Yes, this is another post about the current Readercon controversy / gate / fail however you want to describe it.  But it’s not a rant.  I did that already yesterday.

In that post I slammed the Board of Directors for letting this issue “fester” for three days (now four).  What I’d missed was this tweet made by the Readercon account:

We greatly appreciate the feedback we’ve received on the board’s recent decision. The convention committee is working on a response.

The key words here are “convention committee”  You see, I’d thought that it was the Board of Directors who’d be required to over-rule the decision.  But as Rose Fox states on Twitter:

The entire 30-person committee, which has oversight of the board, is involved. It’s a big discussion….The committee can overturn board decisions and I have put forward a motion to do so… At this point the matter is out of the board’s hands. The response will come from the committee.

I was aware that Rose had put forward a motion but not that the matter was now out of the Board’s hands.

This, of course, explains why it’s taken four days to get a response.  Wrangling 30 people is not an easy task.  And as Andrew Ducker pointed out to me on my LJ via this LJ post, 4 days is not a long time for a con committee.

So I apologise for adding undue stress to a committee that’s already having to wrestle with a fucked up decision that they didn’t make in the first place.

And as I said yesterday, the committee is only in this mess because of a Board of Directors (who I wouldn’t be surprised to find resigning en masse once this is over) that failed to follow their own clearly stated policy but also, and probably most importantly, failed in their duty of care to the attendees of their convention