BiCon 2024 organiser's report

Or: 'Now you know what I did last summer and autumn' by Ian

I've used the singular in the title, but I didn't make BiCon 2024 – attendees did.

Having said that, amongst the various big anniversaries for this one..

.. forty years since the first BiCon..
.. thirty years since it was last non-residential..

.. it's also been twenty five years since someone did so much of the organising alone.

Although the programme for BiCon 1999 credited a handful of other people with organising it, almost all the work for the daytimes of that BiCon – venue finding and liaison, handling bookings, session programming, website etc – was all done by Rowan Alison. Those of us who were slightly surprised to see our names in the team list had mostly just given more or less helpful advice.

There are a number of people to thank for organising BiCon 2024, particularly Katy (without whom Saturday evening wouldn't have happened) and Grant (the same for the online component), but all those things were me this year.

I'm not saying that to boast but to say that one of the things I wanted to do has been achieved: to do a BiCon that needed fewer 'spoons' and would reset people's expectations of what a 'BiCon' is.

It's been the eighth one where I've officially been part of the team and I was also on the team for the (non-residential) second International BiCon back in 1992.

This one was the easiest and least stressful to do: it absolutely needed fewer spoons.

I have gone into quite a bit of detail about the various choices and compromises made – I don't think there has been a longer post-BiCon report since 1987's Fifth National Bisexual Conference mailed out an A5 booklet to everyone who went – so, following a request, here's a table of contents:

    Not being residential
        What being residential involves
        Let it go..
    Venue
        Why a school?
        Why London?
    When
    Budget
    Booking system
    Access fund
    Covid-19
        What happened?
        Mistakes
    Timings
    Programming
    Online BiCon
    Saturday evening
        Lessons
    Publicity
    Demographics
    Assorted other problems
        Transphobic crap
    Conduct
    Other things that were a reminder to me
    Other things that surprised me
    Stuff that didn't happen
    It's made me think
    Want to do one?
    Thanks
    Any comments or questions?
    Geeky details appendix

---

Not being residential

A few of us – 'us' meaning 'people who have run a BiCon' – have talked about doing a non-residential one for a while.

It is lovely to have people think that a BiCon you have been a part of making has been organised by a professional team, but they have all been volunteers spending those spoons.

Twenty-something years ago, I came up with a recipe for BiCon 'pizza':

Venue + People = BiCon

.. and said everything else was toppings on that base.^[1]It was originally a recipe for BiCon cake – cakes can have toppings too! – but the opportunity to later contrast a pizza (baked dough base) with a pilau (rice base) was too great to … Continue reading

While being a very loved one – residential BiCons are very special spaces! – being residential is a topping..

.. and it's one that takes a lot of spoons to provide. I knew it was at least half of the work, and if this one is typical of non-residential BiCons, it turns out that it's more like at least three quarters.

So I never considered doing a residential one for 2024. Saying it'd be OK to do a non-residential one (and it'd be less work) became official in January with a BiCon Continuity post. Possibly because it's been so long since one was non-residential, no-one else was offering to do it even that way by July, so I told the other Continuity directors / trustees that I'd do it.

I don't want to put people off thinking about volunteering to do a residential one, and if you do, help will be available, but..

What being residential involves

Putting some people off coming for the first time

Booking a weekend away somewhere, usually not near to where you live, is a financial and emotional commitment not everyone wants to make when they're not sure they'll like it.

Being able to go back to your own home – or even a place booked for the night somewhere with lots of alternative things to do – at the end of the day helps reduce that.

It limits your venue choices enormously

There are multiple reasons residential ones have used universities. Included in that are that we can usually have self-catering accommodation. Having done a catered one in 2015, I don't want to do one ever again.

Breakfast? Fine, if it's included in the bill anyway.

Anything more? Consider that not everyone wants to eat at the same time and the venue very probably cannot cope with serving everyone who does in a reasonable period. When they're dealing with students, lunch can be stretched out over two or three hours. While not everyone goes to every session, no BiCon is going to have a two hour lunch break. And how long do you think the list of attendees' different dietary requirements is? No, it's longer than that…

The alternatives I spent a year looking at before BiCon 2008 were hotels, holiday camps, and boarding schools.

Pre-Covid, we were too big for most hotels to fit everyone in and too small for almost all of the rest. Hotels tend to expect that you want to serve your whole event lunch / dinner at the same time too and can be quite surprised when you tell them that you don't want that.

Holiday camps limit you to being there 'out of season'. While it would be lovely to have a 'BiCon fun pool' to play in, their session room spaces can be poor, typically far too big for us and priced accordingly. There are now only a handful of the classic Butlins / Pontins camps who take any such bookings and almost all of them are not easy to get to via public transport. Caravan camps exist, but tend to come with physical access issues as well as not many single person places and also typically aren't easy to get to either.

Boarding schools were something I hadn't thought of before that search. We already had some people think that an event at a university was not for them just on that basis, and I strongly suspect it'd be even worse for one at a private boarding school. They're also not set up for self-catering (but the ones I talked to then swore that they could cope with the food issues) and tend to be some way from a train station.

A more expensive BiCon

A venue that was being considered for a residential BiCon 2025 turned out to have an average cost per attendee of around three hundred quid.

I'm sure it would have been lovely, but that would mean the lowest price on the sliding scale to stay on site (and it was somewhere where you didn't have much choice but to do so) would have been around £150 and the top price would have been around £600. The accommodation part of the bill was around £250 per person, so getting loads of people attending wouldn't have moved the average down much either.

