Steampunk Worlds Fair: The Way It Could Have Been

Author's Note: As always, these articles are created with the best information that I have available at the time. Should you find factual inaccuracies, please email me at feedback@michaelwhitehouse.org and I will work to correct the article to be more accurate. 

As an additional note, the purpose of this article to discuss a specific alternate way that events could have gone which would have resulted in a more desirable outcome for all involved. This article is not intended to discuss whether or not people were right to attack Jeff Mach and his company, nor is it discussing the allegations at all. It is discussing what actually happened and the results thereof. Other articles may address those other issues.

I woke up quite rested this morning for the first time in a long time. I woke up at 6:00 AM, but I fell asleep at 9:00 PM. That's the key to a good sleep: not waking up late, but getting an early start. Like sleep, the outcome of many things comes out of how it began.

For those who are not familiar with the company, Jeff Mach Events was a company that ran geek events primarily in the New Jersey area. Their main events were Wicked Faire (a general geek festival), Steampunk Worlds Fair (the largest Steampunk event in North America), and Geeky Kink Event (an event which is accurately described by its name). In all, they ran 7-10 events per year of various types.

On March 13th, I had the unpleasant duty of announcing to the Steampunk community that Silver Phoenix Society would be stepping away from running Steampunk Worlds Fair and that, as a consequence, the event would likely either not happen or not happen as they expected.

But to really understand what happened on March 13th, let's rewind two months to mid January.

At the time, Amy and I were rank and file department heads. In fact, until I was invited to a department head meeting, I didn't even know that we warranted the title. We ran the Info Desk, sold merch, and ran ConCardia at the events. We didn't talk to a lot of the other staff between events. I spoke to Jeff as much as I needed to for my role. Amy was hired to be his "assistant", but that mostly just meant some simple office work like assembling rooming lists and updating the social media Buffer feeds.

It seemed like just another week, but what we did not know was that the house was full of gas just waiting for a spark to ignite it.

That spark, as it turned out, was a post from Jeff Mach seeking new staff and volunteers. Jeff's detractors seized on this, screen-shotted the Facebook post and placed a caption on it warning that no one should work for that company because it mistreated people. From these small pebbles the avalanche began.

I became aware of this on January 23rd when I first started seeing the posts. The posts were on the pages of former staffers who had previously and publicly declared their desire to see Jeff Mach and his company destroyed, so I perceived this to be nothing more than an attack by those who had promised to do so, but it was much more complex that that.

History and Alternate History

The best way to give a good understanding of what happened is to discuss what should have happened. I have spent a lot of time pondering how this could have turned out right. Nobody wanted Steampunk Worlds Fair to fail, so why did it fail? What they wanted was for Jeff Mach to be out of it, but they didn't understand that you couldn't transfer ownership of an event from a debt-loaded company to new operators 10 weeks before the event was to run. Even we didn't understand the full complexities. No one had ever attempted anything like this before.

There is a scenario in which this could have turned out well for everyone: a form of negotiated settlement. If Jeff Mach had agreed to be bought out of his company before the great angry mobs of the Internet were brought into things. Of course, this would have required there to be two parties to form an agreement. The department heads of the company were speaking regularly and could have agreed to something, but who was there who could have negotiated for the other side?

Elise Potenza

As it turns out, there was one person who was playing both sides to the middle and could have facilitated such an outcome: Elise Potenza.

We later discovered that she had been orchestrating things in a significant way on both sides, either for vindictive purposes or as part of a play to take over the company, the details of which we'll discuss tomorrow.

Elise was on the Consent Team in 2017 and was privy to all the personal allegations against Jeff Mach. She was in regular communication with the former staff who were working to see him brought low. She may have been feeding them information during the crisis in January, and she certainly leaked the confidential chat log which was the action which most directly led to the decision to step away from Steampunk Worlds Fair.

She and her boyfriend Jakal Blackwell had also been on the Executive Committee in 2017, so were privy to a great deal of operational information and would have been able to leverage that perceived authority.

How could it have worked?

On the Thursday one week prior to Wicked Faire, in January, she could have contacted all of the department heads to a meeting of vital importance. At that meeting, she would present the accusations which had been made public as well as any other information that she was able to share. She could then have presented anonymized versions of any other accusations she was privy to. Naturally, she could not include names or identifying details, but simply broad strokes to give us the picture. She might have also explained that she knew that strong forces were assembled to take down Wicked Faire if action was not taken.

At that time, this meeting would have contained the same people that the actual department head chat contained. Most of that staff was there to do a job for the attendees. We wanted the events to continue, for the people to have a safe and fun event, and to go back to our lives on Monday having had a good weekend. How that happened wasn't terribly important.

She could then have presented some kind of buyout plan. It could have taken any number of forms from a non-profit to a group forming an LLP. The purchase would have been funded by a fixed payment over time from the new company to Jeff Mach, similar to the agreement that was almost adopted in February.

People having fun at Steampunk Worlds
Fair, which will no longer be running.

The response from the department heads, after some initial pushback and sharp questions, would probably have been, "OK, whatever, that's above my paygrade. See you next weekend."

Elise could have then told her friends on the other side what was happening and gotten them to call off the attack dogs as the process wound slowly through the legal channels, allowing the events already on the schedule to continue successfully under transitioning management.

Why would that have worked when we didn't listen to Elise when she assured us that she had some kind of evidence?

In this alternate history, rather than saying more or less "I know something you don't know, so you need to trust me," she would have shared what she knew.

I Know Something You Don't Know Makes a Poor Argument

Since Elise was on the Consent Team, it might be asked why we did not take her word that there were serious allegations and action needed to be taken. We didn't trust her because she was not trustworthy due to her past actions. She had used dubious information to remove a superior so she could be promoted into his former role.

A couple years ago, Noah Smith was the highly competent and very effective Company Manager of Jeff Mach Events. There were some supplementary tasks that he was responsible for, such as human resources and other technical business duties which he didn't do a great job of, but that was Jeff's fault for giving Noah duties for which he was not qualified, rather than Noah's fault for not being able to do them.

