According to the announcement, "individual registrations … came in significantly below prior years", so it seems few attendees will suffer financially.
No, it just means that fewer attendees will suffer financially compared to the number of attendees who would have suffered financially if this had happened in previous years. The number of attendees this year may still have been many, while still being significantly fewer than previous years and while not being enough to cover their costs considering the loss of their sponsors.
Incredibly sad and disappointing. Especially in lieu of Margaret Hamilton's passing this year. This was not right. Planned attendees deserve to understand a deeper post-mortem of why the event failed to transpire.
This is sad! I only attended during COVID when it was remote and haven't had a chance to attend in person. I sure hope it can come back. I wonder if we will see the same thing with other conferences or only ones that fall under the DEI umbrella.
> What happens to my in-person or virtual registration fee?
> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
I've never worked organizing a conference of this scale, but how do you come to a decision like this only 2 weeks in advance? Surely sponsors etc. need to be lined up months ahead of time and organizers would have significantly more advance notice.
"We're a bit low and might have to cut a few things" and "we're so low we might have to cancel" are very different thresholds and merit very different responses.
If your event has historically gotten a lot of last minute (e.g. a month before the event) sign ups, your error bars for turnout are going to be really large until then.
Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.
Someone never learned the "you don't fund this year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships, you fund NEXT year's conference using this year's signups and sponsorships" rule that applies once your conference is an established yearly event. How the hell was there no contingency fund?
I used to go to GHC to recruit every year on their floor, I enjoyed it greatly and hired a lot of bright people from it. It’s sad to see it so humbled. There was to my knowledge nothing quite like it. I hope it can recover.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] thread> Information regarding GHC registration and other financial matters will be communicated to you promptly once we obtain a clearer understanding of AnitaB.org ’s financial condition.
"We're a bit low and might have to cut a few things" and "we're so low we might have to cancel" are very different thresholds and merit very different responses.
Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.