There’s still time to host a fan table or fan party at the first ever Virtual Worldcon, and we encourage you to apply- but don’t delay, as the registration deadline is 15th July at midnight NZT. This is to give our tech team time to make the plans they need to.
Fan tables will happen on Discord, and fan parties will be hosted via Zoom.
To learn a bit more, and apply to host a table or a party, visit our fan tables, fan parties, flyers and freebies page.
The first Digital WorldCon masquerade is a unique event celebrating costumes from all over the world. The Masquerade has always been a space that welcomes every kind of costuming.
As always we only ask that you enter the appropriate categories.
Not everyone can meet in person, and most certainly not everyone has professional grade recording and editing equipment! We want to encourage creative, but safe, use of whatever technology you have available.
Take inspiration from how technology has connected us, socially, for work, for school, how theatre has reimagined works, and to embrace any limitations as creativity.
The Masquerade rules can be found here.
The Masquerade registration guide can be found here.
The Masquerade registration form can be found here.
Masquerade registration closes Sunday 23.59 NZST (New Zealand Standard Time) 26 July 2020.
Members of the press are invited to register their interest in Press Credentials or Press Passes for CoNZealand, 78th World Science Fiction Convention, that will be held online, from July 29 to August 2, 2020.
Registrations are open until July 22, 2020.
Press Passes are available solely for working press staff—defined as individuals employed by recognised professional “Out of Community” media outlets such as television and radio stations, newspapers, and other news outlets, who are on assignment from those outlets and who would not be attending the convention if their jobs did not require it.
Press Credentials identify attendees as press. They will be available to paid convention members who are covering the convention for the press or online media as part of their attendance. All members of the press are welcome to make use of the press services offered by the convention.
Interviews with any programme participants will need to be scheduled in advance as there won’t be time for these here.
Please read the Attending Press Policy and register your interest here.
The Chairs of CoNZealand are pleased to be able to offer a Membership upgrade initiative to support inclusion of indigenous, marginalised and historically underrepresented people at CoNZealand.
Marginalised communities are overrepresented in the group suffering the greatest fallout from this pandemic, and as such, we want to ensure that our community does not suffer a loss of its hard-won diversity. We want to lower the barriers for participation for those from underrepresented communities.
We want the convention to be a global one, where all communities and viewpoints are represented, and this fund is intended to help those who would otherwise not be able to participate fully in the activities of the Worldcon.
The initiative upgrades eligible members from supporting to attending memberships. These
Memberships include all the rights of an Attending Membership There is no need for applicants to purchase a supporting membership before they know they will be upgraded. We will subsidise the difference between the Supporting Membership and the Attending Membership ($225 NZD).
There are a small number of attending passes available. These passes do not include voting rights and the rights to paper publications, but will allow full attendance and participation. Eligible members who are already fully paid but would like some income relief are also invited to apply.
Applications can be made on the google form below:
https://forms.gle/4odYVgwvuvL8naLy5
Grantees will be chosen by the chairs. The grantees will be notified as soon as practical, and we will continue to announce grantees at least weekly as long as upgrades last.
Questions about this initiative can be mailed to inclusion@conzealand.nz.
We know that many of you are eager to cast your votes for this year’s awards. Although we are working hard on it, we have not yet been able to open online voting. We know that this has been frustrating, and we are sorry.
We will send an email to all members as soon as online voting is ready. In the meantime, the printable ballot is available on the Publications page. You may choose to use this to track your rankings while making your way through the finalists. You can also use it to submit your votes if you do not wish to wait for the online mechanism.
We appreciate your ongoing patience.
Hugo Award voting will close at 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7) on 15 July, 2020. If you have any questions about the packet or the voting process, please contact hugohelp@conzealand.nz.
For anyone who has not yet downloaded the Hugo Voters’ Packet, here are a couple of quick reminders:
Because of our agreement with the rights holders of the works in the packet, it will only be available until Hugo Award voting closes. If you have not downloaded the packet at that time, you will no longer be able to do so.
All supporting and attending members of CoNZealand can download the packet by visiting the Members Area of the website and logging in. Note that once you have accessed the Hugo Voter Packet you will not be eligible to request a full memberships refund, only a reduction to a Supporting Membership.
Happy reading (and listening and watching) everyone!
Costumes tell stories of times and places; by making and wearing them we can explore those worlds by thinking about the people who would have made them and about those who would have worn them, and our audience gets a chance to experience that with us. CoNZealand is proud to introduce the Digital Masquerade! Go here for details: CoNZealand Masquerade.
