In case you weren't aware, DashCon (Tumblr convention) was a massive failure this weekend.
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[quote]While you were comfortably relaxing in your home over the weekend, a group of Tumblr bloggers tried to hold a convention. The result was DashCon, one of the most glorious shitshows to ever amuse bored Internet users.
[s]Why the fuck do I care about anything that happens on Tumblr[/s] What is DashCon you probably asked yourself, noticing the hashtags that popped up on social media over the weekend. In short, DashCon — held in Schaumburg, Illinois — was a convention put on by Tumblr users that attempted to be an assemblage of various fandoms from the social networking site. The planners started working on DashCon in 2013, using Indie GoGo to raise money. DashCon tickets were offered pre-sale for $65, with weekend passes at the door advertised at $80. In addition, tickets were available to some panels at an additional fee.
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Things started to go wrong almost immediately. Convention goers reported a myriad of problems as DashCon kicked off. (This post from Tumblr user Augustine Sycamore sums up the biggest issues during the planning and execution.) Attendance was low. People couldn't get WIFI at the hotel. Early reports surfaced that young teens were allowed into 18-and-up only panels (this was disputed by panel moderators and people at the convention). The game room had one console and television.
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Rumors swirled that the venue (the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel) and planners were clashing over unpaid fees. In a since deleted post, DashCon planners began asking for donations via their website, telling readers the event would be cancelled if they didn't raise $17,000.
[I]Hello dashcon please help! The upper management of the hotel is threatening to shut down dashcon, unless we give them $17,000 by 10 p.m. Central Time tonight. Please go to DashCon.org and click the Donate button and give her anything you can. Unless we get this by tonight everything is cancelled. We suspect it's due to the fact that upper management doesn't like the people at the con. Please please donate what you can!!! Thank you, we have an hour![/I]
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There were some bright spots. Doug Jones, an actor from the Hellboy franchise and Pan's Labyrinth showed up for a meet and greet. Event planners offered an explanation about the debacle with the hotel and say they do plan to start paying people back who donated via Paypal over the weekend. As several people have pointed out, events like this require a lot of word of mouth and usually a few years to build up enough interest to make it profitable enough to stage at a major venue. Without the promotional powers of Tumblr or a similar sponsor, it's hard to make something of this size and scope work. This may be a case of young and/or naive people who have probably attended a lot of conventions thinking it looked easy to do. But even the most seasoned event planners require years of training and experience to be able to pull off successful conventions without having a nervous breakdown. It's easy to blow it off as one big joke, but there were people who paid a lot of money to come to this convention (including tickets, accommodations, travel, etc). Hopefully, everyone involved in planning events like this learns a lesson from what happened at DashCon, so people who actually care and want to support it aren't screwed over and disappointed.
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