Noah did a fantastic job at something Jeff had never been able to do, leading the company in a way that led the staff to feel appreciated and like they were part of a well organized team.

Elise wanted Noah's job. She wasn't actually qualified for it in temperament or experience, but she wanted it nonetheless. She knew two things that would help her get it:

1) She knew that Jeff Mach took consent violations very seriously and tended to give credence to the accuser over the accused regardless of evidence or lack thereof.

2) She knew that Noah Smith had seasonal depression and as the winter approached, his ability and desire to deal with stress diminished.

Using this information, in the late fall Elise found charges against Noah. (I'll explain my choice of verb in a moment.) She brought these to Jeff with the suggestion that something should be done. Jeff approached Noah and told him that there were two allegations against him and asked what he'd like to do about them.

Noah surprised Jeff (but not Elise) by saying that if he could get a small severance package, he'd resign quietly. Jeff was not trying to push Noah out and was quite surprised by his reaction. His intention was to investigate the allegations because he worked closely with Noah and the allegations didn't match his personal perceptions. Noah believed that Jeff was taking advantage of his depression to push him out of the company with the threat of a scandal that he did not want to deal with.

Noah left the company, believing that Jeff had maneuvered to push him out. Elise's name stayed out of it. Jeff lost a competent Company Manager. Numerous staffers followed Noah out of the company as he spread the story that Jeff had forced him out, and the seeds took root which would subsequently destroy the company.

But for all the damage, Elise got what she wanted. She was promoted to "Manager on Duty", a job very similar to Company Manager, and a job she took over others who remained in the company with greater qualifications.

There was some question as to whether or not
Noah's departure was due to consent
allegations. This is an excerpt from the Div
Head chat which Elise conveniently
redacted when she shared it with Brenna.

When I say "found" allegations, I do not know where they came from or if they were true, but I do know from something that happened a couple of weeks ago that Elise does not believe they were true. At Dark Side of the Con this past March, after she was fired from Security on Friday night, she decided that the four EMTs on staff were not sufficient and called in a friend to volunteer. That friend was Noah Smith, an individual that she had reported allegations of sexual misconduct against two years earlier. This means that she either knowingly brought a dangerous individual to an event in a staff role (for which she did not have the authority) or she knew that the allegations were false and she lied to Jeff two years earlier to rise in the organization.

We did not know what would happen at Dark Side of the Con in January, but we did have our strong suspicions about what had happened to Noah and Elise's "allegations," which is why we refused to act on her word which we all considered quite dubious.

Who Killed Steampunk Worlds Fair

There are many people involved in destroying this very popular event that we worked desperately to save, but there was one person who was in a position to offer a solution to save it who did not, and that person is Elise Potenza. What was her motivation in destroying the events rather than attempting to buy them? We can never know that. Maybe she lacked the sophistication to see such a solution. Maybe she wanted to let if fall apart so she could step in to create a new company to rebuild from the ruins. Maybe she just wanted to see the world burn. I leave such speculations to the reader.

A Note about Dark Side of the Con: Many conventions do not have any medical staff present. If there is a medical event, they call 911 like anyone else. Almost no club nights have EMTs on staff. Jet, the owner of Dark Side of the Con, went above and beyond to have any EMTs present, and having 4 on Saturday night (5 with Noah) was exceptional. While the EMTs were kept busy, most of the issues they deal with at an event like that are people who have had a few too many drinks. Without EMS, Security would give them some water, sit with them a bit, and walk them back to their rooms to sleep it off. With an EMT present: they check their blood pressure, take a pulse, do a couple other quick checks, then give them a glass of water, walk them back to their room and let them sleep it off.

I Was Wrong, and I'm Sorry

Giving a public apology is a unique experience. March 13th, 2018 in an interview on Talk of the Tavern was the first time I had occasion to do it, and I learned a few interesting things.

The first thing that I learned is that the nervousness that comes with making a live statement is the enemy of sincerity. Anxiety will make you speak faster and higher. Sincerity comes of speaking lower and slower. I practiced that statement many times to make sure that the sound of my words would match the thoughts in my head that I was trying to express.

The second thing that I learned is that an apology is often a conflicted experience, especially if the people to whom one is apologizing have their own affairs to apologize for. Shots are fired on both sides of a conflict, and we are responsible for our own, regardless of what fire is returned.

I started my apology with the sentence "I was wrong, and I'm sorry." This sentence has stuck in my head since then. I thought about putting it on a t-shirt. The more I thought about it, the more I realized just how often it is appropriate.

Unless you stay locked in your house and never interact with anyone, chances are that any given person may have daily occasions to say "I was wrong, and I'm sorry." Fortunately, most of our transgressions do not rise to the level of that which requires a public, live apology, but we all transgress.

I have apologized for things I may have done wrong. I even apologized for the offense given by private statements I made which were never meant to be read by the public. My wife apologized when she was about as far from wrongdoing as anyone involved in our effort. Tammy has apologized. And all of these are necessary.

As a culture, we would all be better off if we all took a moment to say "I was wrong, and I'm sorry" when the occasion called for it and if we recognized that the occasion called for it far more often than we like to believe, even if, and maybe especially if, the person we are apologizing to has returned more grievous insults than those for which we apologize ourselves. Then, we can seek to learn from those mistakes and do better.

As the Bible says: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgiveness is a reciprocal process, but it starts with an apology.

For any number of mistakes that I have made in my life, I will start by saying to anyone who deserves to hear it: I was wrong, and I am sorry.

The Sin of Loyalty

Last week, I wrote an article discussing my disappointment at how quickly a small number of my friends had turned their backs on me at the slightest whiff of suspicion. This article led to quite a bit of introspection. Why had their betrayal cut so deeply, even though it was really only a few people against the many who have been quite supportive?

The answer was clear. I would not have done the same to them.

