February 2013 Director-y

Greetings one and all. As the new Grand High Director Potentate Supreme of DASFA for Life or until I step down or am voted out, my understanding is that I am expected to write a little article every month for your entertainment. As this is the first of these articles for me to write, I shall start off by thanking you all for allowing me this chance. This position will help me to recruit forces to combat and soon destroy the infidels. As I do not believe that all involved with DASFA are on the same page as I with the need to obliterate the infidels, I shall hold off in revealing the greater details of my plans for now.

It felt to me that my inaugural meeting went over well and that most everyone enjoyed Bryan and Baxter’s presentation. When I was asked to take over they were the first guests that came to mind. I have seen them do presentations before and felt they would make for an enjoyable DASFA program. For anyone interested in the local skeptic community I would highly recommend checking out Skepticamp (http://skepticamp.net/wiki/Skepticamp_Denver_2013) and meeting those who are active in the local community.

I started off my time as Director showing that I do have new ideas for the programming and hopefully I will keep coming up with fresh ideas. However I do promise to stay to the basics as well with local authors being our most common guests. We have Kronda Seibert coming for our February meeting. She is a local author of the steampunk genre and is involved in putting on Anomolycon, the local steampunk convention that is holding its third gathering this year. Going with that theme, we are encouraging everyone to come to the meeting dressed in steampunk attire. Be creative, but remember our meetings place is not the roomiest of locations.

Having themed nights is one of the changes we are going to work on. Expect them to pop up more and more often as things progress. Other changes included promotion and using on-line resources to promote our group and create a more active community. If you are not part of the various communities where we have a presence, I would suggest checking them out. We have a website and are on facebook and even have a twitter account that gets little use. One area on-line that gets a lot of traffic for us is our meetup page (http://www.meetup.com/Denver-Area-Science-Fiction-Association/). This is used mostly by the ‘Vice Squad’ and has been a great way to setup last minute gatherings or out of the ordinary trips. Meetup has been working well as a recruitment tool, drawing in a good amount of potential new members.

We are encouraging members to show up to the Bardo Coffee House, just a half block down from the Broadway Book Mall, before our monthly meeting for a new members meet and greet. This will be an ongoing event for the time being. We held our first meet and greet before the January meeting and it drew a good crowd. So come and meet some new and potential members and chat with them about DASFA and fandom in general.

With the help of my Director of Vice, there are a lot of possibilities and ideas floating around right now that we are looking into. We will be working to make the DASFA experience interesting and entertaining as the year goes on. Feel free to be part of that with getting your ideas to me.

I hope everyone is looking forwards to the rest of the year as much as I am.