A convention for convention planners/runners.
The name comes from smofcon.
In 1983, there were three bids for the 1986 Worldcon. Only a few members of these bids had much experience with running a Worldcon. Joe Siclari and Edie Stern had been discussing how to improve this situation and came up with the idea of a convention for conrunners. In 1983, after running an Atlanta bid party at Windycon 10 (a Chicago regional convention), they approached Ben Yalow (then on the NY bid) and later Theresa Renner (DC bid).
The resulting convention was called ConCon. A flyer for the con had a formal bowtie as a symbol (a reference to Ben Yalow's uniform black watch patterned bowtie) with "aka SMOFcon" beneath it. The con quickly became known as Smofcon.
This was not the first such convention as a convention on con running had been held in New York City in the early 70s (retroactively dubbed "Smofcon 0"), but this was the convention which successfully began an almost-annual series of conventions.
See List of Smofcons.