With external funding, having a very substantial subsidy might have worked, but that comes with the effort of getting it and the necessity of keeping funders happy with what you do. (Personally, if I had a funder willing to hand over say £20k to the UK bi community, I could also think of better uses for it than giving it straight to an expensive university venue…)

Plus once the target number of attendees had booked, you'd either need to say 'anyone booking from now on has to pay the actual cost' or go back to the funders and say 'actually, could we have another ten thousand pounds or so?'

There are substantially cheaper venues than that, but they come with compromises like a long journey to get to them for many people. That would be OK, but is not something you want to happen every year. (Having the same set of venue compromises each time is why using the same venue every year is not, I suggest, a good idea.)

A more expensive BiCon almost inevitably results in..

Higher deposits

Fortunately, BiCon Continuity can cover these, because some can want half the money up front = more than twenty thousand pounds.

This one's venue wanted all the money in advance, but that was less than a tenth of that.

More work in budgeting

Especially if there's more than one sort of room. I'm not talking about more accessible rooms, but things like twin rooms / en-suite vs shared toilets / etc where you're charged different amounts by the venue. (I think the record at any venue that's been seriously considered was about nine sorts – they were the one that only mentioned while we were there that they wanted to charge extra if we wanted to actually use the rooms' kitchens and were rejected.)

In practice, I've not had a problem with it, but some people have found it very intimidating to budget for.

More work in terms of handling bookings

Some attendees come with specific physical access needs. Any venue is going to have a limited number of bedrooms that meet those and often an embarrassing low number. So you need to keep a very close eye on what rooms are available and who's booked with what needs and how those two match up and..

Ditto if you have a limited number of any other sort of room.

Stress over filling rooms.

The worst was Edinburgh in 2013. I strongly recommend^[2]Someone who's been to a number of BiCons did a guide to consultant speak in relation to working at another event. In their version, "recommend" meant 'do it this way or else'. For me, "strongly … Continue reading that no-one who has any choice ever use Edinburgh First for their event based on their treatment of us then..

.. but in addition to all that, they want you to know how many rooms you want about six months before the event. Back then, every six rooms we booked but didn't actually fill would be a cost to BiCon of a thousand pounds: it's nearer 'every four' now.

Doing the budget for BiCon 2013 in Edinburgh and committing to paying for a particular number of rooms there involved taking one of the deepest breaths I have ever taken. (We did fill the rooms in the end, but that didn't mean waiting for enough bookings to come in wasn't stressful!)

Everywhere else is not as bad as Edinburgh – some are happy with final numbers a day or two before – but contracts can still say things like "at least 200 bedrooms" in terms of what you have to pay for.

And since Covid-19 arrived, we don't know we can do that.

Why have numbers dropped off? No-one knows for sure, but BiCon 2023 needed to do some serious renegotiation with its venue about the minimum number of bedrooms they had to pay for and still lost more than this one cost to put on.

On the plus side, if someone said "no more than 200 bedrooms are available", we'd now go "fine" in a way that we would not have done a few years ago.

There is some stress connected to waiting for bookings to come in for a non-residential one – if you want to start off in an organiser's good books, book early 🙂 – but it's nowhere near as much.

The human jigsaw puzzle

There are people who enjoy working out who to put in what room, bearing in mind that A wants to be with B but B doesn't want to be near C and C wants a quiet flat on the ground floor but D wants to be with them and in a 'party flat' that no-one can see into and..

.. but I am not one of them. Especially as attendees can expect you to just know that they were in a relationship with that person and it's just ended, or everything else that affects who else you'd like to be near. Or not.

An expectation you'll provide a couple of services

Not personally and nowhere near as much of an expectation since 2020, but in the 2010s, there was the expectation that there'd be a counselling service available, ideally 24 hours a day, for people to be able to ring. There'd also be the expectation of a first aid service, again through the night. Apparently, usually the main call-out for the latter was to cut people out of bondage because not everyone can do knots as well as they think.^[3]Unless you really like rope / fabric / etc, try using velcro-based bondage..

A bunch of attendees would volunteer to do those, but it'd usually be the same ones year to year and you'd be at least responsible for ensuring that they were suitable people to let anywhere near people in distress or unable to move. Again, they're really lovely services to have, but they take spoons to organise and bring the occasional moral dilemma that you'd rather not have.^[4]One I had at one year was whether or not to call an ambulance, when you know someone wouldn't want one called when they did have 'capacity'. A discussion with the first aider who responded meant that … Continue reading

More emotion

As I say, residential BiCons are incredibly lovely spaces. People can get very emotional in good ways there and, if things aren't going as well as they'd like, in not so good ways too.

So there have been people having meltdowns at the desk over what's objectively trivial stuff: not being in a flat next to another flat, or having to move flats five minutes after arriving because of some problem with the venue, or..

Occasionally it's your fault, most of the time it isn't, but either way, the emotion will be headed in your direction.

Let it go..

This is partly linked to the previous bit and may be just me, but if I organise a residential BiCon, I feel 'on duty' for the whole of the period I am awake from the very start to its very end.

It turns out (= I had forgotten) that for a non-residential one, I don't. Once the daytime bits are over, or the evening event if I am actively running it, that sense of responsibility switches off. I will want to know if there were problems, but I won't feel I failed in preventing them.

Venue

Venue-finding and liaison are two parts of BiCon organising I enjoy.

The first vague idea, at the start of the year when I first thought about doing BiCon 2024 if no-one else did, was using my then workplace: a Town Hall. I then lost that job (which would have put up the price in that I'd have had to pay to have at least one person on site who did work for them) and while it's a lovely town, most of you don't live in it.

By the summer, when it was clear that if I wasn't going to do it, it wasn't going to happen, I'd decided on a school in London.

