Shorah Friends,
We’re still working away on nailing down the details of our hotel. More on that in a few weeks.
Today, I wanted to let you know about some changes to our harassment policies. Over the past few months, we’ve been working with the wonderful folks over at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center to make sure we have a comprehensive set of policies and procedures for handling any future harassment. And we’re pretty happy with the end result.
First is our policies page, available from the top bar, or directly here. The main change is in the harassment section. We took a cue from New York Comic Con’s policy and simplified ours. Now it is easy to read and very clear that we have zero tolerance for harassment.
Second is the new incident report page. This can be reached from the harassment section on the policies page, or directly here. This was adapted from procedures put in place by the Firefly Arts Collective. It lays out who can report a problem (anyone), when a problem can be reported (anytime), and what will happen if you or someone else does report something to us. In addition, this page has a web-form for submitting a report, if doing so in person is not possible or not desired. We want to make sure that everyone and anyone can feel safe reporting any sort of harassment that occurs at Mysterium, regardless of who did it or what it was.
Now, just to be clear, this isn’t because we expect to have to enforce the policy. Mysterium is generally attended by wonderful people who would never harass other attendees. However, as we try to reach out and grow our awesome little convention (and particularly for large years like 2014), we felt it was important to be prepared.
As with anything, if you have any comments or suggestions about these changes, please feel free to drop us a line.
-Taniith