I've seen precious few successful turnarounds of the kind you describe and all of them have started by reducing scope. This is tricky when you have an organization that has been doing a fairly decent job for many years and built an identity for itself as an organization that can do lots of things and do them well. It's very hard to accept that doing so many things, and putting in the effort required to do them well, isn't actually a good idea.
The most successful turnaround -- Wiscon 20 in 1996 -- reduced a lot of scope, and also billed itself as the last event. I wonder if that latter made the former easier, or more difficult. On the one hand, if the event is dying anyway, it's easier to kill parts of it. On the other, no one is thinking about sustainability.
What distinguishes Wiscon from other 1990s convention scope-reductions like Boskone and Minicon is that it wasn't aimed at making the con smaller. The things that remained were bigger, but because there were fewer of them it was less work. I don't know if Wiscon did this but in their place I'd also have considered which things had volunteers who loved them and which were just being done out of habit. Certainly some curious, non-core things survived the pullback, and those were things that by the time I started attending Wiscon a decade later definitely had volunteers who loved them.
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The most successful turnaround -- Wiscon 20 in 1996 -- reduced a lot of scope, and also billed itself as the last event. I wonder if that latter made the former easier, or more difficult. On the one hand, if the event is dying anyway, it's easier to kill parts of it. On the other, no one is thinking about sustainability.
What distinguishes Wiscon from other 1990s convention scope-reductions like Boskone and Minicon is that it wasn't aimed at making the con smaller. The things that remained were bigger, but because there were fewer of them it was less work. I don't know if Wiscon did this but in their place I'd also have considered which things had volunteers who loved them and which were just being done out of habit. Certainly some curious, non-core things survived the pullback, and those were things that by the time I started attending Wiscon a decade later definitely had volunteers who loved them.