Why a school?

There are a lot of them to choose between. They have big rooms and many hire out their smaller rooms, more usually known as 'classrooms', too. They tend not to be booked already for weddings and conferences etc. (If I had gone for the Town Hall, I'd have had to work around bookings like that!) They tend to have physical access issues more or less sorted. Some are available in the evenings (but less frequently at weekends..)

A quick search found a handful of websites that have schools available to hire. Partly because they had a wider choice, the one I used was SchoolHire.

At one point in August, I had a couple of hundred tabs from that site open with London schools. A big chunk got closed when I realised, embarrassingly late in the search, that primary schools are no good for this: while they will doubtless have a bunch of adult-sized chairs for their main hall(s), chairs in the classrooms will be too small. (And the halls tend to be smaller too because the schools are smaller in terms of pupil numbers.)

Other factors were cost (some are after several hundred pounds an hour for their hall) and proximity to a station, specifically looking at travel time from a London terminus. Because there were a handful in the middle of London that looked like they would work, that last bit ruled out schools I think would have worked in places like Kingston-upon-Thames and Croydon.

The five on the final shortlist included one that had plenty of good features, but was a hill away from Clapham Junction and is also a Roman Catholic academy. Part of me was tempted to see if they'd turn down the booking in order to use it for publicity, but the hill meant it wasn't first choice and I didn't want to end up using it if somewhere else was better.

One near Elephant & Castle took a bit of chasing to get back to me, and then said that while they were shown as available on the website, they were changing systems and so weren't at the moment. Another one was further out from the centre than I was otherwise looking at, but was right by an Elizabeth Line station so had step-free access to/from the platforms and the travel time from the centre was good.

It was a bit far to cycle to though, so on my visit to London with a bike on 13th September, that left one in Greenwich and Heartlands High in Haringey. After visiting Heartlands, I knew it'd work and didn't visit the Greenwich one. I also knew I'd need to tell people which entrance to go to, having first gone to two wrong ones 🙂

The mix of rooms was good, as was the flexibility. Had we got twice the numbers, for example, it would have been possible to open the partition in the hall to have more space there, and have more classrooms. Getting between the rooms was easy, with wide corridors on a single floor.

I expected to have the space that the parents of the dance school hung around in on Saturday morning as a reception,^[5]One of those parents came over and offered a donation! but using the space outside the hall worked.

Compromises: The finish time was rather earlier than I'd have liked on the Saturday at 4:30pm. It's not uncommon for a residential BiCon to finish by 4pm on a Sunday, so that finish time was OK. Some schools are open later on weekend evenings.

Driving in London takes much longer than the distances would suggest, so even if there had been on site parking – and I need to ask why it was OK for the dance class parents to use the car park, when I'd been told it wasn't available to us – I suspect only a handful would have driven.

Incredibly annoyingly, Alexandra Palace station has no step-free access to/from the platforms: it's 24 steps, if we use the school again.

There was no food/drink on site beyond a couple of water fountains and, it turned out, some hot water. I would doubt that any school is going to provide any on site catering – many universities don't – but the food places could be nearer.

Had I been able to use the car park and thought about it a bit more, we could have had a repeat of the muffins and flapjacks from BiCon 2002. (If you didn't go to that one, it was at a university hall that did not have much in the way of cooking facilities, so I bought a very large bunch of muffins and flapjacks from a wholesale baker to give away to attendees.)

There wasn't any comfy social space. The nearest the school had was the library, opposite the hall, which had some padded chairs including some around small tables. Looking back, I should definitely have booked it too.

Why London?

A lot of people live there – or in easy commuting distance – already. A lot of the public transport system is set to get you to and from there if you don't. There is a very wide range of accommodation options. A very big chunk of the country's ethnic minority population live there.

And, forty years ago, it was where the first BiCon was held. We also haven't had one there since 2010's.

When

Obviously, having BiCon during late spring / summer / early autumn is a much better idea than having it 'at the end of November / start of December'. But given the late start in sorting this out, having it then was more or less inevitable. As a side benefit, the actual anniversary of the first one is the 8th/9th December and we'd be close to that. (And, looking at the feedback, it was a very good time for someone who is otherwise engaged for many other months of the year: it's not just venues that are compromises, dates are too.)

In the end, I went for the 30th November / 1st December weekend as being far enough away to do the organising work while not being too close to Christmas. Given the weather on the previous one (Storm Bert) and the following one (Storm Darragh), that turned out to be a very good (lucky!) choice..

.. mostly. I have a distinct memory that when I started looking at venues in the summer, I looked for rail issues that would affect the East Coast Mainline (the one I was expecting to use!) By mid-September, when the venue was booked, it turned out that there was engineering work between Peterborough and somewhere south of Potters Bar on the line.

As I posted on Dreamwidth, "the person who co-brought you the BiCon where they demolished the venue on us is going to bring you the BiCon he can't get directly to and from". (There was a much slower than usual route via Cambridge, but in the end, I drove to the edge of London and parked there, using TfL for the in London bits. Someone who lives closer to London than I do had to put up with rail replacement buses because of the same work.)

Budget

Another bit of BiCon organising I enjoy. Not everyone who's run a BiCon can do numbers and you need someone who can.

Once I had confirmed with the venue, I'd worked out a budget, and had it approved by Continuity. I aim to have any BiCon I do the budget for to be as affordable as possible and the price of this venue meant that wasn't a problem.

It was done on the basis of having 100 weekend attendees and 40 day visitors. If there had been substantially more people booking in advance, I would have booked more rooms, so expenditure would have risen too.

