Wherein Twestival screw us over with their egregious unprofessionalism.
dnalounge.com
dnalounge.com
The venue's actions seem pretty reasonable to me. They gave the organizers some slack, assuming these are basically decent people. It's not like they're dealing with some unknown or shady operation.
Still, discovering a Twitter-related operation turned out to be much noise/little signal shouldn't be that surprising :)
On a side note, I am now blind because of the lime green on black. 1994 is calling and wants its "cyber" vibe back.
(Xanadu was the first idea of a hypertext system. It was more heavyweight than the current system, which may be why it never caught on -- but it was incredibly visionary. Sometimes I read futurist writing from that time, and I'm struck by how much better we've done and by how much of its early promise we have left unfulfilled.)
The other big factor is that burning man is happening around the same time which sucks a lot of the promotional people around SF out.
1. it seems that people are more likely to reschedule and not hold to commitments than 20 years ago.
2. has the population changed, or some other external factor, or has the culture changed?
3. why?
These guys carry three cellphones AND a pager, but will never show up on time for an appointment or call to tell you they're not going to be at your house on the day you took off of work. But when that bill is due lookout: they're magically available and on the phone with you constantly.
I lived in the East Coast before that and didn't have as many flakers.
I lived on the East Coast for 5 years, and people there were flakier than their West Coast counterparts -- even though traffic on the East Coast is more predictable and less congested. The difference? People on the West Coast try to make their commitments -- but run in to traffic. People on the East Coast leave late and blame the traffic.
Another way of saying this is if I planned to arrive 8 minutes early, I would have been on time 95% of the time for an appointment in Mountain View driving from Oakland.
If the traffic is that bad on a regular and consistent basis, people could account for it by leaving their origin earlier.
I lived in LA for 23 years. Consider: Traffic means that a sometimes-20-minute commute can take 3 hours. And while you can sometimes predict sort of when it will take longer than it should, you can't always. Everyone has to be a lot more flexible. The alternative is to be willing to show up at every appointment an hour or two early... but most people aren't.
Who knows if this is the "root cause" -- I doubt it. But it certainly contributes to the "lets play it by ear" philosophy you find predominant in LA.
Like the internet, this kind of decentralization requires relinquishing a bit of control. It is daring from a branding perspective to let locals plan events under your brand's global name.
So I wouldn't say this story is the fault of "the twestival" - but of those local SF organizers who dropped the ball.
I mean, there is money involved, and charities to donate to. That extremely sensitive issue is essentially already settled.
I feel myself siding with the venue right now: Twestival seems to be playing the "but it's for charity! c'mon" card a little too strongly for my taste.
Lots of people do this part time looking only to break even, in that case their profit is in the form of social capital.