Rest in peace CUSFS, long live Jomsborg
Feb. 19th, 2007 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackEdit2: An emergency committee was formed, and five years later CUSFS has an exceptionally active community composed mainly of undergraduates, so I apologise for my pessimism. See a more detailed description in a reply to Jessica below.
Edit: This was based on my impressions from the conversation afterwards, and is inaccurate in a couple of important respects. It may do as jack-chatting-to-friends, but CUSFS will send an email describing the decisions accurately, to which you should turn.
Last night I went to the CU Science Fiction Society AGM. For a while it has been being sustained by an older crowd of Chiarky people and more recently a less old crowd of Simeony people, but has not really been acquiring *new* people.
Some of the events, such as games evenings, and traditional large CUSFS/Jomsborg socials like the wake have been busy. I haven't attended many of the regular Sunday discussions, but AFAIK they have not been very well attended. The desire has been to attract new freshers to join, and then run the society for their benefit, but if this isn't happening, there's no point carrying on with what we've been doing.
They decided to disband at least for the moment.
There is still a committee for this year, and there are many people steeped in experience and the traditions who will be pleased to help anyone who does resurrect it. And Jomsborg (originally the fantasy split group, now the social half of the society) is certainly sustaining, not actually doing anything scifi/fantasy-y, but as an alumni organisation with rich traditions still hosts the traditional social events (afmaelisdagr and veizla) attended by lots of people of many eras, and steadily if slowly sucking in new people from here and there.
If anyone laments the lack of a real science fiction society in Cambridge, feel free to ask to co-opt the large amount of existing infrastructure in CUSFS and organise it as you want.
Edit: This was based on my impressions from the conversation afterwards, and is inaccurate in a couple of important respects. It may do as jack-chatting-to-friends, but CUSFS will send an email describing the decisions accurately, to which you should turn.
Last night I went to the CU Science Fiction Society AGM. For a while it has been being sustained by an older crowd of Chiarky people and more recently a less old crowd of Simeony people, but has not really been acquiring *new* people.
Some of the events, such as games evenings, and traditional large CUSFS/Jomsborg socials like the wake have been busy. I haven't attended many of the regular Sunday discussions, but AFAIK they have not been very well attended. The desire has been to attract new freshers to join, and then run the society for their benefit, but if this isn't happening, there's no point carrying on with what we've been doing.
They decided to disband at least for the moment.
There is still a committee for this year, and there are many people steeped in experience and the traditions who will be pleased to help anyone who does resurrect it. And Jomsborg (originally the fantasy split group, now the social half of the society) is certainly sustaining, not actually doing anything scifi/fantasy-y, but as an alumni organisation with rich traditions still hosts the traditional social events (afmaelisdagr and veizla) attended by lots of people of many eras, and steadily if slowly sucking in new people from here and there.
If anyone laments the lack of a real science fiction society in Cambridge, feel free to ask to co-opt the large amount of existing infrastructure in CUSFS and organise it as you want.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-19 05:04 pm (UTC)And for the record - it's not so much the energy that's failed for me, but I've just had enough of worrying, of spending effort for little reward, of propping up a society that's slowly slipping away.
Another thing is that CUSFS, I think, needs a critical mass and some level of turnover to be successful, to generate new ideas, good discussions and so on. In practise, this means undergrads. I would have liked there to still be a CUSFS for me to go to from time to time if there was something to catch my fancy, but as it is, for the past few years we've been keeping it alive for the sake of keeping it alive and that isn't sustainable.