"Hello, Concom Member"

Rev. 19-Apr-1999

Chaz Boston Baden, web99@99.nasfic.org

This page is of interest to members of the convention committee, including Division and Department Heads, and anyone else working in a staff position of some kind. If this doesn't apply to you, please move along, there's nothing to see here.

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Some information about www.99.nasfic.org and your department.

Writing Articles about your Department

Here's something you should know about how the website and the Progress Reports work together.

Any information that first appears in a Progress Report will show up on the web page.
Anything that shows up on the website will probably appear in the next Progress Report.

You can send me information about your department, and I'll put it online. You can tell me to change it later, and I'll make the revisions. And then when Publications is ready to go to press, they'll just copy the latest version off of the web page when they lay out the PR.

If you've had something printed in a PR already, you should probably check out the website's Table of Contents to see where it turned up on the website. (If you don't see a heading that makes sense for your department, there's a keyword-search option at the bottom of the page.)

The Infobot News

We have an announcement list (NASFIC99-NEWS) called the Infobot News, which comes out intermittently; when we get closer to the convention it'll come out every week. About 35% of our members subscribe to this e-mail list. Anything you send to me to put on the web page will also be sent out to the mailing list, unless you tell me otherwise.

Special Forms

Suppose you have a special form of some kind, such as a ballot or a sign-up form, and you want it reproduced exactly. I'd like to have those on the website as PDF files, so that anyone with the Adobe Acrobat Reader [www] can print it out and have it look just like you want it. (Of course, if they fax it back to you, it'll wind up kind of grainy anyway, but at least it'll start out legible.)

If you don't have the capability of outputting a PDF file, then just send me the document as an attachment and I'll take care of it. Any sort of registration form, voting form, or reservation form that we produce, I'd like to have in PDF form.

I can also put a fill-in form on the web site, like our Change of Address Form. This way, a fan can fill in the form from their web browser, and their information will be e-mailed to you. If you'd like something like this, let me know. (If you have some sort of paper form that gets printed in the Progress Report, please let me know whether it's okay to convert it to a web page.)

Staff Listings

We have a Staff and Committee Roster online. I'd like it to be accurate. If you could take a moment to check over how your department looks and make sure it's all right, I'd really appreciate it. Please send me e-mail if you find anyone missing, misspelled, or otherwise misfiled. If you have a very large department, I can easily list your helpers on the page that talks about your department, instead of or in addition to the Staff and Committee Roster.

Convention E-mail Addresses

I've set up an E-mail Directory for the convention. The way it works is fairly simple. E-mail addressed to so-and-so@99.nasfic.org is automatically forwarded to so-and-so's "real" e-mail address. This means that we can give out a "99.nasfic.org" e-mail address, and if you change your address before the convention starts we only have to update the database, instead of having to issue a bunch of updates to everyone who reads the progress reports.

It also means, when in full operation, that if you want to send e-mail to Chaz Baden, for example, all you have to do is spell the name correctly with a period to splice the first and last together, and voila - chaz.baden@99.nasfic.org will work just fine to send me e-mail. This means if someone's working for the convention, you don't have to look up their e-mail address - just spell their name correctly and you can send it via our e-mail system.

Now, there's also departmental e-mail addresses. Suppose that you're in charge of gaming, just for example. I can set up the address gaming@99.nasfic.org and then e-mail about Gaming at Conucopia will go to you. Or, to you and your assistant, if you desire it set up that way. (Your own little departmental mailing list or "exploder.") Then, if you have to give up Gaming down the line (because you've lost interest in games, or have been transfered to Jakarta, or something), we can reassign the e-mail alias to whoever takes over. As an example, web99@99.nasfic.org is another valid e-mail address for myself.

I'd like to urge everyone to give out their 99.nasfic.org e-mail address whenever they need to mention receiving e-mail about the convention.

Special Needs: If you'd like your e-mail address to automatically reply with a canned message, as well as forward the e-mail to you, please let me know. I've done it before, so I know it's feasible.

E-mail printouts?

If you get something in the mail that looks like it's a copy of something you already received via e-mail, it probably is, and if so it may be safely discarded.

All the e-mail that goes through the web form is copied to an archive file here. If the e-mail was misaddressed, for example if your department or name was misspelled (for example: webmister@99.nasfic.org), we'll attempt to figure out who it was meant for, and send it along. We might do this via the U.S. Mail. Also, from time to time I'll go through the archives and mail out printed copies of what's in there; this is a failsafe mechanism, because e-mail can be unreliable. (The archived copy here is filed by the CGI script before it's sent out into the e-mail stream.)

Other Departments

The Daily Newsletter department head would like you to take a look at the Daily Newszine page, at your convenience, before the convention.

See also:

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