Hybrid Convention: What Would it Take?
Executive Summary: DSA’s national leadership must decide if we should host our 2023 convention in-person only as all conventions until 2019, online like in 2021, or a hybrid form never tried before. Each option presents unique challenges and opportunities, especially around valid and real concerns and needs to make the event as accessible as possible during a pandemic. This memo suggests how the leadership and staff can examine different priorities, costs, and benefits to make a decision on how to best select the convention format for next year’s gathering.
My Background
For those that don’t know me, I have served two different staff roles in DSA off and on over the past 15 years. The last one, deputy director, included duties now served by Michael G, our Senior Events Coordinator. I have attended every DSA convention since 2007 and helped plan three as staff. In addition, I have taken leading roles in planning DSA’s national participation in mass conferences such as the People’s Summits, which included up to 4,000 attendees. Lastly, I helped prepare numerous YDSA winter and summer conferences as a staff member and volunteer. My comments here about a potential convention stem from those experiences with coordinating small and large DSA gatherings over a decade and a half.
Democratic Structure and Purpose of DSA’s Conventions
DSA’s constitution mandates we hold a convention every two years to elect a leadership, provides the only window to change our constitution and by-laws, and give members who elect delegates a say in decisions often left just to the National Political Committee. This is why we say accurately the convention is the highest body of the DSA even if it only meets every other year.
It historically has also served the purpose, especially since DSA has not really held its constitutionally mandated activist conferences, as a way for comrades across the country to connect in person. Building relationships is critical to facilitating commitment to each other and the organization, which makes remote and occasionally isolating work more sustainable outside of the conventions. This real social function is why I find some people feel very strongly about having in-person only.
I find some people sincerely believe that in-person will be more comradely. Sincerely, I found the lead up to the 2019 convention much more tense and nasty than 2021 until the final few days of last year’s event. DSA members can be just as mean and nasty in person as online, if we’re honest. That does affect democracy and I want to be clear I think we should not decide on how to do a convention based on that contention.
More importantly, however, a part of this whole discussion that seems to be getting lost is that our conventions are delegated events by nature. They’re a collective process not a collection of individuals. This is why we hold pre-Convention gatherings and encourage chapters to meet and discuss resolutions. Chapter delegates are elected to represent not just themselves, but their chapters. (At-large are just voting for themselves in theory, but many at-large delegates also come from organizing committees that are working to be full chapters.) This assumes a finite number of attendees. Delegates are not just individuals acting on their own accord free of accountability. This is why we let delegates have up to three voting cards if chaptermates cannot attend or if simply someone steps out of the room for a moment. Delegates are voting for people, not for just themselves.
This is why we have a limited number of delegates. Limitation means every member can vote on who goes. Each of us can make requests, demands, and try to move those delegates. This process helps us have a more reflective delegate body of where the politics and demographics of the base are than if we let everyone who can go have a vote. No one I know is arguing that but it’s worth stating because it speaks to the spectrum of accessibility. We have to find a real-world balance between two extremes: a convention with every DSA member in attendance and only those who are free, willing, and able without assistance to go who win a delegate race.
Besides disability, there are many reasons people cannot attend a convention. This is why it is so important to maintain the practice of electing delegates and letting them vote the strength of their chapter size if the delegate is not at-large. Furthermore, because there are barriers, we need to do the best to make it accessible that balances both not exploiting and abusing the staff with what the organization can afford. Historically, this has been national and chapters subsidizing travel and registration costs to provide childcare. But we can go beyond that.
Picking a Convention Site Based on Competing Needs and Priorities
Why Prioritizing Accessibility is Important
Calls for a hybrid convention (doing both in-person and online) come from a genuine place and a real need to make the biennial DSA gathering as open and accessible as possible. Accessibility is a value socialists should take seriously as a collective. Accessibility fairness can be a real challenge, especially for gatherings of over 1,000 people, because the world we live in is not built to be accessible, and doing so requires resources that aren't always readily available to working people, including member funded institutions like DSA. We can and will do our best: we can't make it perfect, but we can treat accessibility as a high priority among the many we have to reconcile.
Staff Planning Timeline: Costs, Venue, and Meeting Attendee Needs
In 2019, at our last in-person convention, we had a budget of about $1,000,000 (counting revenue such as registration fees, not just organizational spending from the existing budget) for around 1,000 delegates. Staff start planning a year in advance (i.e. now for the 2023 convention), with a lead staff member at the beginning and then more and more staff added on until most staff are working on the convention nearly full-time. This is because the level of planning and details of a convention are so consuming. For example, it takes weeks to set up and test the registration process alone.
For a venue this time, we need a location that is situated in Chicago, can accommodate a group gathering space for at least 1,000 people (factoring in observers, tablers, reporters, guests, and others besides delegates), can give us a hotel block for hundreds of people, is located near overflow union hotels that can grant additional blocks for added delegates, is reachable by public transportation, has the lowest possible costs for accommodations, offers single-stall gender-neutral bathrooms, is a union facility, and is physically accessible for comrades with disabilities.
Adding a “hybrid” format is effectively holding two separate but intertwined events as “one.” This includes, but is not limited to: livestreaming multiple ongoing sessions; fitting each room with microphones; a voting system that works for those in-person and off-site; and appropriate staffing to manage both in-person and virtual events.