Kia ora,
We are buzzing around like bees, getting things ready for our virtual convention and making sure we are ready to welcome you on schedule. Amongst the many things that we are learning about the virtual convention space is that legally, it works differently from the in-person convention space. One of the places that this legal difference is most evident is the parameters for unique membership.
We will need to change the structure of our children’s memberships due to these legal differences. Children attending CoNZealand as individuals will need to be at least 13 years old by 29 July 2020. Kid-in-Tow memberships will not be available. We will do our best to have a place available for folks to register their children’s presence for the archives, but we cannot issue unique sign-ons for anyone under the age of 13.
In order to register for CoNZealand, we will need each member to have a unique email account. If you share an email account with another member, we will not be able to issue two unique sign-ons. If you need to register a new email account to do this. You can find directions on how to do this at Free Online Learning at GCFGlobal . Visit their website for more instructions if you want information on changing the settings of your gmail account or how to choose a strong password.
We expect to record most events and some panels so that they can be watched in different time zones. We are not able to say exactly what yet, but stay tuned.
Regarding the technical requirements to participate in the convention, your equipment will most likely be fine. To deliver a good convention experience, we are using many components, all of which work on many devices. Even if some of the systems won’t work perfectly on your device, you should still be able to engage adequately with CoNZealand through other systems. By “device”, we mean a computer, a smartphone, a tablet, or a web-connected TV.
To get the best CoNZealand experience, your device should be able to:
To test your own device(s), try the WebRTC Troubleshooter (https://test.webrtc.org/). It provides a good check. Click the Start Button. If you get ticks on everything except IPV6 and Reflexive Connectivity, your device should be OK.
You will need to register for a Discord ID to use the Discord-based chat rooms. If you have not used Discord before (or do not have a Discord ID) then follow these steps:
You can use Discord from a browser, but many users find that the experience is significantly better in the app. We recommend that you install the app from the Download tab on a discord.com page.
Because your online name is the primary way for people to recognise you, you might like to choose a user ID that will be recognizable by people who know you.
Over the five days of CoNZealand, you will probably use between one and three megabits per second (Mb/s). If you join for 10 hours per day you could use 60 Gigabytes or more of internet capacity. You should confirm that your plan is suitable. We recommend having an unlimited plan for the duration of CoNZealand. Ideally you should be able to stream at 10Mb/s or more, and you can test this with https://speedtest.net
If your device passes all of these tests, you should have a good experience. However, we can’t test every device, or guarantee that every device will work. CoNZealand does not have the resources to support specific situations or combinations of hardware. If your general web-surfing experience is good, and you can stream YouTube videos comfortably, then most likely your CoNZealand experience will be good too.
We thank you for your patience as we work through this. We want to give you the best experience possible, and we look forward to seeing you at CoNZealand.
Kia kaha,
Kelly Buehler
Norman Cates
We are happy to announce that the Hugo Voter Packet for the 2020 Hugo Awards is now available for download by those who have purchased a CoNZealand membership. There is no Voter Packet for the 1945 Retro Hugo Awards, but this is a list of links to publicly available material.
This download of materials is supplied free of charge as a courtesy by the creators and publishers of works on the final Hugo Awards ballot. The purpose is to allow those who are voting on the Hugo Awards to be able to make an informed choice among the nominated works. We are deeply appreciative of the publishers, authors, artists, editors, and other creators who have generously provided their works to this year’s Hugo Voter Packet.
We also ask that you honour publishers’ and creators’ request that you reserve these copies for your personal use only, and that you do not share these works with anyone who is not a member of CoNZealand.
Because of our agreement with the rights holders of the works in the packet, it will only be available until Hugo Award voting closes. If you have not downloaded the packet at that time, you will no longer be able to do so.
All supporting and attending members of CoNZealand can download the packet by visiting the Members Area of the website and logging in. Note that once you have accessed the Hugo Voter Packet you will not be eligible to request a full memberships refund, only a reduction to a Supporting Membership.
Happy reading (and listening and watching) everyone! We will open online Hugo Award voting soon; meanwhile we encourage you to keep track of your rankings as you read through the finalists’ work. Hugo Award voting will close at 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7) on 15 July, 2020. If you have any problems with the packet, please contact hugohelp@conzealand.nz.
Watch a message from Rose Mitchell, our fan guest of honour, on why the shift to a virtual con is a great thing.