cynical
burnunit's comment here.God forbid I should argue from authority (because nobody would believe me anyway, LOL), and I could be horribly wrong, but I don't think either you or
michaellee have done your homework when it comes to looking at the history of fandom. This kind of thing has been tried before and it doesn't work. If it did, the N3F wouldn't be just another obscure fannish organization and the L5 Society would have an O'Neill station or two at the Lagrange points by now. You can hardly get fans to cooperate at the convention level without drama and stupidity breaking out, and part of the reason is that for the vast majority of us, Fandom Is Just A Goddamn Hobby. It has to be, because there really isn't a whole lot of money to be made from acting like Fandom Is A Way of Life. Unless you're in the T-shirt business, I guess.Fandom is heavily reliant on a volunteer labor force because there's not a lot of loose money lying around to be spent on hiring professionals to do the heavy lifting. When you start getting into the SERIOUS BUSINESS world of non-profits, you'll have no choice but to hire those people, because the demands of operating in that world won't allow you to get by with volunteers any more. And this will generate drama, which generates schism, and then the failure cascades.
Yeah, maybe it won't go like that. Maybe LoW will have just the right combination of personalities and lucky breaks to avoid that. But given just the examples provided here by
qob and fsf_rapier, and what I've seen in the history of WSFA and BSFS, that's not the way to bet, and that's what phoenixalpha and I have been trying to say. Look, I'm not saying MISFITS and ATC shouldn't talk to each other. God forbid I should ever say that, because we have ties that go back to the beginning of ATC and beyond. I'm not saying the other clans of Twin Cities fandom shouldn't be a party to those conversations. What I am saying is that there are very good reasons why MNSTF isn't (and never was) the only game in town any more, why fandom in general is not one big happy family, and why you need to study these things before you try and bring all the clan chiefs together to talk about helping each other out and acquiring a Spiffy New Edifice Complex to hang out in between conventions. Because otherwise somebody's going to get hurt, and it could well be you and
michaellee. Funny thing. It's usually the guys with the good intentions that do. 