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Friday and Saturday mostly 9am, but there are some 8am shifts. Thursday shifts won't start until after the first orientation is over.

We don't have any medial aids on gofers or staff -- we leave that to the professionals. Well, we do have those amongst are staff who are professionals for their outside of Otakon lives (sadly there is such a thing), but even for them, they'll leave it to the people are paid to perform that service for us during the con. During our Gofer orientation we instruct Gofers on ways to help contact the appropriate people if things like medical services are needed. As far as Gofers moving on to staff, there are about 200 that I know of since I started tracking in 2013. Looks like about 25 of those in the last year, but there's certainly more than that since I only know the ones that we've been notified about and a number probably go through the Chief of Staff directly. If you want to get involved in helping make Otakon work, I certainly recommend it as the best way.

So Destination DC has provided us with a map of a bunch of restaurants (they call them "Quick Bites") and places with Daily Needs (convenience stores and what not) and I've put up a link to it on our website location page: https://www.otakon.com/info/location/ Hopefully the map they've given us isn't too out of date. ALSO! There is a whole slew of restaurants and local businesses that participate in a Show Your Badge program. Flash your Otakon badge, get a discount! Links to those are also at the link above.

The form to request a slot for the Cosplay Coordination Photoshoots is now live on our website: https://www.otakon.com/activities/cosplay-coordination/

Sometimes we do have departments who contact us with specific needs or special jobs, but they vary from year-to-year. When I receive them, I usually post them to the BBS or the FB group looking for volunteers. If you're interested in helping out with IT stuff, try to find me during the con and I'd be happy to talk more.

Yeah, there was an initial issue getting everyone through the queue, but things were cleared in the first few minutes. If you had an issue please try again.

There will be limits on the number of tickets you can purchase in a single transaction. We're finalizing those settings now, but we're targeting 4 for VIP seats and 10 for general seats (which is a typical max for a con registration batch). We'll be monitoring things, so yeah, if we see something that's obviously not right like one person buy up large quantities, we'll look into it. The wording about being able to purchase for your friend/family is there because we didn't want to make it so everyone needed to purchase a ticket individually. Because the seating is assigned, we want to make sure people can sit together!

Our Access Control team has been meeting regularly with the convention center staff and DC Police. If we need to make adjustments to our policies for DC we'll have them posted to the website. We've always done a weapons-check / peace bonding. In the past, you would have to go into the access control office. From what I've heard so far, that weapons check is likely to move to as you come into the convention center. Though details are still being finalized, so standard "subject to change" notices. But yeah, none of the conversations I've heard so far are in the realm of "airport grade" security like AB had.

It varies. Sue tends to do them in batches every couple weeks.