-I must apologize if this doesnt make a whole lot of sense, it is 430am and Ive been traveling alot lately-
You would try to rope me into something like this Racket. I have helped run the largest free convention in the US for the past few years, (
http://www.momocon.com) and ran events of this scale professionally for two. I will not say I am the most qualified on the forums, in that I am a fairly big pessimist when it comes to cons, but I have been to over twenty this year for Momocon promotion. I say pessimist in that most people do not realize how much it is going to take both monetarily and timewise to get this off the ground. For Momo I personally spend a couple hundred a year on odds and ends to get it through (the actual con cost alot of money to put on and I am not at liberty to state that number). This is why I actually favored a meetup instead of a convention - like the one we were planning on doing at Animazement in Raleigh NC next year.
First thing that needs to be thought of is is there enough desire from the readers for an event like this? Not just the vocal forumnites but everyone who comes to the site. If there is only a small amount of interest (ie under 100 people), I would say it is not worth the amount of work that is going to go into it. Yall have to understand very few first year conventions break even, most stay in the red for the first few years. Momo was in the red the first three years (next year is our 6th). So even if we could do this on under $5k, dont expect any of that money to come back to you anytime soon.
Secondly before you can do any real planning you need to find a location. Be it in Atlanta, New York, Seattle, Leeds, Dubai, it doesnt matter, you need to find a location that can house everything you need. Make sure that in the agreement you can transfer goods and money in atleast one room (dealers room/bst area), and that you can get enough properly sized rooms. Ive seen some hotels where they will not, or cannot, let you sell things on the property - Holiday Inn was like this for quite sometime. I would stray from convention centers in that they are poor choices for this kind of convention.
Once you have a location, then you need a suitable date. It would be best to do it on a day where when there are no other cons or holidays, but thats up to yall. Ill tell you this though, Labor day is possibly the stupidest weekend we could try to do this – both PAX and Dragoncon are that weekend, and I already paid for Dragoncon, hotel and room. This is actually fairly easy to do in that there are several great websites that keep track of anime, scifi, comic, and gaming conventions.
Next up is staffing. Most cons try to keep staff at a 1:30 ratio to attendees. These people need to be savvy of the event and the rules and bylaws of the hotel and local area. Much easier to have locales handle this for those reasons. I imagine that most of us would be willing to staff it but if half the people who show up are staffers, you see where I am going with this? Head staff and/or Administrative staff are even more important. These are the people that will do the bulk of the work for the con. From planning to execution. I would like to say I can help with this, but my hands are tied with other endeavors that I cannot talk about for most of next year.
Then we have advertising. Getting the name out there is one thing I can really help with in that I can take the flyers to all the other cons I go to. Meaning that an informative flyer needs to be created. Those in the area of the event can also canvas the area if need be.
These are just a few of the big things that stuck out to me when I read this topic. If the screen would stop moving around the room I could cite examples and well type more coherently. So I will clsoe with this: I think a full blown convention is a few steps out of our league. Lets start with meetups, then move to a gameday of somesort (or something similar), then try for a convention in a few years. I dont think we have the time to pull one off next year, and lord knows I dont have the time or money to devote to this.
But like I said earlier, I may not be the most qualified on the forums, just giving my opinions.