This imposes multiple additional requirements on our choice of venue, which will likely require trade-offs with the above priorities. This includes insuring the facility can accommodate in terms of literal bandwidth for multiple high-quality video and audio streams, that we can find the appropriate technical staff or volunteers if the facility doesn't have in-house resources, that we can accommodate additional equipment needs in our budget, and that we dedicate additional staff time to planning not only the coordination of voting but also behind the scenes work to make sure virtual delegates are not shut out or relegated to a second-tier status. Virtual delegates may miss out on key debate and discussion that happens in-person even if they have access to a Slack like we did in 2021. In-person delegates may not use the Slack as much, which would weaken its effectiveness as a debating center.
Lastly, but very critically, the facility needs to be available during the correct month in August.
What are our overarching priorities for the convention, and how do we accomplish them given these factors?
Convention Planning Priorities
Here are some priorities that should guide our decisions:
Making the event as accessible as possible including affordability, childcare, COVID protocols, disability, and timing. (For example: venues will charge us less if a convention were held during the week, but choosing a weekend means more people can attend. Hybrid convention might be sign language and live transcription whereas virtual might only mean one or the other.)
What COVID protocols do we use? Whether this convention is in-person only or not, we need to have COVID protocols so people not only feel safe, but are safe as the pandemic is still here. YDSA conferences have modeled this with mandatory vaccine requirements, COVID tests, and masking. Labor Notes convention of nearly 4,000 attendees also showed how this could function well in reality.
Getting through the agenda so we vote on every or nearly all items (Note: resolutions that do not get voted on are recommended to the NPC, but action is rarely taken on those resolutions)
Setting a reasonable budget: Factoring in our other expenses and programs and covering all convention priorities with minimal cuts.
Appropriate level of staffing: How many staff are needed to make the event we want? Do we need to bring on new staff, even if temporary, or reassign people? What bodies are we taking capacity away from in order to staff the Convention accordingly?
Democratic oversight by NPC and national volunteer contribution to convention planning and program. In my experience, volunteers can only do so much and often have to drop out, so we cannot be too reliant on their labor for major conventions. This leaves staff forced to pick up the slack without necessarily the capacity to do so.
Fair Labor Practices
As socialists, one of our oldest and defining values is that we want workers to be treated fairly and with dignity. DSA, unfortunately, especially around conventions has not done this with our staff. The 2017 convention, which I had to bottomline, had me working 10-12 hour days without a day off for six weeks before. I cannot imagine anyone here thinks that is appropriate or how we want work conditions to be for anyone, let alone the staff who help keep our organization running. But in practice, we let that happen.
Furthermore, such overwork is how mistakes get made; not how well run conventions are put together. That year, senior-level staff’s request for additional part-time workers was denied by the NPC. I still think we barely pulled it off because we got lucky and a YDSAer was able to intern through a college grant that summer. Simply put: staff can be set up to fail.
One problem I faced was that I had to plan both the YDSA conference and the Convention. Michael has the same situation. We do not have someone whose job is only to plan the convention. Kristina S, the Operations Director, made clear on the July 29th DSA NPC steering committee call that tech costs related to a hybrid convention would be around $200,000. This included hiring additional staff because the current amount of DSA employees cannot handle the bandwidth. That’s reasonable.
Another issue she brought that I know from personal experience is last minute requests. For any conference, whether in-person or virtual, there needs to be a strict deadline for requests whether it is about accessibility resources, housing, or other delegate needs. In 2017, someone emailed me to arrange airport pick up for them while the conference was underway. I could ignore such an unreasonable request, but many convention attendees do need actual assistance. That is only possible if they get the requests ahead of time. Setting expectations about this needs to be collective. Leaders cannot let people attack staff and convention planners when people make unfair and unreasonable requests at the last minute.
How to Balance Accessibility with Other Priorities and Possible Next Steps
Here is an incomplete alphabetical list of accessibility considerations for the NPC to consider
Affordability: how affordable is the convention and how much can be subsidized through fundraising?
Child care: can we provide good childcare for parents?
Accessibility: is the event accessible for the disabled?
Timing: is the time of year when many people can come?
These concerns do not exist in silos. After the 2017 Convention, the DSA NPC and staff got pushback on accessibility and location. The 2017 Convention was on a public university campus and people stayed in barebones dorms. The next convention was in a union hotel with much nicer accommodations to provide more accessibility and make the experience more centralized. This dramatically increased costs and several people reached out to me to ask how it was much less expensive when I organized it. I told them it had nothing to do with me but the choices we made.
If we want something to be more accessible, we have to be willing to pay for it. That means, if the cost goes up, people need to accept that, not complain in a few months when we see the registration fees (which will be higher if they have to cover a hybrid/livestreamed setup). Good conventions are not cheap! People may suggest cutting expenses such as food, but often hotels require you to purchase food to do an event there. In addition, having people go out on their own means people come back late because they get stuck in long lines and delay the event. A huge complaint in 2021 was even though it was online, we didn’t get through the agenda partly because the voting took much longer. It also meant that much needed breaks were pushed back. With the virtual convention, online votes even for issues that had supermajority support had to be held. In-person, such a vote can take seconds as the chair can see the majority by voting cards, but online voting takes several minutes. There is no real way to speed it up because hundreds of voters using the same platform takes literal bandwidth. We will certainly not get through everything if we do online voting in a hybrid convention if we want to have the same agenda as last time.
Personally, I think if accessibility concerns mean people do not want to do an in-person convention, the fairest and likely most cost effective is to do a virtual convention again. I am not convinced that we are prepared to give staff the support they need to make sure a hybrid convention can be done well. If people do want to meet in-person, then we should do in-person only and do our best to make it as accessible as possible.
My advice is always: don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. If we cannot have hybrid, that may just be. But the NPC should create a prioritization list of what is most important to have to make a fair determination. Choices aren’t always easy, but leadership requires it.