And again, you're focusing on the complaints instead of looking at the broader picture. This is clearly a marketing problem, not a legal problem. Whether you call someone a "member", a "customer", or even a "volunteer", there is a contract that occurs at the time of registration. That contract carries almost no legal obligations, and yet if a convention fails to meet the expectation of its (let's call them) members, people will stop coming. That's the real danger the committee needs to consider. In that event, the convention leadership either needs to rethink what they are doing, or else they should step aside and let someone else run things.
I have found it much more productive to discuss people's concerns, instead of leaping to reductio ad absurdem versions of their argument. It is much, much easier to find consensus and mutual understanding if you don't assume that agreement is a necessary result of the discussion. It doesn't help the conversation to accept an unreasonable premise as a starting point for the discussion, even if one might intend to "disprove" their premise with logic of some kind. Listening to the complaint is reasonable; taking legal steps in response is counterproductive, because it avoids dealing with the complaint for what it is.
So the way to deal with "paying customers" is just to explain what the convention is about, and if they don't like that, no one is forcing them to attend. Many conventions have disclaimers like "Guest appearances subject to professional commitments."
I think injecting a ticket-like standard contract form into the registration process is dubious and would introduce unpredictable legal liabilities, even if this contract form explicitly stated "This is not a ticket." (I.e. if you sell someone a ticket-like object, anything written on that contract is only relevant and binding if the organization hosting the event can prove that the other party has been explicitly made aware of unusual terms printed on the contract.) Conversely, anybody who thinks they can get a court to imply a lot of terms into an unwritten contract that the other party hasn't agreed to doesn't have a clear idea of how the law actually works, so their putative lawsuit isn't much of a concern. (I'm not a lawyer, but if I were convention chair, I wouldn't be worrying about such lawsuits.) Dealing with the complaint as a legal issue seems to be a strategy for avoiding any consideration of policy change, and that seems like bad management.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
members are customers
Date: 2006-04-20 08:20 pm (UTC)I have found it much more productive to discuss people's concerns, instead of leaping to reductio ad absurdem versions of their argument. It is much, much easier to find consensus and mutual understanding if you don't assume that agreement is a necessary result of the discussion. It doesn't help the conversation to accept an unreasonable premise as a starting point for the discussion, even if one might intend to "disprove" their premise with logic of some kind. Listening to the complaint is reasonable; taking legal steps in response is counterproductive, because it avoids dealing with the complaint for what it is.
So the way to deal with "paying customers" is just to explain what the convention is about, and if they don't like that, no one is forcing them to attend. Many conventions have disclaimers like "Guest appearances subject to professional commitments."
I think injecting a ticket-like standard contract form into the registration process is dubious and would introduce unpredictable legal liabilities, even if this contract form explicitly stated "This is not a ticket." (I.e. if you sell someone a ticket-like object, anything written on that contract is only relevant and binding if the organization hosting the event can prove that the other party has been explicitly made aware of unusual terms printed on the contract.) Conversely, anybody who thinks they can get a court to imply a lot of terms into an unwritten contract that the other party hasn't agreed to doesn't have a clear idea of how the law actually works, so their putative lawsuit isn't much of a concern. (I'm not a lawyer, but if I were convention chair, I wouldn't be worrying about such lawsuits.) Dealing with the complaint as a legal issue seems to be a strategy for avoiding any consideration of policy change, and that seems like bad management.