KickstartNW

[Brendan]

This is a pretty flimsy idea, but I wanted to float it out there. I know the organizers of GPNW have worked hard--with amazing results!--at maintaining the price of a badge year-to-year while consistently expanding and improving the con. Still, I'm sure there was some stuff on the nice-to-have list that they had to cut to fit in that budget.

Here's the thing: I think it's great that the con is pretty cheap. But I'd pay quite a bit more--in fact, I sort of do, as I've bought badges for some friends and have standing offers with more. Why not take advantage of me and offer a Kickstarter-style voluntary donation scheme? If enough people pay $20 or $40 on top of the regular price to get something on the nice-to-have list, it happens! If not, the extra money flows back to donors (or gets put in a rainy-day fund for the organization).

This already exists to some degree with the options for shirts and the Feast. I can think of a number of bonus features I'd like to unlock:

• A regularly replenished drink cooler or snack counter
• Rented vertical dividers to section off areas and further control noise
• Hell, hiring some of the Fabricated Realities artists to bring their amazing playspace installations up to Seattle for the weekend

And like I say, I'm sure the organizers have other, more practical ideas. Thoughts? Are there obvious flaws in this plot that I'm missing?

[Ben Robbins]

Speaking in no official capacity, I think it's genius. Con-communism.

[mcdaldno]

I was sort of mentioning this is my post-mortem of GPNW2011. I think it's genius, as well.

As someone who spends a couple hundred dollars in order to attend Go Play (and sits through 20-30 hours of round-trip travel time), the idea of paying an extra $20-40 in order to have a more comfy and beautiful con space is a negligible expense. That might not be everyone's deal, and that's fine, but I'd love to be able to kick a bit in to ensure that the open bar free cooler thing comes back, etc.

[nemomeme]

I also support this idea and would support it financially, particularly for noise reduction, (though maybe next year's space would accomplish that of its own).

edit: Each year I know of people who would like to attend but cannot swing it financially. Two times I've insisted on paying their way and they've graciously accepted, but for most people I'm not comfortable offering or I suspect they'll refuse my patronage. I'd like to see some kind of scaled price or some kind of general fund that people could apply to to offset some of their costs so they can join us at GPNW. And then I'd like to donate to that fund indirectly. This is off the top of my head - there may be better ways to achieve this. Maybe Brendan's idea could achieve this by itself simply by helping to keep the base price down.