Organizing a US Demo Party: Pilgrimage 2003

By Legalize/Polygony

Pilgrimage 2003 is over and now that I've had time to get things back to normal, I'm going to talk about Pilgrimage from the organizer's perspective. I'm combining a recounting of my experiences with advice for other organizers.

Don't Know Nuthin'

I've never been to a demo party before. I first heard about the demo scene in August 2002 at SIGGRAPH in San Antonio, Texas. I have never organized a demo party before, or anything as large as Pilgrimage. I've seen pictures, read trip reports, browsed slengpung, talked to people on IRC, browsed pouet and ojuice, downloaded the demoshow CDs and watched as many demos as I could, downloaded Assembly 2002 results after SIGGRAPH 2002, browsed two headed squirrel, monostep.org and other personally recommended lists of demos. I can't really tell you if our demo party "felt" like a European demo party or previous North American parties having attended none of them.

In addition to my lack of experience, we have the current state of the demo scene in the USA. Very few people know about demos at this point. Those who do know about demos are not necessarily geographically concentrated and don't have a well defined electronic community web portal. The interests are currently splintered across the music, graphics, and gaming communities.

Demo Scene Cherry

After seeing the demo scene panel at SIGGRAPH 2002, I wanted to do something involving the demo scene. I went to the demoscene BOF and spent time talking over the demo scene with Vince Scheib and Phil Taylor over dinner at SIGGRAPH. I think this is where I first got the idea to organize a demo party. I started putting together my plans for what I wanted a demo party to contain besides the usual socializing and compos. I wanted something to fall back on should there end up not being very many compo entries.

The easiest backup plan was to show demos from the demoshow CD compilations on scene.org. I could contact the people I know and ask them to come talk on a subject at the event. I could try to organize a concert finale. From what I could tell in the scene, your only currency is the amount of respect you get for what you have done. I didn't want to organize an event that sucked! I couldn't depend on compo entries to float my event by itself, so it needed something extra.

To simplify the problem, I constrained the event to a single day. Being only a single day was also likely to reduce participation from out of town, but the logistics and expense of a multi-day event were just out of our grasp the first time around. It would be better to run a great 1 day event than a sucky 3 day event.

After being back from SIGGRAPH for a short while, I was contacted by Adam Helps, a CS undergraduate student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, about a 45 minute drive south from Salt Lake City. Adam and I exchanged phone numbers by email and talked at length on the phone discussing our ideas for a demo party and how to raise interest in the event.

Both of us had very similar ideas for organizing a party, so it was a great coming-together of like-minded sceners. Where each of us had specific ideas on some aspect of the organizing, they were either synergistic with or identical to the ideas of the other. Adam would be able to reach people in Utah County while I could reach people in Salt Lake County. Just as the USA is geographically large, Utah itself is a large western state with most of its urban population along the western edge of the mountains called the Wasatch front. The major cities of Utah are Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden. They all lie on the Wasatch front.

Parties as Non-Profit Corporations

While I didn't have any experience with demo parties, I do have planning and organizing skills. My plan was to: form a non-profit Utah corporation to handle the financial and legal details of running an event, hold a 1 day event, and file for IRS 501(c)3 status. My biggest single resource for these tasks is "Non-Profits for Dummies" which, despite the title, contains lots of good information for would-be US party organizers. A non-profit corporation shares many of the same problems and attributes as an organization that puts on a demo party. The book contains these chapters in about 350 pages:

Part I: Getting Started with Nonprofits 
   Chapter 1: Tuning In to the World of Nonprofit Organizations 
   Chapter 2: Deciding to Start a Nonprofit 
   Chapter 3: Writing Your Mission Statement 
   Chapter 4: Incorporating and Applying for Tax Exemption 
   Chapter 5: Safeguarding Your Nonprofit Status 
Part II: Managing a Nonprofit Organization 
   Chapter 6: Building Your Board of Directors 
   Chapter 7: Getting the Work Done with Paid Staff 
   Chapter 8: Getting the Work Done with Volunteers 
   Chapter 9: Planning: Why and How Nonprofits Make Plans 
   Chapter 10: Showing the Money: Budgets and Financial Reports 
   Chapter 11: Creating a Home for Your Nonprofit and Insuring It 
   Chapter 12: Finding Outside Help When You Need It 
Part II: Raising Money and Visibility 
   Chapter 13: Crafting a Fundraising Plan 
   Chapter 14: Raising Money from Individuals 
   Chapter 15: Making the Most of Special Events 
   Chapter 16: Finding the Grant-Givers 
   Chapter 17: Writing a Grant Proposal 
   Chapter 18: Marketing: Spreading the Word about Your Good Work 
Part IV: The Part of Tens 
   Chapter 20: Ten Myths about Nonprofit Organizations 
   Chapter 21: Ten Tips for Raising Money 

As you can see from the chapter titles, many of the activities that nonprofit corporations perform are the same things that demo party organizers must go through in order to have a successful party.

