An A5, 8 page booklet, stapled together. The following covers pages 2 and half of 3. Transcription: Anna Hepworth
Functions and Fortunes
When the original Committee emerged it was neccessarily[sic] formed along the lines of the previous type as it had no other precedent at the time. It was created as a fully fledged Convention Organising Committee. This took advantage of personal enthusiasm generated by WAYCON, and also benefited from the freshness of the event in fault-finding and idea-raising. This original form was found to be very unweildy[sic], after a while, as
a) the number of subjects was too vast to cover easily,
b) it was hard to establish priorities for those subjects,
c) there were too many people at the meetings for concise and consistant[sic] decision making. Another factor adding to this problem was that, apart from fund-raising, the Committee’s real purpose at this time is advertising WestAustralian[sic] Fandom to the rest of Australia and winning the NatCon bid. That meant that our energies and expenditure should be devoted to that end and the only committee members getting anything out of the meetings were those specifically involved with Publicity and Interstate Fan communication. This was the deciding factor for the creation of the “Action Group”. As two of the members of the sub-committee live in the same house (a not unusual fannish occurrence) Perth In ’80 Bid activity is able to occur on a day to day basis.
Now we come to the negative effects of this system. As of the present we have an active Bidding Committee of three persons. The output of this group (apart from an article in the WASFFAN) is all orientated for other States. This means that very few people (i.e., those Full Committee members and Fans who keep in touch socially) in WA know what is going on. Add to this the noticable[sic] absence of the previous committee activity and we have been left with a vacuum -a vacuum that this Report is intended to fill.
The present Committee System has not failed – neither in its work (as you will soon see), nor in the creation of the aforementioned “activity vacuum”. Constant communication by Roy Ferguson with the ‘outside world’ is the reason for the rest of the sub-committee becoming aware of this problem and now we are catering to it. You see – the process is dynamic, we have been informed of something we should be doing and thus it is done. We take this as a positive aspect of this active group.
The future of Committee activity is also as dynamic. After all, once WA is the official National Convention Host for 1980, this sub-committee will no longer exist – for what use is “Bid Committee” once the Bid has been completed? After SYNCON ’79 the first task will be to form a “SWANCON 5 Committee”, who will then get on with the planning of the convention itself.
So, to those of you who feel disillusioned by the seeming collapse of the original activity, our thoughts are: “take heart, – it’s still your convention – it’s still happening – and we do need your help, co-operation and participation in the preparation of the biggest Fan event in WA so far!”