Hotel reservation deadline coming up soon on April 25!

If you’re attending WisCon in person this year, there’s not a lot of time left until our discounted room block closes! Please make your reservation by April 25 at the latest so that you can get our special discounted rate and so that your room counts towards our hotel contract. (Cancelled reservations don’t count towards our contract, so please only make a reservation if you plan to use it.) You can make your hotel reservation by visiting the Concourse’s front desk, using the Concourse’s reservations link for WisCon, or calling the Concourse at 1-800-356-8293 and telling them you’re part of WisCon’s room block. If you have a hard time getting a room using the web link, please call! For more information, visit our Hotel page.

6th Floor Room Rate Discount Lottery

Being able to stay in a room in the Concourse Hotel is one of the pleasures of WisCon — and also one of the biggest financial barriers to attending the convention.  As part of our commitment to affordability, each year WisCon is able to provide a limited number of rooms with discounted rates on the 6th floor.  We hope that offering this discount can help just a few more people get to WisCon by making your stay a bit more affordable. More information on our page about 6th floor discounted rooms.

We are accepting requests through April 25 (closing at 11:59pm Central Time), which is also the deadline for reservations under the WisCon room block.  After the request window closes, we will get in touch to let you know if your request is filled.

To enter, please complete our Room Lottery Google Form. Entries are limited to one per party – that means if you have roommates for the booked room, only one of you should apply. If you received funds from the WMAF, you are still eligible for the room rate discount as well! Please don’t self-reject!

Looking for a roommate or a ride share?

We have a Google Group that, in the past, members have used to find roommates or ride shares. You can join by going to https://groups.google.com/g/wiscon-talk .

• Near west side, lane reductions on University Ave past the hospital https://cityofmadison.com/news/street-reconstruction-university-avenue
• East of the capitol, street closures https://www.cityofmadison.com/engineering/projects/blair-street-south
• The totally demolished lot at W Gorham and N Broom
• UW lane closures on University Ave westbound before N Charter

The WisCon schedule is now live! We have a full weekend of panels, readings, workshops, kids programming, academic papers, parties, gaming, and more: https://program.wiscon.net/PublicSchedule.php

Can’t make it to Madison this year? There’s still time to register for an online membership! Register today at https://reg.wiscon.net/.

For 2022 we have two tracks of online panels, and another of other online programs. Our big events, including the Otherwise Auction and Guest of Honor speeches, will also be streamed. And we’ll have a WisCon Discord server for both online and in-person members.

Want to see our online offerings expand? Once we know we have enough volunteers to staff our all-online panels, we can start to add some in-person panels to our streamed offerings (starting with panels scheduled for “Assembly” in the program). If you are comfortable hosting a Zoom call, sign up via our at-con volunteer interest form to hear about training sessions for this role!

WisCon is a project of the Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3 for short).  In an effort to not be strangers to volunteers or to the public, the governing Board of SF3 has decided to release a little summary of what we’ve been up to at each monthly meeting.  Here are our updates for the past few months:

April 2022

• We welcomed De Ana Jones and LaShawn M. Wanak as our co-chairs of the newly founded POC Outreach Committee. We’re thrilled to have them aboard! You can reach them by email to poc-outreach@sf3.org .
• We are continuing our search for con co-chairs for WisCon 2023. If that could be you, please get in touch with the board at board@sf3.org or the current co-chairs at chair@wiscon.net! We are especially looking for people who have past WisCon experience.
• The board unanimously voted to reallocate unneeded funds from our Guest of Honor budget to our COVID-19 supplies.
• WisCon is now offering comped memberships for all BIPOC pre-con volunteers.
• WisCon members can now donate a membership to a BIPOC volunteer through the Registration system.
• Next month is WisCon 2022! See you there!

March 2022

• Our treasurer, Kit, met with our new financial team and confirmed everything is in order (as expected).
• Last month, the Board presented the ConCom with a list of action items generated from the town hall on racism in Nov 2021. The ConCom has responded to us with the ones they can tackle this year.
• We discussed other ongoing business re: getting the POC Outreach Committee founded, updates on budget, and cementing our anti-racist values in messaging that we can replicate across communications as needed.