As I discussed previously, the first I heard about the allegations against Jeff Mach was on January 23rd. Although we had never been particularly close personally, I had worked with Jeff for 12 years, and I considered him a friend. When a friend is attacked, a good person's first instinct should be to stand by that friend and then look into the reasons for the attack and determine if the friend might be in the wrong. Anyone who abandons a friend and then assesses if they have made an error has a moral deficiency.

A mere 5 days later, I agreed to sign off on a letter that pushed Jeff Mach out of his own company, effectively ending his career and business. Five days after first hearing the allegations against Jeff Mach, I signed his professional death warrant.

It had been suggested that I was secretly working with Jeff Mach after this time. While not entirely accurate, I had not cut him off completely either. After being pushed out, Jeff Mach was left with nothing but debt. No assets. No money. No income. There was a very real danger that he would either starve or simply commit suicide. My involvement was to work to make sure that he was paid for the very valuable property he was giving up. He would have been paid about 1/8 of what it was really worth and the payments would have been spread out over 3 years, but it would have given him enough of a chance to survive.

Redemption is not possible if you do not live long enough to see it.

I am a Christian. The first tenet of my religion is love, – explicitly loving the enemy and the unlovable – but following shortly after is the concept of sin and redemption. These are often misunderstood, but, put simply, everyone has sin – everyone misses the mark – because we are all human and we are all imperfect. How that sin manifests is different for different people, but we all have it. The only path to redemption for sin is what is called repentance, which is a fancy word for admitting that you are not perfect, have done wrong, and that you don't want to do wrong anymore – and then you change your ways.

Before a man can repent, he must first survive.

My first choice was a choice of loyalty. My second choice was a choice of justice (or betrayal, only God can judge.) My third choice was a choice of compassion.

There are those who say that, from the beginning, I should have abandoned Jeff, my friend of 12 years whom I subsequently condemned less than one week later. They suggest that at the first intimations by people, whom I did not know well, that he had done wrong I should have thrown him to the wolves.

There are those who say that I should have left Jeff to starve or even commit suicide in silent solitude and despair.

If you are friends with such a person, I might suggest that you should look very closely at your relationship with this person. This is not a person who will stand by you when you encounter your hardest times. This is a person who lacks the virtue of loyalty.

The concept of compassion and redemption goes much deeper than simply believing that a friend can be redeemed of his wrongs. Over the past two months, some people have done and said some terrible things to me. People have said what one might call unforgivable things: statements so insulting to my character, my reputation, and my morals that one might say that they can never be redeemed.

I do not believe in unforgivable sins. Even for the worst of these people, I understand that if I had been born with their DNA, to their parents, raised in their childhood, experienced their experiences, I would do the exact same things that they have done. When you realize that this basic truth applies to every person you will ever meet, you understand that either everyone can be redeemed or no one can.

For this reason, if any one of these people, even those who have said the most egregious, hurtful, insulting things were to come to me and express a desire for peace between us, I would be open to a dialog. There would likely never be friendship or trust, but there could certainly be peace and possibly one day forgiveness.

There are times when my anger may get the best of me, times when I may forget that my path is not the path of hate, and that is when I am truly grateful to the many wonderful and loyal friends that I can count on, not only to support me, but to protect me from my own demons.

I have been accused of many things the past couple months, but I believe that I made three choices early on, and at the time I believe I chose loyalty, justice, and compassion.

Note: In this article I mention that I am driven by love due to being a Christian. That kind of love is not exclusive to Christianity. Almost every major religion preaches concepts of love and forgiveness, including Humanism. Christianity just happens to be the source of love that inspires me. God’s love is a house with many doors, and you may access it through Judaism, Islam, Budism, Wicca, Humanism, or any other path which brings you joy and peace.

Q&A #1

One of the greatest things I have come to know/be reminded of over the past few months is that try as I might, I can never fully know what the community might or might not know. I can share all kinds of information and miss the one thing that everyone wants to know. For that reason, I'll be doing Q&As periodically as questions come in.

If you have a question, please email me at feedback@michaelwhitehouse.org. While I may take questions from other mediums, the only way I can be sure I won't misplace your question is if you email it.

Now, on with the questions:

You have characterized former vendors, patrons, staff, and presenters who have come out against the myriad ills wrought by Jeff Mach, senior staff, repeat performers/presenters, et al. as being an "Internet Mob" intent to tear down Jeff's life works and as enemies of "the community." Do you still believe that in light of the new COGS event?
First please allow me to apologize for any part that I may have had in making it seem like we were considering you or anyone else with concerns or allegations to be enemies of the community. As I mention in this post, SPS did an absolutely atrocious job of PR, and certain individuals raised the bar on awful communication, so it is reasonable that you may have gotten this impression, but it was certainly not the message I wanted to send.

I did then and still do today believe that there was a small group of agitators who were seeking to take advantage of the situation for their own ends. I have no reason to suspect the motivations of any of the actual authors of any of the accusations. At no time, either then or now did I ever believe that any of the accusers made their statements for any reason other than to tell their story and protect others.

When I refer to enemies of the community, I refer to people who, even after Jeff was pushed out of the company and removed from the process to the extent possible, continued to attack our organization and the event we were trying to run, ultimately succeeding in bringing it down. Their stated objective of removing Jeff Mach from the event and preventing him from receiving profits was achieved in the last week of January, but they were not satisfied until they saw it all burned down.

In future articles, I will discuss some of those individuals in particular and their particular actions.

Why did you choose to believe Jeff Mach and not the victims?

I'm glad that this question was asked. For anyone who has read the the leaked log of the staff chat, you will see that at no time did I say that I did not believe the accusers. My operating assumption was that the accusations were true as written. The fact of the matter was that we were dealing with something very serious. We effectively had in our hands the choice of whether or not we should take away a man's life, livelihood, and life's work based on what was before us, so it was not a question of whether or not I believed what I read but whether what I read justified the destruction of a man's career, reputation, livelihood, and business: a much more complex question.

