Possible Future of GKE

Posted with permission, via Fet, Jan 26 2018

I've been watching what's happening with regard to JME and Jeff with some alarm and concern, as I'm sure many of you have. Certainly, it's appropriate that all of these allegations come to light and be dealt with in some way by Jeff and the rest of JME. But my concern is that the damage to GKE may be a death blow to the event, and that would be so sad. It's supposed to be a safe place for those of us who are Geeky and Kinky to let it all hang out and have fun. This community is not one that is served elsewhere right now, at least not in our region. I don't want to see that go away. I hope many of you will agree.

All of this is to say that I am wondering what this community would think about my company, Turtle Hill Events (THE) offering to acquire GKE and continue producing the event, with substantial changes to the management of the event, of course. Our event culture is quite different from JME's and that might take some getting used to, but we hope that you'll find the differences to be, on-balance, positive.

Our vision of what we'd offer to the community is an event that is managed well by an experienced event production team with lots of input from the community we'd be serving. We'd focus on making the event a safe space for our attendees, staff, presenters, performers, vendors. We'd look to the community for advice on the content and input into how it is run, with an eye towards perhaps forming a diverse advisory board made up of people from past events as well as current ones to help us steer GKE in directions the community wants and also facilitate transparency about consent issues.

We have a long history of good relationships with our staff, with many members having been on our staff for more than a decade. We are careful in our selection of presenters and vigilant about consent issues, with very low tolerance for allegations of impropriety. Our handling of said issues at our event are reporter-centric, which is to say that as a rule, we allow the person reporting the incident to guide our response, always considering their needs first. We have longtime staff and attendees who fall everywhere on the gender and sexual identity spectrum and love that diversity at our events. I think our organization is a good fit for this event and its values.

I'm very interested in this community's opinion of this possible future for the event. Please comment, ask questions, send me PMs if you like, whatever. I'm an open book and happy to answer anything you might be interested in asking about events and my business. Thanks for taking the time to read all of this.