If you're forming an event in the USA and want to organize a non-profit corporation around the event, get things in motion about a year before your event date. If you don't have that much time, start this process first since it will take a while to complete in full. The book (and others like it) has the full details on what you need. It is also possible to operate underneath a sponsoring nonprofit corporation, check out the book for details on this option.

For Pilgrimage, it was pretty easy based on the advice given in the book and the guidelines given by the State of Utah to construct the articles of incorporation and the bylaws. A small filing fee of $20 and about 2 months of processing time and we had our Utah nonprofit corporation.

Showing proof of incorporation was required to open up a bank account at the bank we used (University of Utah Credit Union). You will definitely want a separate bank account through which you track your financial transactions.

Why go through all this? Because you won't ever get any sizable donations or grants unless you have a 501(c)3 IRS designation. If you look at art grant applications from local, state and federal sources you will see that they all require applicants to be 501(c)3 organizations. The same is true for philanthropy from private foundations. You don't want to be funding demo parties out of your own pocket if you can help it.

Web Site & Domain Name

My ISP, XMission, offers pro bono accounts to nonprofit organizations in the state of Utah, so that got us a web space once we had our incorporation papers. A couple of email messages to scene.org and XMission staff and we had a DNS entry for pilgrimage.scene.org resolving to our web space on XMission. At the time we applied for scene.org DNS hosting, they were on their old server and were temporarily holding all applications for FTP or web space. We needed a consistent web site ASAP to keep interest growing from one familiar place, rather than a string of changed URLs. Have you ever noticed how many stale North American demoscene links are out there on the web and in NFO files and such? I didn't want to add to the pot!

While we got the whole nonprofit/webspace/domain thing sorted out, Mike No Worth worked on a web design for the pages that we ultimately stole and expanded for content into the pages we have today. A preliminary version of this was placed on Adam's CS account at BYU and leaked to OJuice :-). Shortly thereafter our real web site was available and running.

I thought that having a scene.org domain name would give us more cred, but you can do any domain naming scheme you want for your party. As a first time organizer, I was going to do everything within my reach to increase the credibility and image of our party as a new birth for the demoscene in the USA. I looked at a scene.org domain name as one that would be good for our reputation. Once our web account was created on XMission, it was a snap to have pilgrimage.scene.org resolve out to our virtual web server on XMission.

We initially created our XMission account with the name 'demos', but this resulted in us receiving large amounts of spam. Spammers now routinely do "dictionary attacks" on email servers hoping to deliver as much spam as possible to "john@" and apparently "demos" is a word that's often used on these dictionary style attacks. So unless you're willing to deal with the spam, I'd suggest using an account name or email alias that's unique to your event and unlikely to be spammed with such an attack.

Mailing Lists and Discussion Forums

Hopefully you've got at least one other person working on organizing your event! You will need a way to communicate what each of you is doing and have a place to refer back to for a re-freshening of details. A mailing list is perfect for this and everyone's got email now, right? We formed an internal mailing list for the Pilgrimage organizers. It was getting to the point where mail sent back and forth between two people needed to be sent to all three people so that we were all on the same page. It was just easier to setup a mailing list and then we all send to the list to keep everyone informed.

We probably would have started a mailing list for party goers but SceneSpot stepped into action and provided us with a discussion forum area on the web. Personally I prefer a mailing list or a newsgroup, but they offered and we took it! This is an example of a good rule of thumb for organizers: don't look gift horses in the mouth! Take everything you can get and any opportunity that's offered to you even if you would prefer to "implement" things differently. Now that Pilgrimage is over, we will probably implement a pilgrims mailing list from our contact list at the party.

Outreach

Let's face it -- the scene in the USA is dispersed to the four corners of the continent at this point. To get a successful event happening, you're going to need to talk to people in your area as often as you can manage it. This is a long-term strategy. Expect a few onesy twosy sort of recruitment from this approach at first. Community involvement requires persistence and patience from you as an organizer and outreach activist. Each time you do it, it becomes easier and soon you'll be able to make an outreach presentation on the demo scene in your sleep. You will also learn that different audiences require different kinds of talks -- you'll want to go into more details about code if you're talking to a programming class, for instance.

