I'm considering whether to go to another WorldCon here in the next couple of years... DC looks like the best match thus far (plus the opportunity for a pilgrimage to see The Gray Lady in her recently restored condition at the Smithsonian).
Your experience maps reasonably well to mine, although we got to have ours at the Colorado Convention Center (which was actually much larger than the con could fully use, and a little better laid out for what they did use), and I didn't talk to quite as many people - a combination of me not being a bar fly, the Convention Center not having a "bar" as such (unless you count the coffee kiosk seating area), and that, socially speaking, pre-gender-transition me was shy as fuck.
I think the professionalism effectively displayed is a combination of factors; there are people working it from year to year, every year, many of them with ties to the various industries (for instance, I know writer Alex Acks has been at the past few business meetings, they liveblog it over on their Wordpress page), many of the others working are from the local convention staff scene, and the awards process that tends to help boost careers in various manners.
The slating thing was something of an anomaly (although when it started, it looked like it might have really been a more serious problem than it turned out to be), and there's been things put in place since it was first attempted that help reduce it's impact by making it much harder than before to completely replace the whole field with a slate, although the votership has shown that merely slating the nominees isn't really enough, you then have to get enough people to then buy supporting memberships to drive the slate home in ways that matter enough to actually damage the legitimacy of the awards. And the writers/editors responsible for it have found their future career options reduced, especially as some who would prefer the field go back to much more Campbellian (read: racist and sexist non-reading types wanting it to be about Straight White Cisgender Males Punching Everyone Else) publishing hijacked it for their agenda.
Your experience maps reasonably well to mine, although we got to have ours at the Colorado Convention Center (which was actually much larger than the con could fully use, and a little better laid out for what they did use), and I didn't talk to quite as many people - a combination of me not being a bar fly, the Convention Center not having a "bar" as such (unless you count the coffee kiosk seating area), and that, socially speaking, pre-gender-transition me was shy as fuck.
I think the professionalism effectively displayed is a combination of factors; there are people working it from year to year, every year, many of them with ties to the various industries (for instance, I know writer Alex Acks has been at the past few business meetings, they liveblog it over on their Wordpress page), many of the others working are from the local convention staff scene, and the awards process that tends to help boost careers in various manners.
The slating thing was something of an anomaly (although when it started, it looked like it might have really been a more serious problem than it turned out to be), and there's been things put in place since it was first attempted that help reduce it's impact by making it much harder than before to completely replace the whole field with a slate, although the votership has shown that merely slating the nominees isn't really enough, you then have to get enough people to then buy supporting memberships to drive the slate home in ways that matter enough to actually damage the legitimacy of the awards. And the writers/editors responsible for it have found their future career options reduced, especially as some who would prefer the field go back to much more Campbellian (read: racist and sexist non-reading types wanting it to be about Straight White Cisgender Males Punching Everyone Else) publishing hijacked it for their agenda.
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor