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Hi everyone

Well – we screwed that one up didn’t we?

The first thing we want to express here in this update, is that we’re sorry. After the last lottery announcement, we know many of you had questions about how things would work for accessible rooms.

We told you that you could email us if you had any questions. Some of you did – and got no reply from us. In some cases this silence lasted months.

There is no excuse for this: we are sorry. We apologise unreservedly.

One of the first things we’re looking to do to address this specific point, is update our internal policy on how things like our email tickets are handled.  Even when we don’t have answers for you, we should still be getting back to you to at least let you know you haven’t been forgotten about.  We’ll try to be better on this front.

We know though, that when we actually announced our position on accessible rooms, many of you felt that it was wrong. Several objections were raised, as many of you felt your needs were just not being taken into consideration.

You also felt ignored, and that you felt these decisions had been taken without proper consideration, inclusion, or consultation. This was only exacerbated by our lack of replies to the emails some of you had sent us.

Indeed, ConFuzzled does have an inclusivity team. However we’ve realised that a lack of communication and engagement with this team, have also contributed to the failures of the original policy decision. They should have been brought into the decision process with greater involvement. They weren’t, and we need to change that going forward too.

We know we need to fix this.  Tonight’s update message is not to announce any changes at this time, but we wanted to let you know: changes are coming.

First – there’s been a big meeting tonight to figure out how we made such a mess of this, and to discuss ideas on how to fix it.  We’ve got some – and we hope they’re the right ones.

However, to make sure that we do get this right, we’re going to take the ideas we have, and workshop them with the inclusivity team.  We hope that by properly engaging them now, we can begin the journey toward fixing this – and ensuring that when we finalise these changes and announce them, that we can get it right.

The inclusivity team is a subset of our innovation team – which was founded to help better meet the needs of the community, and improve the convention. It includes representation from across the community, with non-staff and differently-abled individuals on the group.

So – once again, we want to express that we are deeply sorry for the hurt we’ve caused. We know it’s going to be frustrating to wait – but we beg your patience whilst we work on the solution.

As soon as we have got everything sorted – we’ll announce our changes, and share the new policy with you all.

Please don’t hate us – we will try to fix this for you soon!

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Rallicat

ConFuzzled Communications