Lower numbers of day visitors in particular meant we didn't get that many, but – because the prices were so low? the cost of staying in London if you don't live there and don't know someone who can put you up? – the proportion of people on the lowest two tiers was much, much smaller than usual. Normally, it's around half. This time, it was about one in six for people who booked for the whole weekend and the result is that 2024 made a surplus of a couple of hundred pounds.

Particularly with the costs of living in London in mind, the sliding scale was always going to be one based on the Leeds Queer Film Festival's approach of talking about what you can and can't afford in terms of your basic needs and expendable income, rather than tied to any particular income figure.^[6]They credit The Green Bottle Sliding Scale by the Califia Collective for the idea. Having more than three points to the scale works well, I find.

Booking system

I liked it, and it looks like other people did too. See the appendix for the geeky details.

It doesn't expect that you'll ask for a bunch of things that most booking systems assume will be compulsory questions, like people's addresses. I didn't ask for that – I didn't need to know – but it would be interesting to know how many people had to (or choose to) stay somewhere away from home to come.

Other things it doesn't do include sending an automatic copy of what was submitted to the person submitting it. I can sort of see why – if you let people fill in forms with any email address they think it will get sent to and have text fields rather than just tick boxes, eventually someone (or more accurately, their bot) is going to start using it to send spam to those email addresses.^[7]"Thank you for booking for BiCon! Here's what you said: buy erection drugs from here…"

But that does mean someone (and that meant me) has to send people something manually. Handling the communication with people who've booked / are thinking about booking is something I have actively avoided in the past, but really enjoyed it this time and would happily do it again. (It helps greatly that it no longer involves dealing with paper post – including reading people's handwriting! – and cheques.)

I particularly liked being add personal messages when required. One will get mentioned later.

Access fund

Normally, there's somewhere like £500 to £1,000 in the budget to help people with access needs. A small group of people share it out between people asking for additional help. Ideally, they're not on the organising team and only see anonymised details.

I just had a 'please reduce the price by £5' tick box on the booking form, which meant that the lowest weekend price was £10. The ones I've been part of organising before have had a 'everyone pays something' policy and I was amused to discover that even the base lowest tier price of £15 is the lowest for a non-residential BiCon ticket since 1998..

Around 15% of people who booked for the weekend ticked the box, with the highest proportion being in band 2 of the 7 bands. The highest band anyone ticked it for was band 6.

(A quick reminder to people not familiar with BiCon: this was without asking for proof of income or need in any way. If you think you need to make people prove they're "deserving" then you're a) making more work for them in terms of the spoons necessary to do so, b) making more work for yourself in terms of checking it, and c) a dick.)

Only slightly fewer people than that gave an additional donation. The lowest band anyone did so was band 3 and two-thirds of the people who were in band 7 paid one.

Covid-19

The SF WorldCon was in Glasgow this year. I didn't go – it clashed with the Edinburgh Fringe for one thing and it's also far too based on panels for my taste – but I know people who did. One common complaint was that its final Covid / communicable disease policy (masks 'strongly recommended', everybody tests before arrival and then daily) wasn't enforced. A significant number of people caught Covid-19.

This was something I thought about, a lot. The spoons for enforcing something like that at BiCon weren't there and pretending that they were wouldn't help anyone. Tests are no longer free, and Covid-19 / flu / RSV vaccinations are only free to a minority. Few people mask on the public transport needed to get to the venue. Argh!

In the end, I went with simple refunds for anyone who was ill and a 'no admittance, no refund' policy if you turned up anyway. There was the option to have an orange lanyard saying 'socially distancing' but I didn't make a big fuss about that and no-one asked for one.

What happened?

I masked when in the classrooms with other people masking – around six people in the busiest session there? – but not otherwise.

Two people intending to run sessions couldn't come because of them or a partner getting Covid in the week before BiCon. One ended up being done remotely and worked well that way, the other was cancelled.

One other attendee had a refund for being ill and I think the policy worked in that regard.

I haven't seen anyone talk about getting Covid after BiCon, but if it did happen, there's a chance that it was caught on public transport getting to/from it.

Having taken it to the site visit, I forgot to bring my monitor to measure CO₂ as a proxy of air quality. Someone else brought theirs (and it turned out that the classrooms already had them behind the teachers' desks!) Despite having the air conditioning on as much as I could get it, and the door wide open, the level did rise particularly during the 'standing room only' talk on 1970s & 1980s bi history.

If we are in a similar situation again, I suggest we have some fans at the doors. It would have implications around sensitive sessions and we'd also probably need to have some extension leads to power them.

I also suggest people from the UK pester their MP around making vaccinations free for everyone who wants them, ditto tests.

Mistakes

This also the big reason why doing so much myself wasn't wise and is why I would recommend^[8]See earlier footnote for what 'recommend' means! that anyone doing a BiCon ensure that there is at least one person (preferably more!) who could do every 'organising' thing you're expecting to do at BiCon if you fell ill a day or two before it: that implies people you don't live with. I spent the last week worrying anything different to usual was a possible symptom, and got through a bunch of tests.

Fortunately, I didn't get anything and a week after BiCon, haven't come down with anything either..

Timings

Long experience has shown the best length of slot for nearly all sessions is 75 minutes. It also makes programming them much easier if all slots are the same length. You need time between them (let people move between rooms, cover slight overruns, toilet breaks etc) and a lunch break. So I did a spreadsheet that added times together and came up with what we had. I might have made the gap between slots five minutes longer, but the time we had the venue for meant that would make something else shorter.

