wiscon, i am disappoint

[jazzfish]

At Wiscon last year (2013), Elise Matthesen filed a harassment report against Jim Frenkel, a senior editor at Tor Books.

This official report seems to have triggered a whole slew of additional (mostly unofficial) reports, enough that the end result was for Frenkel and Tor Books to part ways.

Frenkel returned to WisCon this year (2014), and much hubbub was raised. In the process of the hubbub, it came out that the Wiscon concom had 1) "lost" a report of harassment by another individual, and 2) spread false information about Elise's harassment report.

To their credit, Wiscon, having exhausted all other options, started doing what looked like it might be the right thing: they formed a committee to look into l'affaire Frenkel.

The committee released its report today. (Linking to James Nicoll rather than directly to the report as there's some good discussion and interesting backstory in his comments. Summary: Frenkel is definitely banned from Wiscon 2015, and *maybe* for up to three years after.)

This... would seem to be insufficient, and a privileging of the rights of the accused over those of the harassed. It's like, to paraphrase someone (vschanoes?) in James's comments earlier, they saw the Readercon debacle, and rather than saying "oh, we should do something to make sure that doesn't happen here!" said "thank god we're awesome enough that that will never happen here!"

A number of people have already declared their intention to not return to Wiscon next year. Elise, I believe, is going to Balticon instead.

Well. Balticon is certainly more convenient if I'm already in the DC area in May. And it has the likely advantage of sorcyress, as well as members of my former writing group. And next year is a long way off.

I don't know what I'm doing. But... I didn't expect to say that. I didn't expect to ever say "I don't know if I'll make Wiscon this year."

Grr.

Comments

[thanate]

Oh, is that why people at 4th street were asking me about Balticon? Fascinating. I find this kind of weird given that it was Balticon that took in Elizabeth Moon after Wiscon kicked her out, but hey, so it goes. More cool people at Balticon works for me.

[jazzfish]

Most likely it is, although it might also be that Balticon is both local to you and relatively large.

I enjoyed Balticon well enough the two times I was there (2006 and, um, 2000-ish). My tastes in cons have changed since then but I don't know if that means I'll like Balticon more or less now.

[selki]

I'm wondering how possible it would be to reshape Balticon to be more interesting to me, but I don't think just volunteering to do a tech panel is sufficient on my part, yet I'm not sure I'd have the oomph for more substantive work.

[thanate]

I am consistently vaguely disappointed by Balticon, mostly because the writerly panels are all very 101 and usually pretty stodgy. All the other stuff (art room, costumes, not-my-thing panel tracks, various con fun-- I still need to *get* to the maskerade) are generally pretty cool. Influx of Jo Walton-inspired attendees may help next year, and probably getting onto panels will make me feel less cranky when they end up not covering anything I don't know already.

There's also an open game room, which might be of interest to you.