Portland is bidding for Westercon 69 in 2016 announced chair Lea Rush.
In addition to Rush, the committee of the OSFCI-sponsored bid includes David Turner, Dawn Hewitt, Debra Stansbury, Devlin Perez, Helen Umberger, James Lewis, Lisa Godare, Meredith Cook, Jenn Contreras-Perez, Patty Wells, Samuel Klein, Sarah Gulde, Scott Sanford, and Shauna McKain-Storey.
They propose to hold the event – nicknamed Bridgecon — in the Doubletree Portland over July 1 – 4, 2016.
The bid’s Facebook and Twitter pages are live.
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FYI, their bid was filed before the January 1 deadline, so only bids from the North and South Westercon zones are eligible for the ballot. (The Central Zone being, roughly speaking, Northern California, Nevada except Las Vegas, and everything east of there.) Other bids have until April 15 to file to be on the ballot. Also, this bid has effectively nothing to do with the OSFCI-sponsored bid for Westercon 66 that came to grief in San Jose in 2011 other than it’s in the same city and has the same parent non-profit corporation.
Would you like to elaborate on what you mean by “effectively nothing” since you brought up that it’s a bid from the same parent corporation for the same city?
Yep: Different hotel. Completely different committee.
A parallel local to you might be if someone from San Diego had gotten LASFS to “adopt” a Westercon bid for, say, Pasadena while SCIFI were engrossed in the run-up to an Anaheim Worldcon; then that person managed to present the bid so poorly that he was unable to convince a majority of the voters in a nominally uncontested race to vote for the bid. Now roll forward a few years, with the hypothetical Anaheim Worldcon done, and the chair of a successful Loscon getting the LASFS board behind a new bid for, say, the LAX Marriott with a committee of people not involved with the previous bid. Both bids would be “LA” by outside perception, and both would have the same corporate parent, but they’d be so different as to be hardly worth noticing if it weren’t for the fact that they both had “LA” in their headline name.
In retrospect (easy to say now with the benefit of three years of hindsight), it probably wasn’t a great idea for OSFCI to endorse a Westercon bid when a significant proportion of its active and competent members were focused on a Worldcon in Reno. The Portland bid for 2013 apparently had a great hotel contract and their leader was respected as a con-ops kind of person, but the skills to run convention operations are not generally the same political glad-handing skills it takes to win a bid. (Even then, Portland in 2013 was only one vote short of the necessary majority. You really have to work to lose an uncontested election.)