Geek Girl Con Or Bust?

If you have not heard about Geek Girl Con (#GeekGirlCon), it is a non-profit organization where (on the About Us page) its “largest event is a two-day convention (in Seattle, WA) that gives female geeks and their supporters the opportunity to build a community, share facts and fandom, and learn how they can help promote the role of women and other underrepresented groups in geek culture.” This year’s event is scheduled for September 30th and October 1st.

On August 6, GGC suffered a public act of sabotage where an unofficial and purposefully damaging email was sent out to its contact list, as detailed in the following article on Bleeding Cool:   https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/08/06/geekgirlcon-staffers-resign-use-company-e-mail-address-book/

(And for the record, I don’t agree with the reporter’s comment about how GGC should have guarded itself against this kind of sabotage.  This was clearly a coordinated act that had been planned and executed as an ambush in an environment of trust.)

At first, I wasn’t going to write anything about this incident but then I realized it very much impacts me symbolically, if not directly, as a creator/promoter/fan of Queer Women’s Media & Entertainment.

My Personal History with GGC

I can’t remember when I first heard about GGC but no doubt it was a combination of my involvement in Prism Comics (a non-profit organization devoted to queer comics) and the convention’s location in a city where I knew a lot of people from my corporate life.

A couple of years back, I proposed and moderated a trivia panel focused on lesbian content in anime and manga.  I guess in an attempt at counter-programming, the panel was on a Saturday night, at the time of the convention’s big concert or something.  So there were only about seven of us:  me and my “assistant” Jill, a rep from GGC and four attendees.  It was tiny, but we had a blast!

For a couple of years, I couldn’t return because GGC was always held on the same weekend as New York Comic-Con, where I had been a speaker on several panels.

This year, because I wanted to promote my creative works, I decided to look into attending GGC as an exhibitor.  However, they changed their process in that anyone interested in applying to be an exhibitor would have to pay an application fee, which is something I’d never heard of before.  Their pitch is that the fee was to offset the costs of processing so many applications. But the good news (from their perspective) is that if you’re approved, the fee would be deducted from your booth/table payment.  So basically, if you’re NOT approved, you’re out of luck and the fee money.  I didn’t bother applying.

Now fast forward a few months to the beginning of August where I am trying to launch the By For About website.  I realized that there could be a lot of value in attending GGC to network with creators and promoters of material pertaining to queer women.  And since I do have panel experiences as well as being a (ahem) critically-acclaimed creator, I decided to see if there were panels that I would be able to appear on. So I joined the closed Facebook group devoted to GGC programming.

And literally a couple of days later, this email blast happened.

The universe has interesting timing sometimes.

Immediate Aftermath

Because I was a member of two key Facebook groups affected by this event, I realized I didn’t need to do much research on my own as information started to be shared very quickly.  Most significant to me are the following two Twitter postings:

From the online comments and my own gut reactions, I felt I had enough information for me to decide what role GGC would have, if any, for me going forward.

Decision:  To Continue To Support GGC Or Not?

I focused on the following points:

The First Email

My first gut reaction was triggered by the knowledge that a group of people who were trusted and supportive individuals used GGC’s own tools and contact list to send out this email, under the guise of being “Official.”

As a person who spent over 25 years in the corporate world, and in I.T. no less, I view integrity and trust very seriously.  To me, the idea of doing such an act of sabotage (because that’s what it was) is an incredibly immature and unnecessarily destructive course of action.  If I were an H.R. person, I would NEVER hire someone who participated in such an act because I wouldn’t want to expose my own company to such risky behavior.  I don’t care if I ultimately agreed with your moral stance; mature and responsible adults don’t like this.

The Content

In a world of whistle-blowers sharing audio files, documents and screen-grabs, in the court of public opinion (specifically mine) absolutely no evidence was given.  Nor are names.

I make up my own mind; I don’t rely on others to do it for me.  And if I don’t feel like I have enough to make a fair decision, I abstain until I do.  I believe perspective and context matters, and details are required to assess both.

Perhaps it’s our current presidential climate that’s made me more suspicious of accusations.

Their Intention?

I admit I’m not trying very hard, but I don’t see any altruistic goodness that the instigators had in mind for the organization itself.  They admittedly anticipated and WANTED people to stop supporting GGC.  There were clearly a lot of anger from the email writers directed at the Executive Director, however, that doesn’t make me want to automatically stop supporting GGC.  But apparently the resigners felt their own moral disgust and outrage was far, far, far more important than supporting an event where women and girls could feel community and empowerment.

About twenty years ago, I was on the board of a non-profit where we had our own internal scandal that struck at the financial and procedural heart of the organization.  But while there were bitter feelings about the whole incident (which linger a bit to this day), we did our best to keep it quiet as we all agreed that the organization’s members should not suffer if we could work this out together.  And if things couldn’t be worked out, well, those people who had enough could just leave and move on.  Which is what I did because my heart wasn’t in it anymore BUT I kept my mouth shut to the members.

The general membership of the organization was happily oblivious as they continued to enjoy the services and events provided by the board members who remained.  The organization continued on for several more years, which I give full credit to them.

The GGC Official Responses

As expected, with this kind of ambush, the remaining GGC Board Members were caught off-guard and responded with official statements as damage control.  They were put in a situation of defending themselves against accusations that weren’t backed-up with details and evidence.

With my corporate background, I’m used to these types of situations and know such efforts takes research and time.  After all, the resigners had clearly planned the email blast for a while, even if “a while” was just a few days.

But honestly, my mind had moved on to evaluate if GGC as an organization had value in its current state.

The Board did confirm that the event will continue as planned.

And if enough agree that there IS value is continuing to support GGC, the organization will recover and move on.

My Decision

I think you could tell by my previous comments that I think continuing to support GGC is the right thing to do.  There’s too much value in such an event and organization to turn my back on it.

So, those of you who still want to go, see you in Seattle during GGC weekend!

Kristen

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