February 2022

• We discussed hiring for the position of POC Outreach Committee chair.
• We talked about SF3’s financial responsibilities and goals, including updates on tax status and fundraising.
• We discussed meeting with Con Chairs to assign out responsibility for action items generated from the November 2021 Town Hall (centering on combating racism at WisCon).
• We discussed drafting social media guidelines and policies.
• We talked about compensation for sensitivity reading for panel descriptions.

As part of our overall accessibility efforts, WisCon hires professional captioners and/or ASL interpreters during the con. CART will be provided during the Opening Ceremonies, at the Otherwise Auction, and for the Guest of Honor speeches. If you’d like to request captioning and/or ASL interpretation for other programming (specific panels, readings, etc.), please use this Google form. You can request CART/ASL for online sessions, in person sessions, or both!

Questions? Contact Accessibility (access@wiscon.net).

Thank you for joining us for Visioning WisCon!

We have a Google Form where you can ask questions about the ConCom, give feedback on this event (Visioning WisCon), and make suggestions for WisCon in 2022. You can also request to join our email newsletter or request more info about volunteering on the concom (no commitments, just info).

The form will be open through Monday evening (5/31) at 9pm Central time. After that, you’re welcome to contact us or subscribe to the email newsletter through this website!

We have a new Spontaneous Programming item this evening at Visioning WisCon!

Visioning the WisCon ConCom: Do you have ideas for how to carry WisCon forward? Do you have questions about how WisCon is organized that you’d like answered? Start a conversation about #VisioningWisCon with several current ConCom members in Spontaneous 1 on Kumospace, today (Sunday, 5/30) at 6PM Central.

Mark your calendars, Friends! One week left until panel submissions close! We’re excited to see what the community will share at this year’s WisCon, and below are some helpful ideas on how to submit your panel ideas to make sure they get to us!

I’m a little fuzzy on how I should go about submitting a panel idea. Can you help me out?

Of course we can! Here’s the best way to go about it:

If you log into your profile, you will see a list of different options where you can submit your program idea to the right department on the left-hand side of the screen. Please see the screenshot below for an example.

If you want to submit a panel idea, please click on the “Submit Ideas” option.

We ask that you please use the correct option for submitting your program idea. Please do not submit any other type of programming to us. If you want to submit a party, you will need to click on the “Host a party” option. If you want to submit a paper proposal or academic proposal, please click on the “Submit Paper Proposal” option. If you want to submit a workshop proposal, please email workshop@wiscon.net. Information about workshops can be found via this link.

If you submit an event to us that is not a panel, due to the volume of panel requests and the subsequent organization of the panel schedule, we cannot guarantee that your submission will be timely transferred to the correct department.  The deadline to submit a panel idea to Panel Programming is January 21, 2019 at 11:59p.m. CST.

OK, that sounds very easy. I need to make sure I only submit panel ideas to you. So, do I have to log in to submit a panel idea?

You actually don’t have to log in to your profile to submit a panel idea, unless you want to receive a confirmation email to show that your submission has been received. For your benefit, we recommend logging in, especially if you submit multiple panel ideas! It will be easier for you [and us] to keep track.

This is super helpful information. Anything else I should know?

Panel Programming wants to help you get the best WisCon panel programming experience, so after you register, we would like for you to do a couple of things to help us help you.

1.    Update your profile, especially your email address.

All you need to do is log in to your profile, click the “Edit” link on the right side of your name, then click on “Save” once you’re done.

2. Update your availability.

This information is essential to us. The more information you provide us, the better chance you have in getting your top choices of panels at your most desired times. To update your availability, please click on “Tell Us Your Schedule”. After you click on “Tell Us Your Schedule,” you will be brought to the following screen:

In this text, you will be asked for your arrival/departure information, your desired number of panels, as well as your preferred panel times. Once again, the more information you provide us, the better it will be for you. Given that it is still early, you can start off with a ballpark estimate, but please continue to update as needed as we get closer to the availability deadline in March 2019.

As usual, if you have any questions regarding Panels, please email us at panels@wiscon.net.