Hi! I was the logistics lead for the program, and I also had some input on the creative side, including helping to translate The Fallen Star. Probably not to anyone's surprise, I disagree with much of your commentary, but I did enjoy reading it. Thanks for your notes! Let me know if you or anyone has any questions: I don't promise to answer everything, and I don't check this site that often, but I could probably shed some light if there's anything anyone was confused by, particularly on the logistics side.
Yes, that was my thought precisely. Which of those explanations might be useful in interpreting the drives of, for instance, people addicted to World of Warcraft?
Sure, let's see. So, first off, nearly everyone involved in the program was a volunteer, including myself and Anna (the creative lead). No one was paid anything except the venue staff, the childcare providers, and travel and lodging for the professional musicians.
It's difficult to estimate how much time Anna and I put into this, but a few numbers to set a bound:
- If you just total up the time we spent in officially scheduled meetings about it, that's about 30 hours each. The first such meeting was in February 2023, ten months before the event.
- There were many, many hours of unscheduled time spent thinking, planning, bouncing ideas off of each other, figuring out who would perform what and in what order (on the creative side), negotiating with venues on what we'd be able to do and when and for how much (on the logistics side), and other such tasks.
- Anna and I both took several weeks leading up to Solstice off of work, because it just wasn't possible to do both; Solstice preparation was already a full-time job.
Smaller than that in individual terms, but definitely the largest collective expenditure of volunteer-hours was the choir (which Anna also participated in, pulling double duty there). There were 24 hours of official choir practices, plus five hours of rehearsals (tech and dress), multiplied by 22 choristers. Of course many of those put in more than that minimum number, scheduling unofficial sectionals where they could practice together and just practicing on their own time.
Not every performer was in choir, though - the other performers all practiced on their own time and attended the dress and tech rehearsals. And, in order to be selected as performers at all, they needed to audition either in-person or with a recording. That's not counting the time spent creating the performances, either: translating The Fallen Star was a collaborative effort involving several hours from the main contributors and small contributions from a number of others. I won't even guess at the time spent writing the various speeches.
Then there was the livestream team. The three of them were good enough at their jobs that frankly I don't have a great estimate of how much time they put in, because I basically never needed to manage them. This was not their first time doing the livestream for the event and they set up next to the venue A/V team and just went. They attended the tech rehearsal also.
There were the dozen or so former organizers and volunteers that we interviewed, mostly during the early stages, so that we knew what we were getting into, who each gave a little of their day to talk about what they'd done and wished they'd done better.
There were the day-of volunteers, who arrived at the venue hours before the event and moved things around on and off the stage, advanced the slides on the projector, helped with taking tickets, answered questions and directed people, and so on. We did pay the ones who skipped the event entirely so that they could provide childcare.
Enough people participated in Solstice as a volunteer that regrettably, I'm probably forgetting some of them as I type this out now. My estimate for the volunteer-hour total for this event would be a four-digit number. Of our costs, over half of them were related to the venue or related costs such as event insurance. Very few of our costs could be significantly defrayed by volunteer hours without making pretty significant asks of individuals who were already putting tons of time into this event, which seemed incorrect.
Hope that answers your question!