Update to Masking Policy
Dear GGC Community,
As you may have noticed with last week’s 2025 convention announcement, GGC is moving from a mask mandated convention to a mask strongly recommended one. Since then, we’ve heard concerns from our community about how this policy change was communicated, especially the lack of transparency in not mentioning it directly in our newsletter or on social media. We apologize for the shock this caused. We realize that we should have announced this policy change separately and prior to ticket sales opening.
We have heard from community members reaching out via email and on our Discord to ask questions and seek more information as to why the mask policy was changed. The decision to update this policy did not come lightly.
GGC has fewer people on staff now than we did in 2019. We have struggled to fill agent roles. During the 2024 convention, we heard from attendees who were concerned with inconsistencies in how we were enforcing the mask mandate. Due to our lack of funding and volunteers, we’ve realized we are unable to improve enforcement for 2025.
Ultimately, we no longer have the resources to produce a fully masked convention. We acknowledge that the decision to move from a mask mandated convention to a mask strongly recommended will directly impact some of our most vulnerable community members and prevent them from attending GeekGirlCon. Though we can’t fully make up for changing this policy in a large way, we are trying our best to support the community in other ways.
We are requiring our staff, agents, and venue staff to continue masking, and will also be continuing to provide complimentary KN95 masks at the entrance and throughout the rest of the convention. We are actively looking into how we can support a more robust online experience during the event, including expanding our online offerings beyond streaming the main stage. Additionally, we will continue to host our mask protected community events, like our monthly book club series.
Some community members shared confusion over our choice to continue to post photos of our attendees in masks. Not only are these the most recent pictures from our last few conventions, but we firmly believe that since we will be strongly recommending masking at our 2025 convention, we need to normalize masking through our promotional materials.
We understand that this decision has impacted different parts of the community in different ways; we encourage people to continue to reach out at communityprotection@geekgirlcon.com.
While much of the outreach we have received so far has been respectful and thoughtful, unfortunately, some of it has violated our harassment policy. As such, comments have been turned off on this blog post and on associated social media posts, in order to simultaneously protect our volunteer staff from further harm and ensure all comments, questions, and ideas are funneled directly to the board. Everyone that runs GeekGirlCon, from agents to staff to the board of directors, is a volunteer. We will respond to emails we receive about this change as soon as we can in the coming days but please understand that any delay in response does not reflect a lack of appreciation or care for the emails sent. Thank you for your patience and continued support!
– The GeekGirlCon Board of Directors