The start time for the first slot on Sunday was originally 10:10 and that was too early given the 'travel on Sunday' issues. But chopping 15 minutes off what was planned to be a 40 minute closing session and having everything start 15 minutes later was fine.

Programming

Yet another bit of BiCon organising I enjoy!

Amongst the many things I like about BiCon is that the vast bulk of the content is generated by attendees.^[9]I could do seven out of seven slots with different things myself, but it's much better for everyone, including me, not to! They suggest a bunch of things and you need to put them into a programme without too many obvious clashes and which has something for as many people as possible for as much of the event as possible.

Enough came in to have three choices of things for six out of the seven sessions, and I already had something in mind for everyone for the last one on Saturday.

To arrange the programme, some people use a spreadsheet, but I've always used post-it notes. It's much easier to swap two or more things around that way – and you will do a lot of moving – than going 'cut A / paste somewhere temporary / cut B / paste in A / cut temporary / paste in B' a lot. Either way, if you have a load of things to shuffle into a programme, you can colour code by stream so it's more visibly obvious that everything in a slot is the same type of session and you need to do more swapping around.

The vast bulk of proposals were put into the programme. Two people suggested the same thing, but one also had another suggestion, so I asked them to do that one instead (and it was apparently excellent). One person pondered doing three, I said 'only do more than one if you're absolutely sure you will have the spoons etc', they thought about it and did one. Someone else offered three and always only wanted to do one, etc.

The only one that I didn't want to accept without them and their approach being seriously vetted by someone else was on a very heavy topic and from someone who'd never been to a BiCon before. They also only wanted to do it online. In the end, that vetting didn't happen and we had a full online programme on the Saturday.

As mentioned, a couple got cancelled or moved to be presented online because of illness, and the other one that was cancelled was one where I had someone else lined up to attend the session and speak up if the person who offered it went off in unwise directions.

What I didn't do was actively search out people to do sessions I thought would be good but which no-one had offered. That would have been particularly useful to have done if we had had more new-to-BiCon people turn up on the day.

Online BiCon

I didn't originally plan to have one, mostly because of spoons and tech kit issues. Amongst other things, I thought there was a risk that if there was one, I would end up doing all the work and at that point, I'd never created a Zoom meeting never mind sorted out managing one. I also wasn't sure we'd have working screens at the venue.

Foolishly, I'd forgotten how much assistance is forthcoming from the community.

Grant enabled it to happen, both in terms of the kit and in putting in a day (and a bit) doing the button pushing.

One of the four sessions that made up Saturday's online BiCon was always going to be hybrid, something about another one meant it was sensible to have them be so as well, and a third one became one when Covid meant someone couldn't attend in person. That left online people being one of the groups for the 'I want it!' session, with me and Grant watching on and joining in with them.

It was expected to be a one-day only thing, but one of the things scheduled for Sunday ended up being done as a hybrid too.

Not least because a free-to-join online bi meetup that's been going once couple of months since 2020 had an issue with trolls trying to disrupt it for the first time not long before BiCon, I asked for some money, but tickets to 'online BiCon 2024' were from £2.

Saturday evening

I don't have much to say about this, because Katy did the venue finding for this as well as everything else.

There were several other places looked at, including near King's Cross. We wouldn't have wanted to pay anything near as much as their usual fee, but I note that Queer Britain never got back to me and, while I know they're not open after 8pm on a Saturday, neither did the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, even to my wondering what the issue was with having anything later.

Another pub nearby was considered, but the location of the Nag's Head meant that it was the one chosen.

There was a budget of £500 for the evening – over a quarter of what the school cost – but we ended up spending much less than that.

Katy says:

"Just to add some details about venue finding for the Saturday night: the essentials were affordable, available and accessible – accessible including 'easy to get to from the daytime venue'. I also wanted 'interesting and/or LGBT venue' and a private room, but in practice, almost all the places I looked at fell down on one of the essentials, so I had to go with the one option that I had.

"(Money was the biggest issue, but availability was second – finding somewhere on a Saturday night in London a month before Christmas is not easy. The other major variable was that I live on the other side of London and do not have a lot of free time.)

"However, the Nag's Head turned out to be absolutely fine, particularly once the football had finished. The staff were lovely, they only charged us for food, the accessibility was fine, and as far as I know nobody got bothered by the other punters. Would go back."

Lessons

Another disadvantage to doing so much myself was that by the end of Saturday day time, I needed a break from BiCon and didn't go to the evening.

There would have been much more choice of a venue had the process started earlier, probably including somewhere even closer to the daytime space. With a different venue, Katy would have worked even more of her magic and we'd doubtless have spent all of the money budgeted for the evening on stuff for it.

Publicity

Sigh. I tried.

Part of the problem is that I am highly averse to paying for ads where I think they should cover it as news / something of interest to readers. Another is that we are non-commercial: there is no significant revenue stream anywhere can expect in exchange for coverage.

I was never going to pay Google – we already are on the first page, if not the first result, for searches like 'bisexual event'. I was also never going to pay Meta to 'boost' posts on Facebook – so many reasons.^[10]The BiCon Guidelines include not using platforms with 'real name' policies for more than read-only announcements. I did answer a couple of questions on Facebook there, but pointed people at the … Continue reading

But I expected Pink News to do something after being sent a press release. If they don't do anything, not even respond with a '..if you pay us', why pay them?

The same thing happened with various bits of the Black / Asian media.

The same thing happened with various outlets, including the Guardian, that did big stories on the 50th anniversary of Pride events in London. We're the longest running etc etc, it was our 40th anniversary, and I had at least three people willing to talk about their experience at BiCon over the decades. Nothing.

