bookmark_borderPenguicon Board of Director’s Statement

Greetings,
 

As an organization created for and by the community it serves, it’s our priority to create as safe a space as possible for all who join us at our events. We want to ensure attending members who are from minority groups that are generally under-represented in spaces like ours find a welcoming environment at Penguicon. To our deep regret and dismay, this year, we made decisions as an organization that played a role in those folks feeling unsafe at the convention, and we have to own that and do better in the future.

Due to how our convention has operated since inception and the desire to empower each year’s volunteers, the Board of Directors is intentionally not involved in day-to-day event planning operations. Thus, they may not be aware of issues before they present a problem. Every volunteer from the bottom to the top is an unpaid community member with outside responsibilities, not a professionally paid event organizer. Thus far, this has served our community-run convention well. We each learn and grow as we produce the event together and frequently change positions with others who step forward, including at the Board level. Sometimes, that dynamic interferes with passing along institutional memory and timely guidance, and we must find ways to work better as a team. We want to apologize to anyone impacted and hope those who decided not to attend Penguicon at the last minute this year will consider us again in the future.

It also must be said that over the years, we have occasionally removed people from our events or prevented people from attending when we think it’s appropriate to safeguard our community. This is one of the few actions we can take as an organization that has never hired security to police our attendees. We reserve the right to refuse entry, as listed in our code of conduct, because providing a minimum of care for our fellow attendees is essential.

However, we are not a court of law or professional investigators. We do not officially comment on conduct issues unless absolutely necessary to protect those who report conduct from retaliation.

Unfortunately, that does mean we have to allow people to present their case to the community without retort, even when the incidents, facts, people involved, and timing are entirely incorrect. We would rather our reputation suffer than to put others at risk, and we will not exploit our attendees for posturing, pride, or profit.

We must make choices based on the information we have as a small part-time volunteer organization. The Board wants to assure our community that we work hard with our Operations team to verify information that we take action on to the best of our abilities, to consider contradictory or maliciously presented information for its worth, and seek out multiple sources, witnesses, prior complaints, or points of evidence that point in the same direction.

We will always choose to inconvenience one person to provide safety to the whole. We would rather see the organization cease to exist than allow genuine harm to come to our fellow community members through our actions or inaction. We try to reflect that value in our decisions.

Penguicon is an incredible, unique, and diverse community full of talented, generous, kind people who build the con from the ground up every year. Our most important job as temporary stewards is to safeguard the community’s ability to share their knowledge, art, and joy with each other.

Sincerely,

The Penguicon Board of Directors

bookmark_borderPenguicon 2024 Masking Requirements

Everyone (age 2+) is required to wear an approved Mask while attending Penguicon 2024. An approved Mask must, at a minimum; fit properly and snuggly, fully covering your nose and mouth, and secure under your chin.

Masks/Face Coverings Not Permitted:

  • Masks with exhalation valves
  • Face coverings, including bandanas, that are unable to be secured under your chin
  • Neck Gaitors
  • Masks with mesh materials
  • Masks that contain holes or are significantly damaged
  • Costume masks
  • Clear, open bottom, plastic face shields, only. (may be worn in conjunction with an approved mask)

This policy applies to all members (Age 2+) including staff, dealers, artists, presenters, guests, and cosplayers, regardless of an individual’s vaccination status. There are no exceptions to the Mask Mandate, however, as always, email us at [email protected] for help with accommodations for those with disabilities.

DUE TO ONGOING CHANGES REGARDING TESTING AND VACCINES:

2024 PENGUICON WILL NOT REQUIRE PROOF OF VACCINATION OR NEGATIVE COVID-19 TESTING. MASKS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES.

bookmark_borderPenguicon Infrastructure Changes

Hello everyone,

As of December 21st, 2023, Penguicon has migrated all of its websites, domain registrations, and DNS zones off of DreamHost (which was costing us around $150 a year)! Thanks to a generous donation by Liberty Center One, a data center in Royal Oak, we now have a permanent home for all our web assets, including every Penguicon website since 2003. Additionally, we centralized our domain registrations and DNS zones to CloudFlare, which, on top of providing those services, also gives us a fantastic WAF (Web Application Firewall) to protect our websites better. You should hopefully see significant speed improvements to penguicon.org (and any subdomain of penguicon.org) and penguicon.social (our Mastodon instance). On the security front, in less than an hour of enabling the WAF, CloudFlare has already blocked more than 300 security threats.

We’re entertaining the idea of holding a “Penguicon IT Infrastructure; How the Sausage is Made” panel for Penguicon 2024, so hopefully, there will be more on that soon.

Please let us know if you have any issues accessing any Penguicon site you previously could access.

Thanks,

James Gamble

bookmark_borderPenguicon.info is Now Decommissioned

Hello everyone,

Penguicon.info once served as a planning and documentation wiki for all things Penguicon. Over the years, it’s been used less and less and hasn’t received a significant content update since 2019. That being said, we’ve archived the site, making it readable to anyone who’d like to look. It currently resides here: https://infoarchive.penguicon.org/doku.php/start – Additionally, DokuWiki has been patched to the latest version to resolve security issues.

I’ve also added a section to the website under “About” to document old assets that have been archived. You can reach it here.

Thanks,

James Gamble

bookmark_borderPenguicon Presentations Are Back!

Hello everyone,

Penguicon offered presenters a discount for several years by allowing us to publish their presentations on presentations.penguicon.org. However, that site broke at some point in the last year or two. While the content was still available on the web server, the software that presented the presentations to users was beyond busted. I’m happy to announce that I’ve recovered the presentations previously hosted on that site and have rehosted them here: https://presentations.penguicon.org/

If you have been a presenter in years past and still have your presentations and would like them shared, please send them to me at [email protected]. Include the year of the presentation, and I’ll get it added.

bookmark_borderSocial Media Changes

Hello everyone, I just wanted to let you all know that as of noon ET today, December 4th, 2023, Penguicon no longer has an account on Twitter/X. You may view an archive of our account here: https://xarchive.penguicon.org/#/

We will maintain a presence on Mastodon (https://penguicon.social/@penguicon), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/penguicon.bsky.social), and Spoutible (https://spoutible.com/penguicon). While this may be seen as an overabundance of official places to get Penguicon information, note that we are trying to reach folks where they are instead of getting them to come to us. Spoutible has begun allowing native crossposting to BlueSky with the addition of Mastodon in the coming week. That said, communications across all three platforms should be consistent in the future. Please send an e-mail to [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thanks,

James