Revised registration rates

New and final pre-registration rates for RodCon have been announced in the website. We've been thinking about this for the past few weeks, asking for feedback from potential sponsors and attendees, and we're glad that we can make a final decision now and just steam ahead without any hesitation henceforth! Since a convention like this hasn't really been done before in the Philippines and we haven't got anything to use as a standard exept for--ironically--professional conventions and US fandom convention models, we basically went for an uneasy mix between the two, at least in terms of deciding the economics of the entire thing. I was personally interested to see how Filipinos would respond to the possibility of a stay-in convention with a programming such as RodCon's, but I don't suppose we're ready to take on a full-scale model as yet. So, a prototype would have to do :)

At the risk of repeating myself (as if I haven't already, numerous times): RodCon is not a book fair or book expo, as such. What we'd really like is for convention attendees to involve themselves actively with the programming of the con, to take advantage of the activities to the fullest. This is why we fixed the initial entrance rate at that level, because we couldn't be sure about the number of people who'd take a chance on an approach like this, so we concentrated on a conservative estimate of presumably hard-core bibliophiles and industry fixtures who would see the risk for what it was and take it. We also thought that since the proceeds would be going to a charitable cause, the latter should--how to say this?--expedite any fuss about the entrance fees :) But that was a frank and rather deliberate miscalculation (in other words: malay natin, kumagat).

However, it seems that we can now safely expand our targeted audience for the con to include groups and organizations we hadn't considered before, and the lineup of activities is beginning to reflect this. We're honestly happy about how this turned out and we're all learning a lot from RodCon. I'm one of those people who, if I hadn't belonged to the secretariat, would also have been asking myself whether I would be willing to pay P500 for the convention. My answer in the end was "Yes," but attached with a qualified disclaimer about how I'm probably not ready for this, etc. As it is, the dilemma has been sidelined in favor of an astonishingly simple compromise (without all the anguished metaphysics!)