Oh interesting. We sometimes are gentle but firm with new people about how much the audience has to contribute at Fourth Street--quite a few Fourth Street panels could be cleared and entirely restaffed from the audience and still done well--but you're right, it is not the established model at a lot of traditional SFF cons. And I did notice that the general model guidelines for Readercon gave "open up to questions" far later than I expected from Fourth Street, and made it clear that it was presumed to be questions rather than comments--"this is more a comment than a question" is presumed to be a nuisance at a lot of traditional SFF cons, but in my experience it varies quite a lot and can easily be someone with something quite interesting to say. (At Readercon too! At my most recent Readercon panel it was several times Chip Delany speaking about his personal experience of Judith Merril.)
I expect it was particularly surprising because I think there is a perception among literary fandom people that media fandom people want a "big name draw" or "star power" at their conventions, and there may be a misfiling of fanfic communities as part of media fandom in that regard rather than their own special thing.
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Date: 2017-08-08 08:53 pm (UTC)I expect it was particularly surprising because I think there is a perception among literary fandom people that media fandom people want a "big name draw" or "star power" at their conventions, and there may be a misfiling of fanfic communities as part of media fandom in that regard rather than their own special thing.