Someone who started earlier and had more spoons to devote to it could probably have got something somewhere, but I tried. Sigh.

Demographics

Not everyone filled in the form when booking (it was entirely voluntary!)

It didn't surprise me that people use a load of terms for their sexual identity, gender isn't at all binary at BiCon and attendees have a lot of health issues of one sort or another.

I'll do a better breakdown soon.

We underperformed significantly in terms of younger people and while we were around the national proportion for Black and Asian people, we also underperformed significantly in terms of the population of London in that regard.

Some of that is doubtless related to the publicity issues just mentioned. The timescale meant there was no opportunity to promote it at Black Pride, for example.

There are a couple of people I reached out to as people with followings on YouTube etc, but who had other stuff going on in the relatively short time available. Again, more time more spoons etc would doubtless help.

Assorted other problems

When I was printing various things on the day before BiCon, my otherwise completely reliable Brother laser printer decided it didn't want to pick up anything from the paper tray, just the manual feed slot. (I've no idea why – it's working again now.)

That meant some things weren't printed on both sides and some things weren't printed at all (like multiple paper registration forms for people who turned up on the day and some signage)

I knew I would forget something and that something turned out to be the name badge stickers. A very helpful desk volunteer – thank you Kathryn! – bought some more, but stickers didn't really work as well as badge + lanyard would have done.

Transphobic crap

On 23rd September, Bi Visibility Day, I posted:

Just drafting a Code of Conduct for https://2024.bicon.org.uk/, including:

"BiCon was an early adopter of accepting people's self-identified gender for all purposes, including single-gender spaces. We had the discussion in 1993 and to our knowledge, there have been zero problems as a result over the past 31 years.

It is not up for debate. If you disagree with it, we suggest you do not attend any BiCon."

..to various places including Twitter.^[11]I am not going to call it any other name, but the decisions of its owner – reposting hate, never mind platforming it, as well as providing lots of evidence they're a lying greedy selfish … Continue reading

Several people posted supportive comments online.

Several others started emailing transphobic crap to the BiCon email address. The level of it was never huge and I was personally fine just categorising it all as spam, but I'm not aware of it happening before.

But given that a pair of transphobic crap conferences were happening a couple of weekends later, including that of the well-funded hate group LGB Alliance,^[12]In 2022/23, they had the money to spend £113k paying an average of two staff, £146k on running events, £17k on admin support, £24k on premises, £8k on travel and hotels etc etc etc. The budget … Continue reading I thought it sensible to not specify the precise venue until after they had finished.

I was never expecting any protest / action at BiCon from the bigots (and that's clearly what the 'B' in the LGBA's name stands for given that they regularly and happily platform some notorious biphobes) but it would have been a bit easier for that to have been arranged if they knew the venue when they were meeting in person.

I did enjoy pointing out that, despite their funding, the cheapest ticket to the LGBA's one day event was £75, 25% more than the top end of BiCon's sliding scale for weekend tickets, and positively cheered when some young trans activists disrupted it, causing it to be truncated.

Those activists also got emailed an offer of free tickets, should they want to come to BiCon but found even the lowest tier too expensive.

Conduct

To attendees in general:

I'm not aware of any problems – if you know of any, please do tell me.

To attendees staffing the desk:

"Someone who wouldn't take no for an answer about joining a session that had closed and had to be told a couple of times, and someone who was a bit huffy about reading all the code of conduct". Both are fortunate that I didn't know about this about at the time.

To me:

One person who proposed a session that they knew was scheduled for Sunday thought it was OK not to tell me that they weren't going to turn up at the school at all. I only found out because they told someone else at the Saturday evening event.

Other things that were a reminder to me

1. Someone adding the comment to their booking info that they were sorry for where they were on the sliding scale reminded me that having one isn't as common as it should be. In the 'thank you for booking' email, I said:

".. please do not feel sorry in any way for where you are on the sliding scale.

"It is absolutely one of the pillars of BiCon .. Being defiantly non-commercial in comparison to so much of the LGBTQ+ communities is one of the things I love. There is no way to know who paid what to attend. People who pay more don't get a shinier badge or any other perk: instead we all get more lovely people at BiCon! Win!"

2. We don't have 'tickets' in the way that new people can expect, so those 'thank you for booking' emails should mention that just their name will be enough (possibly with an email address in case two Jo Smiths, say, book!) and they're not missing an email with a barcode that will be scanned or similar.

Other things that surprised me

1. I expected people from outside London to ask about somewhere to stay and people in London to offer places on Discord. It didn't happen there or anywhere else I looked.

It's absolutely not something I wanted to make official: I saw the Public Liability insurance as a necessary spend that we wouldn't actually need to use, but if I could have been seen to be in any way responsible for what happened to people staying in other people's homes, I would have been going "£2m? It's not enough!" to the insurers. That's just thinking about guests falling down stairs, even before anything else.

I used a friend's place (thank you!) arranged directly. It would be interesting to know how many others from outside of London did.

2. There were no complaints or indeed comments about not having any anti-racism training this year until someone mentioned it in their feedback form.

Not having any was a combination of correctly expecting that a large chunk of people had been in the 2020s and done it then, spoons (again!), and not having the rights to the recorded sessions that have been used.

It turned out that around half of people who booked for the weekend had been before and done the training then. (Other people had been to a 2020s BiCon and hadn't, presumably because of being from a visible ethnic minority.) Another quarter had been to a BiCon prior to the 2020s and I happen to know that some of those would have been excused doing it too.

It would also have made it much more difficult to have people come on the day and, as mentioned, I expected more of those and also expected to be able to get various publications actually publicise the event. Around half of the people who came for a day were new to BiCon.

