Aileen Wall is taking over the reins as WisCon 40 chair, relieving interim chair Jackie Lee.
SF3 and the WisCon Concom announced the appointment on October 23:
Aileen has been on the Concom since early 2014. At WisCon 38 and 39 she was master of ceremonies for the Sunday night Dessert Salon / GoH Speeches event. For WisCon 39 she was also hotel co-liaison. In life outside of Wiscon, Aileen works in the Madison performing arts community including as stage manager of Concerts on the Square.
We all have enormous respect for Aileen from her work as hotel co-liaison and are grateful for the stage management skillset she brings to the Concom Chair role. We’re looking forward to working with her over the next seven months as we build WisCon 40 together.
Wall supersedes Andrea Horbinski and s.e. smith who resigned October 6.
Well, I hope it works out this time. 🙂 Wiscon could do with a bit less turmoil from the sounds of it.
(Also, wow, I just went and looked back at that resignation thread. I’d lost track of it and hadn’t realised it had got so heated.)
Can anyone explain what the actual what is going on with WisCon?
It seems to have a pretty complicated backstory.
One of the major issues was the con’s tolerance of a serial harasser (including problems with procedure/process relating to their anti harassment policy, showing that having a policy is just the first step).
Here is Natalie Luhr’s 2014 blog entry about it:
http://www.pretty-terrible.com/2014/06/01/wiscon-and-harassment/
At the bottom of the entry, there are links to “related posts” in her blog as well (a great feature!).
John Scalzi posted a piece by Elise Matheson about the harassment and her experiences reporting it and after:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/07/28/what-happened-after-i-reported-elise-matthesen-wiscon-and-harassment/
While you’re gathering tea leaves to read, here are two more pieces of the story, Jeanne Gomoll Resigns from WisCon, and More Changes in WisCon Committee Revealed.
http://blog.wiscon.info/author/chris/page/5/
A bunch of posts from the WisCon blog relating to the series of incidents
Wow, I missed Jeanne Gommoll’s resignation–thanks for posting that!
Note to future self: just search File770 for useful resources on fan topics!
@Peace: THe WisCON search results here!
https://file770.com/?s=WisCON&submit=Search
@Mike and @robinreid:
Thank you.
Good … grief.
(I have just spent the weekend at Windycon and some things came up that got me wondering.)
Peace, you were at Windycon? I wish I’d known; so was I. I would have taken you to lunch…. (Ok, I’d’ve made you a sandwich in the consuite. <grin> )
I made a File 770 sticker and put it on my badge, but I wasn’t exactly shouting to the skies.
I didn’t know any other Filers would be there, so I wasn’t looking. I hope you had a good time.