Comment by Arainach
6 days ago
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 how underwhelming turnout is going to be might be really large until then.
Presumably when that happens you don't immediately cancel, but rather try some last ditch efforts with sponsors, vendors, etc and then you wind up 2 weeks out in a shitty situation.
Though looking at their filings, it seems like they did not adapt to reduced revenues starting in 2023, so maybe denial and an inability to cut costs is a bigger explanation: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/770...
They also stopped posting audited financials around then: https://anitab.org/audited-financials
People in the middle of things can often be in denial about the situation much longer than they should be.
heck just look at what happened with fyre festival.
The difference is that I assume good faith and a history of competence on the part of the GHC operators and do not make any such assumption about the Fyre operators.
Certainly. The Fyre people were definitely fraudsters and so far i see no reason to think GHC are.
Nonetheless, good faith people succumb to denial all the time. It is a very human failing i think anyone can fall into surprisingly easily.