DCM

Duty Committee Member

At many conventions, on the day, there is a rota between several of the senior committee members who are the final recourse if anything goes wrong.

This role is identified as the Duty Committee Member or DCM.

If a problem can't be handled by whoever is local to the problem, or by the area head (e.g. a problem at Registration should first go to any kind of Registration help/info desk, then to the Registration Shift Manager, then possibly to the head of Registration then Ops and finally if it still can't be sorted out...) it is escalated to the DCM

The DCM is expected to know what the budget is, how much money can be spent on a problem, and has the authority to spend what is needed to solve the problem, and is also expected to make large policy decisions on behalf of the committee and convention as necessary. The DCM can exclude a person from the convention, can agree that the convention will pay a hotel bill or any other financial expenditure beyond the amount Ops is allowed to spend etc.

The DCM is usually identified in some special way to make them more visible (a special badge, waistcoat, baseball hat, or in one case, a piece of fruit. At the UK Eastercon Eastcon'90 the Pocket Program was meant to say that the DCM would be wearing an orange badge ... but due to a typo, the word "badge" was left out, and so for the rest of the convention, the DCM wore a piece of fruit (it was silly, but it worked!))