A good goal would be to perform a demo scene outreach activity at least once a month. "Activity" could be anything from introducing a single individual to the demo scene (say, with the demoshow CDs), talking to a class of programming students as a guest lecturer, giving a talk at the local library (always showing demos, of course), or participating in a community fair, county fair or state fair.

The best thing about demo outreach is that you basically just let the demos sell themselves. All you need to do is shut up and play the demos! A little introduction at the beginning helps, but I've done events where I just dimmed the lights, put on the DemoDVD, cranked up the sound, and propped open the doors with trash cans to encourage people to just get into it without a lot of intellectual blather.

Reaching Out

You not only have to talk to audiences, you need to reach out to them to get them involved in the demo scene. Ask them if they are coders? musicians? graphic artists? If they are any of those, make a note of it for when you talk to them later.

Have a contact sign up sheet so that people can provide you with information that you can use to build a relationship with them over time. Will they remember to phone/email you? (In my experience, they won't.) Get their contact information so that you can initiate contact with them. When you talk to people during your outreach and they make specific offers or comments, write them down next to their name so that you can match that up with the contact sheet later. Ask them to sign the contact sheet if they haven't yet done so when you talk to them. Your contact sheet will be your source of potential volunteers and attendees at your future events.

Besides getting people to work with you on your demo party, you're going to need funds to pay for your event's expenses. Unless you can work directly with another nonprofit that helps fund your event, you shouldn't expect any financial assistance from grants or corporate foundations in your first year. You're going to need to find sponsors and financial support from yourself, people you know and any relationships with corporations you personally have formed. One way to raise money is to always have something that you provide as a gift for a donation of a certain amount of money. My personal rule of thumb is that the gift should not cost more than 10% of the donated amount -- remember that you are doing this to raise money for your nonprofit/event, not to make a 10% margin on retail goods. Now you know why you get a $1.95 coffee mug for donating $50 to PBS! You can also sell items outright as a nonprofit corporation. The details are in the nonprofit book mentioned above.

Literature on the Demo Scene

Beyond the immediate-gratification aspect of demos, you'll want to have printed information ready to explain the details of demos. I didn't have anything printed at my first outreach event. At my second outreach event at the SynOrgy 2002 Decompression party, I had a printed one-sheet pamphlet that gave some basic information about demos and the demo scene. I refined this handout for the next outreach event I did for a programming class. It was further refined into a three-panel foldout style pamphlet to contain information about the demo scene as well as our upcoming event.

I would recommend having a "What is the demo scene?" style pamphlet ready for use in all events. I'm preparing one right now and will make this available for all to use and re-use when its finished. A generic pamphlet gets the preliminaries out of the way for complete newbies and can be reused year-in and year-out. You can make minor updates and clarifications based on how well it works for your local audience.

Supplement the basic demoscene pamphlet with a pamphlet or flyer on your event. You don't have to go into tons of detail if you want to do a flyer-style promotion, just make sure you include a one line summary of your event ("Chicago's First Demo Party!"), and contact information for your event: phone number, email address and URL.

Make a flyer or pamphlet for each event that you do, big or small. It may just announce a talk on the demoscene given at a particular place and time, or it may be the time and place of your party. We are preparing a pamphlet for First Night 2004, which we expect to be our next event.

Finding a Space

Finding a space for your event is your primary item of concern once you've gotten certain that you want to hold a demo party. This was the stickiest issue for Pilgrimage because spaces would appear and disappear and we were getting closer to the party date and we needed to address this first.

Start at least one year in advance of your party date to start scouting out a party space. There are several areas of concern when scouting a space: availability, logistical, and legal. You want to make certain that the space will be available when your event is taking place. This seems pretty straightforward, but once you start talking to potential space you find out they have constraints on operating hours, may be available only on a first-come first serve basis, and so-on. I would recommend having at least one backup space in case your first choice falls apart. Having two backup spaces would be preferable.

The logistical aspects of a space cover the mundane aspects of what a demo party requires: control of the lighting, adequate power for the number of computers and additional equipment you expect, adequate HVAC (cooling/heating) for the time of year and number of people, and so-on. You'll have to figure in the amount of time it will take you to setup any infrastructure you may need on top of renting the space itself: tables, chairs, power supply, network cabling, projection screens, etc.

