History of the BiCon Guidelines

4 August 2023 by Jennifer

A comment written by me in discussions in 2021.  Still relevant, so I thought it would be useful to have it documented in public here.

Context

• BiCon is an annual social/educational gathering, for bi people in the UK and “anyone with a positive interest in bisexuality”.
• There are BiCon Guidelines which describe what it’s meant to be like.
• BiCon Continuity is a legal entity which, these days, looks after BiCon’s money.  As I mention in the comment, this didn’t exist back in the 1990s.
• Another thing I refer to in this comment is the “DMP”.  That was the “Decision-Making Plenary”.  It still exists, but it’s not officially called that any more:  the name was changed (I think in 2022) to be “BiCon Decides”.  It’s a BiCon session every year where whoever’s there gets to vote on things about BiCon.  The word “plenary” is often used to signal “we want everyone to go to this session, so we don’t schedule other stuff at the same time”.

This bit is the actual comment from 2021

Source:  my recollection of the discussions/arguments/concerns which were current around 1995-1998, and the meeting itself where the Guidelines were first voted in.

To me the Guidelines are, or were meant as, a framework for creating shared expectations.

The point wasn’t that you had to do them all.  The point was that you EITHER had to do them OR you had to say up front that you weren’t gonna, which might mean that the DMP didn’t vote for you to run BiCon.

(There was no BiCon Continuity in those days.  One team would hand the money direct to the next team.  If more than one group wanted to run the next BiCon, then either people would talk it out like “Okay, you do next year and we’ll do 2 years from now”, or the DMP would vote on it.  The formal hand-over was at a DMP.  That’s a bit oversimplified but that’s the gist of it.)

The point of having Guidelines was so that when, as a BiCon participant, you voted in a team to run a future BiCon, you knew what you were getting.

(Or at least, you knew what the team was committing to, even if in practice there were reasons why they didn’t manage to deliver.)

The concern* which the Guidelines would answer was like:  “But what if someone says they’re doing BiCon, and then they decide that their BiCon is going to be a cruise to the Bahamas which costs like a thousand pounds each.”

Or, for a less far-fetched example:  any team could decide not to have the sliding scale fees, and nobody would have any comeback – because they’d never said in the first place there would be sliding scale fees, all they’d said was “we will run a BiCon”.

I think since 1998, there has been a kind of, not exactly “scope creep”, but some kind of “people forgot what these were really for”, which has turned them into RULES. They weren’t meant to be rules. They were meant to be a starting point for a negotiation between a potential team and the wider community.

Notes

Original comment was made 18 August 2021, as part of discussions about making BiCon better, especially as regards anti-racism.  Lightly edited for clarity.

* “The concern”:  I might’ve overstated this; maybe it was “a concern”, and there were some other concerns floating around too.  However, the potential of “people could do any old thing and call it BiCon” was certainly central to the discussions I remember.