If you were in a low-level role, how are you so sure that the statements you've made about how the company was being run prior to your ascension to power are true?

This initial series on Wicked Faire is based on my personal experience. That is also why my story starts on January 23rd, while, clearly, the the seeds of this crisis were planted many years prior.

As for future articles in which I will discuss past issues that I was not directly involved in, all of the information I have is from conversations with a great variety of individuals who had knowledge of the situation. In places where I am uncertain or accounts differ, I will certainly attempt to indicate so.

Why were you chosen or why did you step up as the background leader of this group, while placing someone else as the public figurehead of the "new" leadership?

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of all of the various chat logs that make up the story of the crisis. We are quite blessed that this is such a record of all that happened. I will be working on posting an un-cut version of the logs when I have a moment, because there are some key portions missing from the leaked logs.

All of us stepped up as necessary to keep the event running. although I had never had leadership in JME beyond our small department, I did have experience with other leading events, and I was the only one with that experience. For that reason, there are some occasions in which I lead the conversation. At no time during that process did I have any kind of formal authority.

Why are you writing these articles?

The story of the fall of Jeff Mach Events is long, complex and convoluted. The particular sexual allegations are merely the symptom of a much greater systemic failure, and there are tremendous lessons to be learned from a deep understanding of that system. Many other organizations, in business, fandom, and non-profit, suffer from some of the same failings that JME succumbed to. Perhaps the stories that I'll be sharing over the next few weeks may help another organization to step back from the cliff that JME went over.

Why did you insist that Elise share personal information of the accusers?
I didn't. Below is the actual chat log of that portion of the conversation.

How Not to PR

Nature abhors a vacuum. An information vacuum doubly so.

People want to know what is going on, especially when they are hearing rumors that something they care about may be affected. In ideal public relations, you will want to practice message discipline, meaning that you do not share extraneous messages, but to also maintain a sufficient stream of information so that people feel informed and have a counterpoint to rumors they may hear.

Silver Phoenix Society did none of these things, and in this article we will be discussing why that organization is a fantastic example of how not to run a PR campaign.

Specifically, we failed to

• Create a Q&A page on the web site
• Maintain discipline in address questions on central posts
• Communicate effectively and sufficiently
• Remain calm and professional in engagements with individuals
• Avoid engaging with trolls
• Create consistent and effective moderation policies

I am going to refer to the organization with a general "we." Obviously, there were individuals in the organization who were trying to do these things and others who were failing to do so. I am not interested in discussing the actions of specific individuals because the purpose of this article is to understand the past and learn from the experience rather than find fault with a group of people who jumped in over their heads to attempt to save something good for the benefit of the community.

Who Does It Right?
If you want to see a great information campaign, look at the Republican agenda. They are brilliant at PR. Can't say I agree with much of what they are saying, but the way they are saying it is quite skillful. They maintain message discipline by ensuring that no one says anything off the script. They maintain a constant presence on cable TV, talk radio, blogs, and online sites. They provide ample, easily available references for anyone who may find themselves in a debate about the issues they are advancing.

It has been devastatingly effective, and it is a large part of the reason why the Republicans control the White House and Congress at the time this is written, in spite of the fact that many of their policies are actively hostile to their base voters' interests.


Silver Phoenix Society had a tough row to hoe. The information they were dealing with was muddled and confused. Due to attorney incompetence and the fact that they were dealing with something that had never been done before, it was not an easy thing to deal with. People understand challenge and complexity, but they don't accept silence.

Allocating Limited Resources
The first thing to note is that any PR team, especially a volunteer team who is also trying to run an organization, has very limited resources of time and energy, so those resources must be managed effectively. Time should be put to activities that will reach the most people for the most impact.

It takes the same amount of time to write a 50 word reply to a comment in a Facebook thread as it does to write a 50 word answer on a Q&A page on a web site, but the Q&A answer will reach hundreds or thousands of people, while a comment reply will reach only a handful.

We would often have to answer the same question over and over because four or five people would ask it. Because we failed to have a proper Q&A platform, even if we answered the first five, the sixth would still complain that we were avoiding their question.

Worse, when you do things quickly and often, you will make mistakes. When you have people actively trying to prove that you are lying, one error out of 100 answers will be captured and used in their campaigns as evidence of your malfeasance. Answering in a proper format allows the time to verify the accuracy of answers provided, preventing mistakes.

This is the age of instant gratification. People are not aware that others exist in the world and do not understand why they cannot get immediate answers to their slightest whim. Automation of resources like Google, chat bots, and others have conditioned people to expect immediate response, and you either need to provide that immediate response or an alternate source for the information.

The correct way to do this would be to either create a Q&A page on a web site or to answer questions in batches in posts on the Facebook page (or both). Then, each question could be answered with a form "Thank you for your question. It has been received and we will do our best to answer it shortly in our next answer series."

How Much to Communicate
Someone asked Gary Vaynerchuk how often you should employ live video. His answer was something along the lines of "Turn on Facebook live now and stay on it."

People want to feel that they are being respected and that their questions are being answered. Even if you answer every question they have, they still have the suspicion that there is a question they didn't think of.

In the future in which we live, anyone
can pull a small device out of their
pocket and be live on the air in
seconds.

The live video in the week before Wicked Faire was so powerful because it was over an hour long, and Tammy answered every single question presented to her. Unfortunately, this effective strategy was abandoned after Wicked Faire.

The rationale was theoretically sound. Let's not say anything until we have solid information. This would have worked if Jeff's lawyer hadn't dragged a three day process into a three week process, but as the situation started to drag on, we needed to start communicating.

What we should have done was throw back the curtains and say everything we knew as we knew it on an accessible and public forum. Likely, everything was revealed in the aggregate of all of our Facebook comments on various platforms, but that means nothing if people can't find them, and no one is going to dig through hundreds of hostile comments to find their answers.