The legal aspects mostly have to deal with fire, safety and health regulations. If you plan a multi-day event, you may wish to consider using a local hotel as the venue, with rented rooms for sleeping.

Make sure that your event has a comfortable environment! I'm talking creature comforts here -- ensure that there is adequate cooling in the summer and adequate heating in the winter. Make sure that you have good, clean toilet facilities at your event. People will go home remembering how hot/cold they were at your event as their first memory if you don't take care of this. Make sure that there are enough chairs for people to sit down if they want. I would recommend having chairs for any event where you will be showing demos. Even if it were just showing demos on the street, I would have four chairs in front of the screen.

Start Up Tasks

Many of these things are tasks that you only have to do once when you are starting up your event for the first time. Once you have a nonprofit corporation and your tax status settled, they pretty much take care of themselves from that point on. The same goes for getting a web space setup, although the web content updating is a job that is ongoing in nature.

Writing your compo rules is another area where the difficulty is getting the first set written. We used a combination of specific recommendations and rules from other parties to create the rules for Pilgrimage. Next year, it will only require minor changes before we are ready to announce the rules.

Last Minute Party Tasks

As we got closer to the date of Pilgrimage, I had a list of outreach activities designed to give a local last-minute pump to the attendance. I wanted to draw some of the club crowd over with our free concert promotion and also hit the clubs with small flyers to generate some interest in our web site and to encourage the participation of more first timers to the demo scene. I had also planned to practice creating video postcards so that I was familiar with the software before the party date.

At the same time, I was unemployed and looking for work. About three weeks before the party date, I interviewed for a job. They made me an offer and I took it, starting the following Tuesday. Oops. Now I had some major competition for my time working 40 hour weeks again and still trying to do all my demo party tasks. Fortunately for my wallet, but unfortunately for Pilgrimage, I placed work a higher priority than Pilgrimage promotional tasks, so not much was done in the last few weeks before the party date.

I did take off the Friday before Pilgrimage from work so that I could finish off the last tasks that must be done before the party could start. I had three people to pick up at the airport for Pilgrimage, two of whom were going to be staying at my house. We got a press release faxed out to a bunch of local news organizations the day before the party.

The Day of Pilgrimage

We officially let people start coming in to setup their computers at 8am. Since we were the only event going on at the facility, they had setup our tables and chairs weeks in advance. I had to get up at 5:30 am to start getting all my equipment and all the Pilgrimage materials packed into my Ford Explorer. We were ready to leave with a fully loaded truck around 7:30 AM. My truck was loaded to capacity -- if anything else needed to go it would have to be strapped to the luggage rack on top!

Once we got down to the party place (just a 10-15 minute drive), we had to unpack everything from my truck, up the elevator, and start setting it up. Volunteers helped move the boxes and equipment up to the party place while I parked my truck.

Greets

Once back to the party place, it was time to get the Greeting table set up. You want your Greeting table to be the first thing people see when they get to your event. Here you give them a name badge, ask them to sign your contact list and ask them to make a donation. Remember to have something in return for the donation, even if it is just a lollipop! Follow my 10% rule above. That last bit is important, so I'm going to repeat it again:

ASK THEM TO SIGN YOUR CONTACT SHEET
ASK THEM TO MAKE A DONATION

I'm sorry for the shouting, but its really important that you do this! Most people will sign up or donate if you ask, but its up to you to do the asking. If you don't ask for donations and participation, you will find it much harder to get your event off the ground and prosper.

Your greeting table should also display your literature ("What is the Demo Scene?" plus your event literature) and any giveaways you have from corporate sponsors. We gave out ATI lollipops, key chains and temporary tattoos on the main table and our greeter Fred asked everyone who came if they were a coder and would like a copy of VS.NET. We didn't charge any money for our first Pilgrimage, but if we did, it would be charged at the greet table.

Event Setup

We had three rooms available for Pilgrimage, so we used 3 easels to display poster board showing the schedule for each room. We didn't have time to get them printed up nicely so we just used magic marker to write them out. It was OK, at least it was something better than nothing. The IT staff at the facility had power and networking already setup in our computer spaces room when we got there, so all we had to do was plug in and go. There was a sticky point with sharing files later, which we resolved by setting up an FTP server on a machine I had brought.

There was also a miscommunication about the availability of wireless internet access -- the marketing guys for the facility told us it was available, but the IT guy said it was only for students at the facility. Oh well, since I didn't have a wireless card, I didn't test this part of their network before hand. If your facility is providing you with any IT services, be sure to test all of the services in advance to find out exactly what is available and working.

