What's Foolscap?

Foolscap is a small science fiction convention in Redmond, WA. This year, we're getting together from September 16–18 at the Redmond Town Center Marriott. We gather every year for a convention focused on the two things that matter to us: flat stuff and funny hats.

Flat stuff and funny hats?

That’s right: Flat stuff and funny hats! Flat stuff: books, art, comics — that sort of thing. And funny hats: hats like this.

It's a lot of fun.

The program schedule

Foolscap works because we plan out a weekend's worth of interesting conversations: topics to discuss, presentations, icebreakers, workshops, plus time and places for people to just sit and talk and take a breather. That schedule is the convention program, and it's the tool that enables us to bring more than a hundred people together for a highly interesting weekend.

One of the things that makes Foolscap interesting is our community-based approach to the program. At other conventions, the programming committee decides on a list of events to hold, and recruits people to be panelists, presenters and moderators. At Foolscap, the community brainstorms a pool of interesting panel ideas, and the programming team sends the list of those ideas to everyone we know who might be coming. That means that at Foolscap, any member of our community can become a panelist, simply by telling us which panels they're interested in being part of, and what expertise they have to share. This is how we discover things we'd never have known, and how the events at Foolscap are guaranteed to be interesting and diverse.

This year's programming survey is online. Anyone interested can go fill it out, and tell us what discussions and events we should have at this year's convention.

Too many panels, not enough space

Once we have the results of the programming survey, there's a second step: we need to find places in the convention to hold each of the events that people want to go to. In the past, we've only had two rooms to hold panels in: one small, and one big. This means that, we're forced to give up on good panels at this point; panels that people are interested in and we want to hold, but for which we, quite literally, don’t have any room.

The magic of the third room

Last year we cleaned out our basements and held a garage sale to raise enough money to get a third room for one day. The results were wildly successful: the panels held in all three rooms were vibrant, well attended and interesting, and we were able to cover more diverse programming than we could with only two rooms.

The effect was bigger than just one more room would imply. One more room means one more choice of things to do at any time: it means that we can be talking about three things at once, and there are fewer times when people look around and say "there's nothing that interests me right now." One more room means that topics that are interesting to a few people on the survey can happen at the convention, and those people can find each other and have an interesting conversation. One more room means that there's one more place with interesting discussions spilling out and making the rest of the convention livelier.

Last year we sold our stuff to prove that the idea worked. This year we're looking for the community to pledge support, and help us make the third room a permanent part of the convention.

What we need

We need $700 to rent the third room from the hotel for the whole convention. That's enough for us to open the room this year and fill it with interesting programming from when the convention opens on Friday afternoon until we shut down on Sunday night.

More than that, and we can make sure this happens in the future: we can grow the convention, and talk about more of the interesting things that the community suggests.

Where you come in

We're on Kickstarter for a reason. We need $700 to make the financial side of this programming plan come together. Every dollar you pledge gets us a step closer to making that happen.

But even if you can't give us money to help, there are ways you can support our efforts to make this a bigger, more inclusive Foolscap.

If you share this with other people — online and off, with people who are part of the SF community and with people who are interested in talking about books — you can help us find the people who want to help us. Our community grows by word of mouth.

And of course, the most direct way to support Foolscap is by being there. Come to Foolscap, and bring your friends with you. Every person at the convention supports more interesting programming twice: First, by buying a membership, and second, by attending and being part of the programming. It's also one of the best ways we can think of to spend a weekend in September.

If you're coming, you can also support us by staying at the hotel. When enough of us are overnight guests, we can negotiate discounts with the hotel, which means we can do more with the money we have and provide more for our members.

What we're giving you

In return for your pledges, we're giving you Foolscap — a full weekend of discussions, conversations, workshops, friendships and interesting experiences. But we're going to give that to everyone at Foolscap. If you pledge your support to help us bring you more awesome programming, we'll find a way to give you even more.

We're going to recognize you publicly, of course: Everyone who donates will have his or her name put on the door of this third room, and in the program book, as our thanks for helping us make this happen. Anyone who pledges $25 or more will also be thanked on video, in one of the videos we'll be making to show our appreciation for all the help it takes to make this happen.

We've also got some tangible rewards we'll be giving you: T-shirts and tote bags with the iconic Foolscap Jester, jester's hats to wear proudly — and for a few generous supporters, some one-of-a-kind articles of haberdashery, decorated by the members of this year's Foolscap.

And, of course, we'll recognize people who can be exceptionally generous to us with exceptional generosity of our own: We've only rarely bestowed lifetime memberships on anyone besides our guests of honor. But if you can help us make this happen, we think that kind of support is a good reason to make you a part of Foolscap forever.

We want to give you this great stuff. We want to make videos about how excellent you are. Most of all, we want to see you at Foolscap this year.

We'll be there with our hats on.