3. The giant post-it notes, usable as flip-chart paper without a stand, turned out to be really useful. There are twenty in a pad that cost me £15.82.^[13]Looks like that was a 'Cyber Monday' price and it's usually around £25 on Amazon. By the end of Saturday, we'd used all of them at least once. Get two pads next time.

4. I didn't bring a laptop with me to London, because I expected to be able to do things like last minute update or news emails on my phone. I could but it was a lot harder. It turns out that you can easily paste a plain text list of addresses to BCC an email to into( Gmail in a full web browser, but if you try to do it on the Gmail app – or in the phone's browser – then it wants you to do them one by one. What should have been the job of a couple of seconds took several minutes.

5. One bit of feedback mentioned finding out about BiCon via a book I do not rate highly: it's just gone up a bit in my estimation.

They also mentioned a podcast host – who's never ever been to BiCon – saying it was too academic and too geeky. I didn't expect my opinion of that person to go down any lower than it already was given their past behaviour, but surprises come in many forms…

Stuff that didn't happen

1. There was a plan to name rooms after people from the UK bi community who are no longer with us: names like David Burkle, Kay Dekker, Jackie Hutchinson and others.

2. As ever, there were a dozen or so sessions I would happily have run. Choosing what to offer at another BiCon has been harder than doing most of this one.

3. I had a speech lined up for the closing ceremony. It went because of shifting the rest of Sunday's timings 15 minutes later. As well as some of this stuff, it had included:

"It's been really lovely to see some people I don't see nearly often enough..

.. but enough about the kids."

.. because both were there in their own right. One had previously been the star of "So you're thinking of having a baby (with real live baby)" back in 2002.

4. Someone mentioned in their feedback that, although 1st December is World Aids Day, there was no reflection of that at BiCon including on Sunday. I didn't think about that for a second until that came in. Hmmm, thank you anonymous feedback person.

Partly, it's because in the 36 years WAD has been going, not once has had it had a theme explicitly acknowledging gay and bisexual men have been disproportionally affected by HIV, so I don't think of it as being something for us.

Sexual health, recent developments in HIV/Aids treatments and prevention, the place of bisexuals in the 'gay (oh, and bisexual) men's health sector', and others have all been sessions I've done at BiCon in previous years.. but weren't priorities for me this time and no-one else suggested anything like them either. Hmmm.

It's made me think

I probably shouldn't set myself up for volunteering to do one of them, but having done this one I can imagine – in a way that would have been inconceivable before – that we could have two BiCons a year again.

It happened in 1985 (one in London, one in Edinburgh) after all..

Want to do one?

If you'd like to run a BiCon instead of me – and the comment I made about 'I would like the next BiCon I go to to..' when testing the feedback form was "be organised by someone else" 🙂 – then email info@biconcontinuity.org.uk and we'll put you in touch with each other.

Thanks

Two have been mentioned already:

    Katy – who did all of making Saturday evening happen

    Grant – who with his online kit and teching made online BiCon 2024 possible

Two people gave a bunch of advice in long conversations this year:

    Rowan – also mentioned already: a large number of things we came to take for granted were first done by Rowan

    Natalya – if you're interested in disability rights, check out Reasonable Access

People who helped, from doing sessions to covering the desk – in describing BiCon to people who were at another event, I came up with the phrase "we don't make BiCon, you do". If they were physically present, they got a purple ribbon. It's an idea first done by Rowan, when they used gold stars for people's name badges.

Other directors / trustees of BiCon Continuity – for letting me do this one.

All the attendees – as I said at the start, attendees make it a BiCon. Venue + people = BiCon, venue + people = BiCon, venue + people = BiCon…

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Geeky details appendix

Website software: WordPress, hosted on the BiCon Continuity server

WordPress has its downsides, but it is very easy to use and a holding site using it already existed. (Having done WP sites for other people, I've got setting up a new one, complete with assorted useful addons, down to a minute or so with the help of a script.)

How long WordPress stays a sensible choice became much more of a question following the behaviour of the person who controls far too much of the WP system late in 2024. A 'fork' of WP before it started going badly wrong six years ago, ClassicPress, exists but limits you in terms of themes and plugins you can use because of the differences between the two.

For someone else, I've switched to using Hugo, a 'static site generator', but their site actively doesn't want any comments, there are not many good self-hosted comment services for sites that don't use things like WordPress, and I wanted some way of people contacting me without using email.

Booking system software: Forminator

BiCon is not suited to most booking systems, even (especially?) the expensive ones that vendors will try to get you to buy if you go to a conference organising event.

If you want to make someone trying to sell you a booking system stop bothering you, try telling them "We will have a dozen accessible rooms for people with disabilities. They will differ according to the needs of the person who would best be in it, all be priced seven different ways – each totally valid for the same room – and we'll allow people to pay in three different ways, including in instalments. The other rooms…" It's always worked for me.

Amongst other things we don't have a fixed price for tickets, we usually don't have a limit on how many people book (the exception is when there's a limited number of one sort of room), we don't want people to book more than one ticket as opposed to getting one booking per person.. unless it's someone coming with a carer, and.. well, the list goes on.

People have talked about using Eventbrite and Outsavvy. Apart from the issues just mentioned, Eventbrite charges more in the UK than it charges anywhere else in the world, currently 6.95% of the ticket price plus 59p on top of that. Outsavvy wants 5% of anything more than £51 (with a £3 minimum) and 10% of anything that's £10 or less (with a 50p minimum) and different rates for tickets between those two.