When information was provided, it was done rapidly and in too short a format. Because 20 words were used where 200 were needed, people were left to try to interpret the tea leaves. A problem in the best of times, but a disaster when there are detractors more than happy to provide their interpretation.

However much you think you know about something, divide that in half, and you'll be closer to the truth.

However much you think other people know about what you are doing, divide that by ten, and you'll be close to the truth.

People are busy and don't have time to keep track of what you are doing, except for those who make it their job to do so, and those people are rarely on your side. It is up to you to keep the public informed, and in that we were ineffective.

Transparency does not just mean having all the information available, it means having all that information in an easy to find format in an easy to understand format. It is not the duty of the public to find out. It was our duty to provide the information to them.

Failing to create Q&As, we should have employed live video and long form writing. These two formats allow you to put out sufficient content that one can accurately piece together what is really happening. It is also important to do this regularly. Content which you think is perfectly clear may be ambiguous to the audience, but if you are doing a weekly live Q&A or a regular blog post, you have the opportunity to correct misapprehensions and even errors from previous releases.

While it is clearly too late to help SPS, this is the reason for this particular writing campaign which you are reading today: to provide sufficient information and context so that people can feel comfortable that they know the real truth.

Keep Calm and Engage On, Except with the Trolls

A troll is a state of mind, more than
a person.

The definition of a troll is someone who enters into a conversation with the express purpose of creating disruption and getting reaction rather than advancing the conversation. Sometimes it is just for fun, and other times it is for an agenda.

A troll is more of a state of mind than a person. Just because someone is acting as a troll in a given situation does not mean that they are a bad person or troll all the time. Some people get worked up online and their worst traits come out. Some have legitimate cognitive impairments that lead them to behave like trolls. When I speak of trolls here, it is not a judgement against the individual, but a set of behaviors that cause a certain situation to deal which. Unfortunately, this situation is common on Internet forums and well worth discussing.

Some trolls have an agenda when they stir things up. They want to aggravate whomever they were dealing with so that they would become angry and impatient and lash out not only at the troll but also at innocent neutral people who were just looking for information. Sometimes a person does not actually have an agenda but is simply lashing out because they are very passionate about the issue or even just deeply misinformed, in which case, the effect can be similar in that the respondent becomes aggravated and may speak in appropriately to others. Either way, the way to deal with it is the same.

It is nearly impossible to get down into deep comment engagement and stay calm. Five different people tried it on the SPS team and every single one, including myself, was worn down and started snapping and getting aggressive. Some lasted as little as a few hours, and the longest lasted about four days before the stress made them ineffective.

As discussed above, people tend not to be aware of people beyond themselves, so when they get an aggressive response, they have no sense of context that the person they are dealing with is coming off of a hostile conversation. They shouldn't have to worry about that either, but the fact is that this makes the trolling so effective. By aggravating the spokesperson, they can flip five or six more people to their side by our own spokesperson's failure.

The only sure fire way to avoid losing your cool in these rapid fire interactions is not to have them, which goes back to the central platform of answers and standard responses. Your rules of engagement must be very clear without exceptions, because the temptation is to say, "oh, but that's just a simple question, so I'll answer it." But once you've answered it, the trolls will be right there saying, "you answered that one, what about this one?"

The best and only way to deal with trolls is just not to do it. Stay out of the comments. (Good advice which I struggle myself to follow.)

Create Consistent and Effective Moderation Policies
People have the right to free speech... on their own platforms. They have no right to free speech on your platforms. You have built your Facebook page, group, forum, etc to have a large audience and no one has the right to use your platform to advance their agenda, especially if that agenda is against you.

With great power comes great responsibility.

The problem is that too many people feel they are entitled to whatever they want. When you delete their offensive comments, they cry censorship. They claim that you are not being transparent when you ban a troll. This is why clear, posted policies are necessary. You may choose what standard you employ with your policies, but stick to it.

Some set a high standard for removal such as "threatening or offensive language" and others set a low bar, banning anyone who just ticks them off. Either one is fine because you own your page and can enforce it as you see fit.

Policies are enforced by people with discretion. The argument against moderation is that it will stifle honest discussion, but it does not. What stifles honest discussion is trolls who turn everything into extremes and consume all the oxygen in the room with their bloviating. By removing a small number of people, a much wider conversation can occur.

SPS failed to do this as well. Comment deletion and banning was inconsistent. A clear policy was never set, except for on the SWPF page which was determined to be only for news about the event itself. The SPS page, however, was a mess. People got banned when someone was frustrated with them. Some comments were deleted while others were left up. More than once, a person with an honest question was banned because the moderator mistook them for being hostile.

It was absolutely an example of what not to do. Clear policies are vital.

Learnings
What can we learn for SPS's failure in crisis public relations?

• Create a central source of answers: a Q&A page or regular answer posts.
• Communicate early and often and even more.
• Do not engage in comment threads, keep answers to formal channels
• Have clear moderation rules for forums you control

Nothing can be done to undo the results of the errors of SPS, but it can be a valuable lesson for others to avoid our pitfalls.

10 Days to Wicked Faire - Part 3

This is the third part of a three part series. You can read the second part here.
Not sure who everyone is, please consult the Dramatis Personae page.

Previously, we had removed Jeff Mach from the company, but we were so delayed by Jeff's lawyer that the moment of opportunity had passed, and we now faced a nearly unstoppable momentum of rumors pushed by various individuals avidly working to shut down the event.

The fiercest attackers did not believe that Jeff was gone, but his contractors certainly did believe it. Jeff didn’t so much make contacts as outlines of agreements, and his events functioned in the spaces of faith, goodwill, and sheer willpower.

Circuit Six, an amazing production company led by Dr Andy Lange, had been contracted to run all the programming as well at-convention production. The contract specified that they should be paid by the beginning of the event, but Jeff always managed to get some credit extended to pay a couple weeks after. Without Jeff, that personal credit vanished, and a large payment was needed by Thursday.

