I had an aggravating amount of energy tied up this year at Readercon in 'am I going to have to moderate xyz? welp, no way to find out till I get there!', with in at least one case the addition of 'dear God don't let me have to moderate this it will be a circus please please please can anybody else do it'. As things turned out, I did not have to moderate anything that I wasn't warned about in advance, but I did not enjoy worrying about it.
And it's not that I think I'm that amazing a moderator, it's just that I've done it a lot and a lot of people know I have, so when there isn't someone pre-assigned, I am one of the people who starts getting looked at with puppy-eyes. Which, the puppy-eyes are hard to resist, and that's another large amount of energy I have to keep setting aside in case I need it, the energy needed to say a polite firm no even if it looks like everything is going to go to hell otherwise.
The least stressful panel I had this Readercon was, amazingly enough, the one which had a moderator assigned ahead of time, and the mod got all our email addresses and we started discussion some weeks in advance.
I have no idea why there was only one of those. I would prefer strongly that more panels work this way.
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I had an aggravating amount of energy tied up this year at Readercon in 'am I going to have to moderate xyz? welp, no way to find out till I get there!', with in at least one case the addition of 'dear God don't let me have to moderate this it will be a circus please please please can anybody else do it'. As things turned out, I did not have to moderate anything that I wasn't warned about in advance, but I did not enjoy worrying about it.
And it's not that I think I'm that amazing a moderator, it's just that I've done it a lot and a lot of people know I have, so when there isn't someone pre-assigned, I am one of the people who starts getting looked at with puppy-eyes. Which, the puppy-eyes are hard to resist, and that's another large amount of energy I have to keep setting aside in case I need it, the energy needed to say a polite firm no even if it looks like everything is going to go to hell otherwise.
The least stressful panel I had this Readercon was, amazingly enough, the one which had a moderator assigned ahead of time, and the mod got all our email addresses and we started discussion some weeks in advance.
I have no idea why there was only one of those. I would prefer strongly that more panels work this way.