise desert them. They need to convince the Opposition that, at the very least, the Bill isn’t going to do a lot of damage to things that the Opposition in the Lords care about. They need to convince the Independent members of the House to support them, many of whom have particular interests and hobby-horses of their own that they want to see included or protected. And these people know how legislation works. Some of them might be a bit past it, but they’ve got major experience in government. They’ll have read all the debates in the Commons, and they’ll have a good idea about the things they think are wrong and that they want to concentrate on.

The House of Lords can easily vote against the Government; they can change major parts of the Bill, and – although the Government can change it back again in the House of Commons – the Lords can seriously affect public opinion and make them question a lot more about the Bill than they would have done otherwise.

Eventually, though, most Bills get through Parliament. And they become Acts of Parliament. And at this stage, everyone involved with the Bill heaves a sigh of relief again, and collapses. But this is actually where the really important stuff starts.

The event

So there you are. All the preparation is done; officials (the staff) have organised things in a way they think will work, Parliament (the fans) have agreed it all, most of the public (potential attendees) are convinced it’s worthwhile and are ready for it to happen, Ministers (the Chairs) have had their reputations changed for ever, one way or another, and the Bill Team (the executive) are exhausted and obscure and largely unthanked. Yeah, guess what my role’s been.

So now you have an Act of Parliament – or a Worldcon – and it’s really going to happen, and that’s what most people care about. The officials know that some of it’s a bit creaky, but it’ll basically work; if they’d known what they were aiming for at the beginning, the legislation would be more elegant and a bit less complicated, but the effects will be the same and very few people will actually notice. The Bill Team remember what a nightmare it was to get this far, but at least it’s done now and, again, very few people will know quite what was going on in the background. And quite a lot of other people are involved now in making it happen, so if a lot of the expertise that’s been developed drifts away as people take a break and decide to do something different now, that doesn’t really matter – does it?

 

So why does any of this matter?

Where I think this analogy becomes important is because of what it says about the people you need to have involved and the skills they need to work effectively without killing themselves or other people.

You need people who can be the public face of your Worldcon, who can present it all intelligently and convincingly (and, one hopes, honestly) and who are in a position of real responsibility so that they can both affect the big decisions and have a feeling of ownership and accountability about making things happen in the way they’re selling it to active fandom and to all the other potential attendees.

You need people who can do all the different aspects of the work that it takes to put the Worldcon on, making sure it fits together and that it actually works on the day. They need to know their own area, and enough about other people’s areas to keep it joined up, and they need to be able to co-operate. They need to be able to concentrate on details. They need to be quite organised, but some of them won’t be. And that doesn’t matter too much because someone else is going to be very organised indeed, and what the staff need to be able to do is to trust that someone else to tell them the truth and help them – and respond accordingly.

So you need people who can manage the project. They need to be able to see the big picture and a lot of the details. They don’t need to be expert in any of the detailed areas of work that are going on, but they need to understand what they are, how they fit together, what the relationships are of the people working on all these things and where the pressure points will come. They need to know what and how much the people right at the top need to know, when to involve them, and how to deliver what they’ve decided is essential. They need to understand not just the deadlines and the milestones in the timetable, but all the dependencies. And they need to be able to communicate all of this in a way which commands respect, and which is reassuring but realistic, and they need to be able to motivate people and sometimes they need to be pretty tough and make themselves unpopular. But not so unpopular that people stop working.

And you need to bear in mind that there are a lot of fans out there who are potential allies, if only you take account of the things that matter to them. They might only be able to help in a limited way; they might only be able to lend public support without working on the con itself. They might, at best, be convinced to be neutral. And some fans are never going to think it’s a good idea, and are certainly never going to help, and they’ll resist it all the way as a matter of principle. Accept it, but don’t dismiss them. Some of what they say will be valid, and some of it will affect wider fannish and public opinion whether it’s valid or not. But this is fandom, and all of this is part of what people are here for.

Think about it?

A few final thoughts:

Another difference between Worldcons and Bills is about people’s motivation to get involved. Everyone involved with a Bill, except the public, get paid to do it. Most people enjoy their involvement with a Bill, but it’s hard work, tiring work, and sometimes profoundly unrewarding work. It does have a lot going for it, though, mostly to do with getting more involved with Parliament and feeling that you’re a part of something which affects you in your own daily life. And that bit might be an analogy to why fans get involved with Worldcons, for some people at least. Nonetheless, when it comes down to it a salary is more of a motivator than fannish zeal, and this doesn’t just apply to motivation. A Worldcon is dependent on volunteers, and it’s harder to manage volunteers. It’s also harder to turn them away, even if they’re not people you’d actually employ if you had more of a choice. So you might not have the best people available for the jobs you need doing. And if you don’t appreciate them or use them effectively, they can leave. And that’s not going to help to attract the people you really want to have involved.

There’s a lot more I could say about that, but not here.

And then there’s the question of whether I’d get involved again, with either a Worldcon or a Bill? In both cases: only if I could define my own role. And the people involved count for a lot too.