It was at this time that the true tangle of the finances began to become clear to me. The shows weren’t so much budgeted as money came in and money went out and somehow it all worked, but this house of cards could only be maintained while the whole Rube Goldberg apparatus that was Jeff Mach Events continued to operate. As we approached the show, we found the coffers emptied.

Most events gain much of their revenue in the last couple of weeks from last minute ticket sales. That spigot had been closed by the crisis. However, even if the full amount had come it, it clearly would not have been enough. Each event was counting on the revenues from the events in the future to pay its bills.

The Circuit Six issue was handled by Tammy offering to back the event with even more of her own money, and help from an unexpected corner: Jeff Mach himself, who had agreed the day before to step away from and give up his own company. He heard that Circuit Six was not willing to run production without the advance payment, and he offered to put $5,000 on his personal credit card to make sure that Wicked Faire could happen.

There was no plan to repay him, and as far as he knew at that moment, this $5,000 would be gone forever. Under the circumstances, we could end up in a position where we would never be able to pay him back, yet he still stepped up to offer that money without reservation.

For years to come, people will discuss Jeff Mach’s failures as a businessman and as a person, but I feel that this one action, which had to remain secret at the time, speaks to Jeff’s true character. A friend of mine during the crisis said, “character is what a person does when no one is looking.” In secret, knowing that the story may never be told and knowing that he may never be repaid, Jeff Mach, who was facing financial ruin and great personal uncertainty, gave $5,000, enough money for him to live on for over 2 months, to ensure that his event would survive and those who relied on it would be taken care of.

It should be mentioned that this was not the only thing that Jeff did behind the scenes to make sure the event went on. He could have very easily just walked away, declared bankruptcy and washed his hands of it, and he would have been justified in doing so. Everything was in his name, and his help was needed right up to the start of the event, including with the hotel. Had he simply done nothing, the event would have failed, and hundreds of people would have lost a great deal.

While the crisis was clearly one of Jeff’s own making, it should be appreciated that, even when he was losing everything, his main concern was taking care of the vendors, performers, and attendees of the event.

What happens when someone places
an idea or a mission above all else?
In a future article, I'll discuss the
concept of idolization and the
dangers is can create.

Jeff’s identity was tied up completely in his events, so it is not surprising that he would sacrifice for them to the last. In fact, one perspective is that it was not so much as a selfless act as an act of denial. Not fully grasping the reality of the situation, he was willing to do what he had always done, put the events ahead of everything else: ahead of his own needs, ahead of the needs of those who ran that, ahead of everyone else.

(Editorial note: Apparently there is some confusion about the section above. At this time, Tammy was running the event and the company, but she was in communication with Jeff because every element of the event was still in his name and some key information was only in his head. He did not have any input as to how the event would be run, but it is necessary when taking over an event a week pre-con to have access to the knowledge of the former event chair.)

The following evening, I saw a post from a performer. It was a fairly ambiguous post, primarily asking people not to take out their hostilities on the performers who were still performing because it was their livelihood. However, it also made mention of Jeff Mach profiting from the event, which was clearly no longer happening. There were other similar posts. Two days after Jeff had left the company to the greatest extent legally possible, people were still speaking of Wicked Faire as if Jeff was profiting from it. Clearly the message was not getting out.

But I was about to find out something far worse.

The small crisis with Circuit Six was merely a warm-up for the climax of the crisis that would come Wednesday night.

At 10:06 AM on Wednesday, January 30th, Brenna Skirata made a post informing people that they could call the Hyatt Regency and cancel their rooms as long as they said they were concerned about safety. This post was shared 41 times and seen by thousands of people. It was even shared by one of our own staff.

By 6:00 PM, 49 rooms had been cancelled. The hotel contacted Tammy and said that they needed $16,000 by 5:00 PM the next day or they would cancel the contract. In a series of rapid conversations, the first focus was on how to come up with that money or how to fight the hotel, but I knew that was not the solution.

If gas is leaking into a fire, you don’t worry about the fire until you have turned off the gas. The mob was getting worse and worse because we were not getting our message out. People thought that they were attacking Jeff, but they weren’t. Jeff was already out.

In fact, in the greatest irony that no one understood, if the event were cancelled, Jeff would not have to pay the $5,000 to Circuit Six, and he would still have the few thousand dollars left in the company account. No amount of hotel penalties would have mattered, because he would have immediately declared bankruptcy. Cancelling the event would have ruined a number of vendors and performers and devastated many more. Jeff Mach himself, however, would have walked away with an extra $10,000.

If the public understood these facts, then they would be supporting us in keeping this event going, but we were failing to get the message out. I was in Hartford for an unrelated meeting when I got this news, so I was an hour away from home, but I had a phone call with Tammy Shipps on the way home that would turn out to be very important. During the call, she was in tears and apologized for being so weak.

I paused and said, “No. Don’t be sorry. That’s what we need. Sincerity.” I suggested she get off the phone and record a video immediately. She did so and what resulted was a 10 minute video that was both awful and gutwrenching.

When I finally got home, I saw the video which had been shared with our team. It was rambling, but it seemed to get the sincerity across. My plan was that we should post this video to our page with the announcement that we would be following up with a live video an hour later at 9 PM. I asked everyone to share the video so that those who did support us could see it.

The video went up, but it was not shared well. This meant that the people who saw and commented on it were not our supporters but those who wished us ill who stalked our Facebook page waiting to jump on anything we did. And jump they did. They said that it was terrible PR, that it didn’t belong on the page, that we didn’t know what we were doing.

Tammy at this point was exhausted, already being ill-suited to the spotlight, and told us that she was not up for the live video. In our group chat, some staff members started suggesting that it was time to pack it in. That we had lost and should give up.

My wife Amy gave me a little speech in which she said that this is not a movie in which at the darkest hour the heroes make a bold move and it turns everything around to save the day. But I was not ready to give up. I knew the power that the live video would have, and I insisted that we had to move forward. If not Tammy then someone else, but we had to at least try. If the live stream didn’t work, then it would be time to give up, but we had to try our last desperate move.

