In November 1996, I set up the Eurofurence Organisation Webpage, and started a poll for location and date suggestions for Eurofurence #3. The search for con places went over 4 months, and the result was only one concrete suggestion from Markus Graffe (aka Whitepelt). Since there were NO other offerings at all, it was soon sure, that Eurofurence #3 would be held in Bingen/Rhein in southern Germany, and the following date poll showed, that most people would like to have it held during the last week of July. And this was the information I put on this webpage, since Whitepelt told me, that there would be virtually no problems in getting the desired location, the building of the local primary school. We applied for it, and initially got some positive replies, and it seemed that everything went smoothly ... but things changed, when we suddenly, at the end of march, got the information, that the school's janitor decided to take his summer vacation exactly during those weeks, we planned to hold EF3... something which we hadn't anticipated at all. From that moment on, we began working hard on finding alternatives.
The reason why this wasn't posted immediately was to avoid confusion and false rumors ... during the last three weeks, we checked between 10 and 20 different locations, and I don't know what confusion it would have caused if I would have changed the page each time we were trying the next one. To prevent this kind of chaos, I decided not to write anything until there was something to write about, other than "we're working on it" ... which would not have made a difference, except for furries panicking, and flaming me for things I couldn't prevent from happening. Eurofurence #3 was never in jeopardy, we found lots of possible alternatives, it just took us some time to check all of them out. It was never my intention to "keep everything secret to those who are concerned". All informations on this webpage were clearly marked as "highly preliminary", and that's what they were until now. I stated from the very first moment, that all the data was subject to change, depending on if the proposed resources were available to us, or not. Everybody who chose to be a member of the EF3 Organization team (and everybody could and can become that, with no exceptions, by simply asking) of course knew exactly what was going on, and those who heard of our problems should have asked me instead of spreading false rumors, and they would have known that we did have a solution for the problem, and that it just wasn't confirmed yet, and thus I didn't post it yet. If you want to help organizing, you're welcome to do that ... if you're not, please understand that we can't notify and ask every european about every detail of our work all the time, but keep technical discussions to our internal staff mailing list. (Please read the last sentence again carefully, I do not want to be misunderstood.)
We're honestly trying to make EF3 a success, and everybody who wants to take part in the organization has the chance to do so. But if you choose to stay outside the con orga, please do not complain that you are not notified about internal procedures.
Thanks for listening...
Yours,
Cheetah