Keeping the Schedule

We had an aggressive schedule of up to three simultaneous speakers in our morning session. I did this because I wanted to get all the "seminar" type stuff out of the way in the morning. I gave myself the first talk time slot in one of the rooms so that I could get it over with right in the beginning. I didn't expect much of an audience at my talk unless there were lots of newbie coders at the event. Most people there seemed proficient in coding, so I only had a couple people just casually talking about Direct3D with me in my talk. Thant's talk came right after mine and his had more of an audience.

Dan Wright wanted to shift his talk to the afternoon, which was fine with us since the rooms were not specifically scheduled for the afternoon. Dan's talk is moved to 2pm.

After the talks are done, we dispersed for lunch. I took a group of guys down to the Crown Burger, a local burger chain whose specialty is a cheese burger topped with pastrami -- The Crown Burger. We head back to the party place with full bellies :).

Once I get back to the party place, I just hung around solving whatever problems are coming up until Dan's talk starts up. I go in and notice that there is a lot of drunk people at this party :-).

Video Postcards

The video postcards -- where each scener has an opportunity to make a short video presentation to the scene -- were a novel aspect for our party. I'm not aware of any other party specifically trying to create video greetings of the guests. I hadn't had a chance to setup the machine lent to us by Serious Magic to run their Visual Communicator product. They had shipped us two big boxes and we started unpacking them and setting up the equipment around 3pm.

When we opened the boxes, which I expected to both contain bits of the computer for some reason, one of them contained about 30 copies of Visual Communicator. Bonus! I took the box out to a table near the center of the action and called out to everyone that if they wanted a copy of Visual Communicator, they should come over and get one. I think some people were taking them at first not quite realizing what the software did :-). We then went back to setting up the video camera and machine for making the postcards.

We got the machine all setup and did some practice runs and things seemed to be working fine until we realized that there was no audio on the published video file. After a little debugging, we concluded that we needed a microphone on the PC in order to get audio working properly, so I pulled a microphone out of my box of computer equipment and we used that. We would have been set up much faster if I had the chance to use Visual Communicator before the party date, but even with our audio bugs and late setup we got 4 video postcards recorded, which I thought was a good number.

I would like to see more people making video postcards at their demo parties. Next year I would like to have someone who is familiar with the software "operating" it for the duration. Then we could have people walk in, get interviewed by the operator who uses their responses to write the script. The person rehearses their script and then the operator helps them add any effects, transitions, video clips, backgrounds, etc., that they want in their postcard. They record it, the operator publishes the video file and the next person is ready to walk in and sit down.

For this year, the best we could do was setup the machine and leave people to their own devices :-). Considering the situation, I think we did pretty good with 4 postcards.

Compo Server

For the compo server, we couldn't seem to mount shares by either NetBUI name or IP address. We never did get to the bottom of that one! Instead, we decided to install an FTP server. I had never installed an FTP server on this machine before, so we needed a Windows 2000 Professional installation CD in order to get the server components installed. Fortunately Adam had an image of one that he could burn to CD-R. So 15 minutes later, we were continuing with the FTP server installation. Once the server was installed, we created a party account on the machine, gave everyone the IP address and party account/password pair. We logged the party user into the desktop so that people could make submissions by floppy or by CD-ROM by dragging files onto a folder on the desktop.

In the future we would like to have a better system for submitting results, but it was another one of those things where there just wasn't time beforehand to setup anything sophisticated. We should have tested the network facility for sharing a hard drive between two machines though. That gets back to testing everything your facility says they are going to provide in terms of IT services. Try everything first in a test run for your party to avoid last minute surprises.

Gathering Compo Results

The music and graphics compo entries were done on time. We let the demo compo deadline slip so that Tfinn could finish cursesdemo and Hurricane could finish Charged. Unfortunately Charged didn't end up being quite as finished as we would have liked :-(, but the advantage of stating that you can change your rules at any time is so that you can be flexible enough to adapt to the situation. We could have been hard-nosed about the demo compo deadline, but that only would have resulted in two less demos to show during voting.

Once we had all the compo entries gathered, we assembled our juries who did the job of qualifying the entries. A qualified entry is one that is judged to have been made in accordance with the compo rules. Judges are also given the flexibility to adapt to the situation. We didn't want to discourage people from participating. I believe we had only a single disqualified entry from all the compos; a graphics entry was disqualified because the final image was missing.