And it worked.

At 9:30 PM, Tammy reappeared in our chat and told us she was ready to go up. At 9:40 PM, the video went live. At first, she had hostile questions, but she answered them one by one and made clear that she would stay on until the last question was asked. She stayed on for an hour and ten minutes, answering every single question. She explained why the event was still in Jeff’s name and the legal restrictions that we were under. She explained what was happening with the hotel, and in time questions went from the past to the future. People were asking how to help and what they could do.

Before the live stream, 1 star reviews had flowed onto the page, but after it 5 stars began to appear. We had done it. We had gotten the truth out and turned the tide. We had done what no one thought was possible. We had reversed an Internet mob.

There were some small bumps in the road after this. Turtle Hill Events was running registration, and they had shut down the ticketing system after the chargebacks started coming in, but that was easily remedied by setting up a backup ticketing system. The hotel was rejecting people who were calling to book rooms, but that was also easily managed (and, a couple weeks later, the manager who caused this to happen was subsequently fired).

Ultimately, the event was a great success. There were no significant issues. It was probably the smoothest running JME event I had ever been a part of, and we felt that it boded quite well for the future of events in a post-Jeff Mach world.

Sadly we were sorely mistaken, but that is a story for another day.

Questions and Answers

During the last couple of days, I received some excellent questions which I'll answer here.

Why did you choose to believe Jeff Mach and not the victims?

I'm glad that this question was asked. For anyone who has read the the leaked log of the staff chat, you will see that at no time did I say that I did not believe the accusers. My operating assumption was that the accusations were true as written. The fact of the matter was that we were dealing with something very serious. We effectively had in our hands the choice of whether or not we should take away a man's life, livelihood, and life's work based on what was before us. I'll go into greater detail about the specific allegations in a future article.

If you were in a low-level role, how are you so sure that the statements you've made about how the company was being run prior to your ascension to power are true?

This series is based on my personal experience. That is also why my story starts on January 23rd, while, clearly, the the seeds of this crisis were planted many years prior.

As for future articles in which I will discuss past issues that I was not directly involved in, all of the information I have is from conversations with a great variety of individuals who had knowledge of the situation. In places where I am uncertain or accounts differ, I will certainly attempt to indicate so.

Why were you chosen or why did you step up as the background leader of this group, while placing someone else as the public figurehead of the "new" leadership?

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of all of the various chat logs that make up the story of the crisis. We are quite blessed that this is such a record of all that happened. I will be working on posting an un-cut version of the logs when I have a moment, because there are some key portions missing from the leaked logs.

All of us stepped up as necessary to keep the event running. although I had never had leadership in JME beyond our small department, I did have experience with other leading events, and I was the only one with that experience. For that reason, there are some occasions in which I lead the conversation. At no time during that process did I have any kind of formal authority.

Why are you writing these articles?

The story of the fall of Jeff Mach Events is long, complex and convoluted. The particular sexual allegations are merely the symptom of a much greater systemic failure, and there are tremendous lessons to be learned from a deep understanding of that system. Many other organizations, in business, fandom, and non-profit, suffer from some of the same failings that JME succumbed to. Perhaps the stories that I'll be sharing over the next few weeks may help another organization to step back from the cliff that JME went over.

Why did you insist that Elise share personal information of the accusers?
I didn't. Below is the actual chat log of that portion of the conversation.

10 Days to Wicked Faire - Part 2

This article is the second part of a three part series. You can read the first part here.
Not sure who everyone is, please consult the Dramatis Personae page.

In the previous section, I first learned of the allegations against Jeff Mach and came to realize that we were dealing with something far more serious than merely some sour grapes from former staff members.

Friday, January 26th, 2018

At this moment, we were largely flying blind. There was one individual who had more detailed knowledge of the allegations against Jeff, but she refused to share even the broadest outlines of that information, citing confidentiality. Our suggestions that this was the moment when what she knew could actually evoke the action that had been sought when the allegations were first made fell on deaf ears.

What further complicated the matter was that there were three types of allegations which were conflated. A woman known as Brenna Kali Skirata had created a blog called Owl Eye View in which she cataloged all the accusations and almost any other form of content she found anywhere on the Internet which remotely bore on the issue. They were not sorted by type, so someone could go to the site and see dozens of accusations. There were, in fact, only four accusations of a sexual nature, but one might read one and see it was sexual, then see 20 more links and assume that they were all sexual, which supported the rumors they had read.

In fact, one allegation was from a man who'd been banned from JME events because he was banned from other kink events. Another was from an individual complaining that he'd applied to be a volunteer but hadn't heard back after three months and then decided not to volunteer.

People are busy, and when they feel they have enough information, they stop looking. Most people heard the rumors, read an accusation, saw the length of the list, and knew everything they needed to know.

Through the weekend, we could see that the responses to the statements were not what we had been hoping for. Many people did come out in support of us, but too many did not. It became apparent that Jeff merely not attending would not be sufficient. We were facing a tsunami of anger.

Sunday, January 28th, 2018

On Sunday, January 28th, we received the results of our investigation by our own independent mediator which confirmed some of the allegations and had a recommendation that Jeff should step aside. This was not from the people who had publicly declared that they would have their revenge on Jeff. This was from our own moderator who was not involved in the situation other than in the way in which he had hired him. The mood among the staff was rapidly shifting.

At this time, I contacted a friend who I believed had background in the field of crisis communications. We were clearly over our heads in this situation, and we needed help. He was a member of the community and cared deeply about these events and wanted to make sure that they survived, so he agreed to help.

He developed a plan which involved Jeff stepping away from the company. The problem that we faced was that we were working in a world of rumor, innuendo, and unbridled rage. Jeff was willing to step away if it would allow his events to survive. He cared about his events more than anything else. In fact, much of his habit of promising things he could not deliver was because he cared so much for his events and the community that he built that he would do anything to make them happen, even if it meant overpromising.

