It’s Official — ROFLCon Moves To MIT

As promised, Saturday ended up being one of the biggest meetings ever for the ROFLCon Team. After going back and forth for quite some time, we’ve finally decided to our entire operation over to MIT for April 25-6th. We wanted to make it possible for as many people to come and partake in the ROFL, and for that reason, the capped attendance of the event is now looking like about ~500+. (as opposed to the more cramped 250 we were looking at at Harvard). This, if our calculations are right, should make things extremely baller.

Thanks to the help of the folks at MIT Free Culture, we’ve also gotten a fix on the actual spaces that this thing will be going down in. I’m tying up a final draft of the logistics of the schedule (which will have to pend through our guests before being finally confirmed) tonight, and will post it tomorrow.

SO, for people who know the MIT campus: with some finagling, the general space of the conference will be Friday starting in the second floor of the Sala de Puerto Rico eventually shifting over to 34-101 (and surrounding spaces), with Saturday (the 26th) based primarily in 26-100 and surrounding spaces.

Comments, recommendations welcome!

Suggestions For Conference Events?

The ROFLCon Team sat on down to its  weekly staff meeting this week to sort out some stuff. One of the big issues that we’ve been tackling lately is the restructuring of the conference schedule.

Beyond the straight-up discussion with the celebs and scholars about memehood and the infrastructures that have played a role in the development of online culture, it’s been brought up by a few that it’d be really awesome to have a few more “convention”-type events going on at the same time. Ideas range from an animation screening room, a conference-wide signing period, and unmoderated talks with some of the guests.

But we want to get a sense of what you guys want to see. So, we’re putting out an open call for suggestions for conference events and volunteers to help facilitate these various activities. Let us know what you think by comment or by our ever-reliable gmail account at roflcon AT gmail.com!

Venue (For Saturday) CONFIRMED!

So lots of people have been asking us: where’s your conference at?

This is a great question.

I’m glad to announce that after hours of searching and scouring by the Team (thanks, Carrie!) around campus, we’ve secured Harvard University’s Gutman Conference Center in the name of ROFLCon. This’ll cover all our events for Saturday, and we’re still finagling details out for Friday of the event. There’s some good leads and opportunities that we’ve been sleuthing around town for currently and we’ll let you know as that comes together.

Incidentally, it turns out that we’re at the same time as Harvard College’s pre-freshman visiting weekend. Go figure — some poor pre-frosh are going to get a really skewed vision of life in Cambridge. Survey says this is totally sweet.

Conference Schedule v. 0.9 Released!

So many of you have been asking — “Gee folks, internet memes are great and all, but what are you going to do when you get them all into a room?”

We hear your cry. And suffice it to say, it’s a pretty good question.

We here on the ROFLCon Team have been working through the vacation to put this thing together, and we’ve hammered out a preliminary conference schedule that we’ll be molding over the next few weeks into a completed, shiny plan of action for our two day event. For descriptions of the memes themselves, see the links on our confirmed guests page.

Check it out, after the jump. We’re taking comments/questions/criticisms from everyone at this point, so feel free to let us know what you think, particularly about the panel prompt questions.

This schedule is subject to change. (And addition: there’s a number of big namer guests that don’t know about their schedule yet — for privacy’s sake, I’ve left them off, some of these holes are obvious, feel free to guess who they are)

(more…)