If you sort your own booking system and go direct to a payment provider, they can charge you much less. For this BiCon, the savings over using Eventbrite were around £100. For a residential one, it'd be well over £1,000 and for one the size of 2019's around £2,000. You can do a brilliant BiCon Ball with a thousand quid. You can subsidise a bunch of People of Colour coming to your BiCon with a thousand quid.

Before 2015, I think bookings were all done 'by hand'. At least one had a geek who wanted to write their own online booking system in their favourite computer language, but I don't think any managed it. If they had, I just know that it wouldn't have been usable by other years.

From 2015 to 2019, BiCons used an ticketing addon to WordPress called Event Espresso. The booking system itself is hosted on an entirely different site so that teams can have someone looking after their year's website without letting them have access to the more sensitive booking info that only one or two people need to see.

EE was flexible enough to cope with what we need.. with some tweaks. With some help from the developers, I was able to make it do things like not have any particular price pre-selected – we don't want to push people to pay any particular price – for example.

Setting it up each year wasn't easy for beginners to the system: realistically, I was the only person who could do it and because I only did it once a year, there was an amount of frustration each time. It also costs $99.95 per year, halved if you renewed quickly each time, so usually under £40. (As an indication, that's less than a tenth of what some conference booking systems want to charge you per event.)

The online-only BiCons for 2020 and 2021 were a case for using (and did use) Eventbrite – it doesn't charge you for free events. It does take a cut of any and all donations though.

By 2022, I didn't want to face Event Espresso again and had found Forminator. It's another addon to the WordPress software. Instead of doing 'tickets', it does forms.. and that can include booking forms, including linking to a payment provider to get the money. It's clever enough for you to be able to say things like 'only show the question about children's ages if they have said they're bringing children' or 'don't ask about donations if they've ticked the £5 discount box' and do the maths to work out the total you want to pay ('basic amount – discount + donation').

It's also free. (There is a paid for version that does other things, like produce PDFs of the submitted data, but we don't need those.)

So Forminator is what I used this year and had no problems. I don't think 2022 had any either. 2023 used a different – paid for – forms program, because they couldn't get Forminator payments working.

Forminator is also what's used for bicurious.org.uk, including this year's feedback form – if you want to do a survey relevant to the bi community and don't want to pay SurveyMonkey or similar, do get in touch.

Payment processor for the online bookings: Stripe

Currently, Forminator allows you to link to payment providers Stripe and PayPal. Back in 2022, it only did this for Stripe – clearly PayPal have since paid the authors something to include them too. Having experienced PayPal for this in the past (it is still the only one Event Espresso will use unless you pay them more money) using anyone else Stripe was the obvious choice anyway.

Almost everyone who booked in advance paid that way rather than wanting to do a bank transfer or pay cash at the door (a handful of people for each..)

Stripe charge 1.5% + 20p for transactions using UK-issued personal cards, and 2.5% + 20p for EU-issued cards. I think PayPal's fees are 1.2% plus 30p for UK cards, but that comes with having to deal with PayPal and they work out as 2.49% plus 30p for EU-issued cards.

One person from outside the UK had problems paying online (none of the others did) and there were no other problems at all to report.

Payment processor for in-person bookings: Square

With an account with a payment processor, any reasonably recent Android/Apple phone that will work with Google Wallet or Apple Pay can take card payments. Stripe will do them, but needs some work to set them up, and I already had accounts with Square and SumUp.

SumUp are a small fraction of a percent cheaper (1.69% of the money rather than Square's 1.75%), but the Square app is easier to use. Amongst other things, it takes you straight into the 'take a payment' bit rather than having to go there from a home screen, which made writing the instructions for other people to follow much easier. When you start using it, it also doesn't default to wanting to charge VAT. Oh, and writing this has reminded me that, with the right link, the first £1,000 of payments within a month or two of opening a Square account can be free, so that can be another reason for using them for future BiCons.

I've used both for selling stuff at table sales etc, and forgot to change the account name (it might well have been a faff to do so) so people on the day found themselves paying "YES" rather than "BiCon" as far as their bank account is concerned.

Bank account: Kroo

Opening a business account was its usual pain and I didn't have much time, so I ended up using a personal account I already had opened. Kroo pay interest on current accounts (recently changed to be 1.10% less than the Bank of England's base rate which means at the time of writing 3.65%) and their app has to be very easy: it's an 'app only' bank. Looking, we made enough on the interest Kroo paid to cover the cost of buying those giant post-its.

It turns out that it doesn't accept payments from non-UK banks – when someone had a problem paying with their EU-issued card via the online booking system, we ended up receiving their money via PayPal.

Phone: Lebara

£5/month reduced to £2.50 for the first two or three months – I only used it for two – got 5GB of data as well as more minutes and texts than any BiCon is going to need. As well as being a contact number, it handled the in-person bookings, but at one point I was wondering if we'd need to use it for data for the online bits.

If you use them, note that when you cancel your cheap contract a week or so after BiCon, it puts you on a 'pay as you go' deal instead of just cutting you off entirely, so take the SIM out of the phone you're using.

BiCon News email list: groups.io

The idea of having an email list for 'here's details for the next BiCon' etc emails has occurred before. When I did a search recently, it turned out that the previous go at setting one up was in 2020. That looks like it no longer exists and I can't find anything from it in my email.

I picked groups.io because BiCon Continuity already had two or three mailing lists there, so making them an owner of this one too was easy, and I'm happy handing off the tech involved in setting up a mailing list to a company. It also looks like it might last in a way that, for example, Yahoo's mailing lists ('Yahoo Groups') didn't.

If you're not already on it, send an email to BiCon-News+subscribe@groups.io to join. It's very low volume.