This was not merely stepping away from an event for Jeff. For Jeff Mach, this was giving up his life's work. His entire adult life had been dedicated to building Jeff Mach Events. The only asset he owned was the company, and he was being asked to walk away from it, getting nothing in return, or at least far less than it was worth.

The problem was not convincing Jeff to step aside. The problem was convincing the angry mob that he had really done so. Jeff was the sole owner of Jeff Mach Events. While he could assign authority, he could not quickly transfer the assets or events. The hotel contract was in his name. Everything belonged to him and his company, and, due to sloppy management, the assets were commingled between his personal and business resources.

On Sunday night, we drafted a statement that announced that we were pushing Jeff out of the company and that new policies were being put into place to address some of the systemic issued that had been raised.

Recognizing that the rumors were growing exponentially, we realized that action needed to be taken immediately. It was expected that this statement would be out first thing Monday morning so people could see it when they first checked social media in the morning.

Monday, January 29th, 2018

By noon, the statement was still not posted. Jeff wanted to consult his lawyer prior to acting, and this lawyer was not available to speak until 2 PM. Our crisis expert informed me that if we didn’t have this statement out by 3 PM, then we would have lost the bulk of the benefit of it. Unfortunately, the lawyer did not understand PR, but did understand defensive law, so he was all caution and pause.

This lawyer, as we would discover after Wicked Faire, was quite unqualified to handle a situation of this nature. He could not grasp the situation, nor could he achieve any level of haste at any time.

Finally, as the furnace of Internet ire grew hotter, at 8:20 PM on Monday, January 29th, the following statement was finally posted.

Guests, Attendees, Friends, & Family:

As some of you may know, there were a number of serious allegations against Jeff Mach, former head of Jeff Mach Events, and the topics of security and consent have been in the forefront of most conversations.

We have read what you have written to us. We have listened to your concerns, taken them to heart, and we have made a choice to act in what we hope is in the best interest of the community, the company, and our patrons.

We care deeply about the safety and well-being of everyone who steps into our events in any capacity. We’re making a massive effort to change all of the old company policies and put fairer, clearer policies in their place.

Our goal has always been to provide our attendees with events that are unique, fun, and safe. However, after talking to many of you, we’ve realized that we can do a much, much better job ensuring that our events are a safe place to be, and that our business practices are more ethical. To that end, we would like to announce the following:

* Jeff Mach will not be allowed into any events of ours for the foreseeable future. This includes the Wicked Faire next weekend.

* Jeff Mach has stepped back from the company completely. He will not participate in the management of events or operations for the company in any way.

* Jeff Mach has been removed from payroll and will not receive paychecks from any events for the foreseeable future.

* Any profit made from Wicked Faire: Reborn will go to paying off debt to performers, vendors, contractors, etc.

* No writings by Jeff Mach of any kind will be posted on any official channel or page belonging to Widdershins, Inc. and we have removed the vast majority of his writings from the existing web properties already.

* Widdershins, Inc., as an entity is in the process of determining the right way forward that will allow the events to continue without Jeff Mach as an active participant, including potential sale of all events and assets to an entity of which he will not be a part.

As stated above, we have begun the process of forming a new entity that is completely separate from Jeff Mach, Widdershins, Inc., and Jeff Mach Events. All of the events loved by so many will be run by the new entity, including The Steampunk World’s Fair, Wicked Faire, and the Geeky Kink Events (Classic and New England.) The new entity will begin as an LLC and be owned and operated by myself. This process is not a quick one and is likely to take 30 - 60 days to finalize. We will keep our attendees up to date as much as possible.

Because it is so important, I want to reiterate:

Jeff Mach will not be permitted to enter or or otherwise attend the Wicked Faire: Reborn, nor any other event run by our team.

Jeff Mach has not and will not receive his salaried pay for the foreseeable future. If Wicked Faire makes any profit, it will go to paying off those we owe money.

We are invested in saving the events that so many of you love and that many vendors and performers rely on. This is incredibly important to us, and while we have no right to ask it of you, we beg to please be patient with us as we completely overhaul all policies and procedures to make our events and company safe and ethical.

This is just the beginning of the changes that are being made and we expect many questions to be posed to us. There is a list of our leadership team below with the information on how to contact them; please reach out to us, we’d be happy to address any questions or concerns you still have!

Tammy Shipps, CEO – Just Magical Events &

Executive Managing Committee Members

It had the right effect and was received the right way, but the delay had been catastrophic. Rumors had spread far beyond our capacity to reach. People had begun to call their credit card companies to charge back their tickets, and some were even calling the hotel to say that they would picket the event and to demand that it be cancelled.

Tuesday, January 30th, 2018

The challenge in fighting rumors is that you never really know what is happening beyond your own personal circle, and information was coming to us too slowly. Had we been properly organized as a crisis response team, we would have had plans in place to keep information flowing to us, but we were a convention team, not a crisis team. We were set up to run a show, not a campaign. We did not know that throughout Tuesday, the rumors continued to spread and, with it, the anger.

While those who had seen our second statement were largely satisfied, there were many that it had not reached. Many of Jeff’s die-hard opponents did not believe that he was really stepping down. They believed it was some kind of trick.

To be continued...

Please return tomorrow for part 3, in which we discover that those trying to shut down Wicked Faire had one more trick up their sleeves, and it would came within a hair's breadth of succeeding.

Interesting Note:

Somewhere around this time, Turtle Hill Events stopped providing data on ticket sales, further decreasing our situational awareness. Also around this time, Turtle Hill Events started negotiating with Jeff to buy the Geeky Kink Events (which were renamed after the sale). As we ultimately discovered, the financial situation of the event was better than we thought, largely due to the money Tammy had put into it.

While the Geeky Kink Events were sold for the bargain price of $8000, it turns out that that money would end up being entirely unnecessary to the success of Wicked Faire. Tammy Shipps' loan of $42,000 to the event ensured that all the bills were paid.