How Not To Run A Convention
Nov. 5th, 2013 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerIt sounds as if Jack O'Con (last weekend in Albuquerque) is going to be a star addition to the list of Great Conrunning Disasters:
Jack O’Con – The Comic Convention That Suddenly Wasn’t (Bleeding Cool News)
One Artist Attending Jack O’Con Tells Their Story (Bleeding Cool News)
An attending dealer tells his story
I suspect that there's a lot more to come out of this, but it sounds like a one-man con-committee way out of his depth (and that may be the charitable explanation). A lot of people are criticising the hotel, but if advance payments hadn't been made then the management were probably erring on the side of helpfulness by allowing function space payment on the day rather than just cancelling the even a week out. Hotels usually require a hefty function space payment in advance, which, by the way, is why it is so damaging if a payment provider such as PayPal decides to sit on your income for 'fraud prevention' reasons until the organisers can show paid invoices, as that totally wrecks your cash flow.
I am also a bit wary of the report that the hotel management tried to claim that the contract included unauthorised amendments by a departed manager that they weren't going to honour. Firstly, that sounds suspiciously like an organiser's excuse to me, unless verified. And secondly, unless New Mexico contract law is way out of line with that in most common-law jurisdictions, an event manager would in my view be deemed to be acting for the hotel and there would need to be some pretty convincing evidence to show otherwise ("but he signed this napkin to approve our having the dealer room free over the weekend!" would, for example, probably not hold water). There's a reason why I often find myself typing "...or employees, servants or agents" in legal pleadings.
This sort of thing, by the way, is why Nine Worlds got a slightly leery reaction when it popped up early this year promising a 1500-person event with novel crowdsourced funding run by a handful of people few in any established fandom had heard of. Now it turned out really well of course but wariness towards new cons that promise a lot can, as this debacle shows, have some justification.
One Artist Attending Jack O’Con Tells Their Story (Bleeding Cool News)
An attending dealer tells his story
I suspect that there's a lot more to come out of this, but it sounds like a one-man con-committee way out of his depth (and that may be the charitable explanation). A lot of people are criticising the hotel, but if advance payments hadn't been made then the management were probably erring on the side of helpfulness by allowing function space payment on the day rather than just cancelling the even a week out. Hotels usually require a hefty function space payment in advance, which, by the way, is why it is so damaging if a payment provider such as PayPal decides to sit on your income for 'fraud prevention' reasons until the organisers can show paid invoices, as that totally wrecks your cash flow.
I am also a bit wary of the report that the hotel management tried to claim that the contract included unauthorised amendments by a departed manager that they weren't going to honour. Firstly, that sounds suspiciously like an organiser's excuse to me, unless verified. And secondly, unless New Mexico contract law is way out of line with that in most common-law jurisdictions, an event manager would in my view be deemed to be acting for the hotel and there would need to be some pretty convincing evidence to show otherwise ("but he signed this napkin to approve our having the dealer room free over the weekend!" would, for example, probably not hold water). There's a reason why I often find myself typing "...or employees, servants or agents" in legal pleadings.
This sort of thing, by the way, is why Nine Worlds got a slightly leery reaction when it popped up early this year promising a 1500-person event with novel crowdsourced funding run by a handful of people few in any established fandom had heard of. Now it turned out really well of course but wariness towards new cons that promise a lot can, as this debacle shows, have some justification.
