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The follow up this morning from the director of @furryweekend.com was about as bad of a non-apology as anyone could ask for. They stated that there were 15 staff on the con and despite having a full time dedicated office and being a for-profit con 🧵

The director blamed a number of issues on the lack of staff but failed to address the fact that staffing of the con is the direct fault of the director. No one chooses the amount of staff, staffing allocations, or who is doing what other than the director.

Further, the director also blamed many of the issues on having 300 vendors. Again, other vendors pointed out that having that many vendors was a choice by the director and not staffing to support that number of vendors is again a choice BY the director.

Let’s keep going! The director also blamed the expensive new venue for the issues arising in vendor set up and expectations but the director, dealer director, and their communications liaison failed to review policies and layout of the new venue and relay these to their vendors.

That’s all on the staff and director. Also, choice of venue was on the director - no one but the director and dealer head chose this new venue which by and large most of the vendors did not want. Trying to chalk up that there was a need for more vendors to cover the cost of the venue means

there wasn’t an inherent need for the new venue, the new venue was a consequence of poor planning. The director has effectively not done an audience evaluation and is not building a convention that meets audience need.

There has been repeated feedback to the director about the dealer head, their inappropriate behaviour, poor decision making, and attitude towards vendors that is outright hostile. If I were in charge of an event this size and my weakest link was doing this much reputational damage

alongside mismanagement of the event itself they would be gone. But I generally don’t hire incompetent people - what can I say I run a strict program #eventmanagement #furryweekendatlanta

You’ll be delighted to hear that staff left at 7ish (hall closed at 6) to go to a dinner for 3 hours, and a dealer, who is vendor staff for an UNRELATED EVENT, ran the loading dock (in downtown Atlanta!) for that period 🫠 (and might I add, did so with far greater efficiency)

Also (insider trading here) having worked with Dragon Con and having helped with the launch of Atlanta Science Festival I can tell you that when you're event staff and specifically you are on load in/out - you leave when the last people are done. Your shift ends when everyone else is OUT.

Anything less than that is negligence on your part as an event organiser. Now if you're a director and you have that delegated to other staff - that's totally fine, you can't be 75 places at once - but you have SOMEONE THERE. To have no one there covering something like that is a BIG deal.