Voting

Once we had the entries qualified, we assembled everyone into the middle Salon for the voting. Since we are a small party, we just manually displayed each entry on the big screen and sound system, letting people vote for the entries they liked. We had a voting system that gave everyone the ability to specify preferences within each compo and gave heavier weighting to the jury of the compo. The end result is that each production had a number of points assigned to it and the top three point getting entries won our 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes.

At one point during the music compo, I looked out towards the hallway and saw some people dancing to the entries!

We had everyone write out their votes on a sheet of paper. In the future, we will have a printed ballot with the production names already recorded so that people could just cast their ballot without having to write any of the other information down. It could have been better, but at least we had some sort of system, even if it was very low tech.

Concert

I tried confirming our sound system guy the day before the event, but being a Friday night, I was unable to reach him only his answering machine. During the afternoon of the event I still hadn't heard back any confirmation, so we started working on a backup plan for the concert sound. The facility staff were very helpful in offering to let us use an additional space as large as the one we rented for the concert performance and they were going to provide sound through the overhead speakers. While not great, this was at least something. Another backup plan was for me to go back to my house and get my stereo!

However, just as we were putting contingencies in place, our sound man Stephen called and confirmed he would be there to provide a proper sound system for us. Yay! Stephen arrived while we were voting on the music compo entries and started setting up Nullsleep's sound. By the time the voting was over, we had everyone go over to listen to Nullsleep's performance while we tallied the votes. This was a good distraction for everyone, since they all wanted to know the results of the voting.

Awarding the Prizes

Adam hand tallied the results for each production. We then paired on adding the entries up in sa a spread sheet: I would read out the points for each vote while Adam typed them in. After the totals were counted up for all the productions, we gathered them up along with the prizes and went into the concert room. I got to groove out to a particularly cool part of Nullsleep's performance until I interjected during a song break.

We had given out raffle tickets for the remaining ATI material that wasn't awarded during our compos, including a chance to win a Radeon 9800 since we had 5 cards and 3 compos. First we raffled off the last of the remaining ATI promotional material: a bunch of calendars and some battery operated fans. People were wanting to get to the Radeons, but you want to give out the weakest items first. In the first place, people won't stick around for the weaker items if you give out the best items first. In the second place, you want to build from weakest to best items in your prize presentations to end on a high note.

After the calendars and fans, I went to the compo winners. I announced in the order of 3rd place, 2nd place and 1st place for each compo. I did the compos in the order of weakest to strongest. Our weakest compo was the graphics compo, followed by the music and demo compos. After giving out the compo prizes, I raffled off the last two Radeon 9800 Pros.

Nullsleep Encore

Since I had interrupted Nullsleep in between songs, I asked him to keep playing after I awarded all the prizes. Ending on a tune seemed like the better thing to do! Besides, we still had some time left on the room. Nullsleep played for another 15 or 20 minutes.

Breakdown and Cleanup

We started packing up the equipment around 11:30 PM. After getting it all loaded into my truck and ready to head home, it was around 12:30 AM. The next day, Mac mentioned that its amazing how fast things clean up when you don't allow boozing and eating at the party place!

Next Year

If you're planning an ongoing event like Pilgrimage, there is always next year. There is always something you could have done better and some things you know you will do better the next year.

Mac commented that Pilgrimage had about the same showing in terms of people and entries as BCN'01, a Spanish demo party. I personally felt that it would be a success if we could get at least 50 people to show up throughout the day. Our contact list shows about 65-75 people throughout the day, so I achieved my attendance goal as an organizer. The number and quality of entries in all compos made me proud to have organized Pilgrimage. I was also proud that the graphics and music compos were both won by Utahns.

Specific things we would like to do for next year are:

compo submission / voting server. We need to have this worked out in advance next time and we need to provide printed ballots for voting.

grow to a traditional 3-day event printed party information handouts (schedule, compo rules, etc.)

double our level of local participation

get more high school participation

Ongoing Efforts

As demo party organizers in the USA we need to work more closely in networking with local rave scenes, local gaming scenes, local music scenes and local graphic artist scenes. Pilgrimage has been building contacts in these areas but we also need to do more.

Sceners in the USA need to pool their resources to create a more closely knit internet portal (web, news, email and beyond) with low barriers for participation. The geographic hugeness of the US needs to be addressed in any internet portal so that sceners can find others local to their area. SceneSpot could evolve in this direction, but it currently lacks news or email access and has no geographic oriented tools.

Legalize/Polygony