Business Meeting Papers Released

[kevin_standlee]

Renovation is starting to publish those reports and proposals that will be coming before this year's WSFS Business Meeting on their Business Meeting Page. Besides the current Constitution and Standing Rules, you'll find the 2010 Updates to the Resolutions of Continuing Effect, including for the first time resolutions passed by the Mark Protection Committee (MPC).

Also here is the minutes of the 2010 MPC Meeting in Australia, where a barely-quorate meeting managed to squeeze through a vote of 5 of the 14 total MPC members (8 present) that voted to prohibit MPC and MPC subcommittee members from being eligible for a Hugo Award. As I wrote last year, this resolution had the net effect of forcing Cheryl Morgan, the person who had done more work than anyone else on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, to decline nomination to the HAMC. It was, in my opinion, a slap in the face to her and indirectly to me, and I continue to be angry about this. I think that the rule is actually unconstitutional because it applies eligibility rules to MPC members above and beyond that defined in the WSFS Constitution. The rule passed by the MPC is numbered MPC-2010-1 and is not only in those minutes but in the Resolutions of Continuing Effect.

The deadline for submitting new business is about 5 PM on Wednesday of Renovation (two hours after the Official Opening, and the Opening Ceremonies are at 3 PM), but some people have smartly submitted business in advance, and those advance submissions are also posted. Of relevance to what I wrote above is a resolution overturning MPC-2010-1 (the Business Meeting is superior to the MPC and can override it) and ordering the MPC to not adopt rules more restrictive than those imposed by the Constitution. If you think the action of the MPC in disqualifying Cheryl (and anyone else who might be plausibly eligible for a Hugo Award) from membership on the MPC or the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee was wrong, please come to Thursday's Preliminary Business Meeting (10 AM, Convention Center A02) and vote for this resolution.

But wait, there's more: I rather expect that there will be a motion to write MPC-2010-1 into the Constitution. That's a constitutional amendment, so unless two-thirds of the people at the Thursday meeting vote to squash such a motion without debate, it will be debated and voted upon at Friday's Main Business Meeting. It would have to pass at Reno and then be ratified at Chicon 7 to take effect. If you agree with me that disqualifying people who want to work for WSFS on the MPC or any of its subcommittees from being eligible for a Hugo Award is a bad idea, then come to Friday's meeting to vote against such a proposal. (Or even better, vote to spike it when it first comes up on Thursday.)

Friday's meeting (10 AM, Convention Center A02) is also where the elections for the Mark Protection Committee will happen. Two of the five people who squeezed through that motion in Australia are coming up for re-election. I hope you will vote for candidates who reflect your views. I expect there will be more than three candidates in the field this year.

Of course, besides this little sideshow for the hearts and minds of WSFS, we have the proposals that got first passage last year and that are up for ratification:

• Raising the voting fee multiplier on site selection from 2x to 4x so that Worldcons could charge up to 4x the voting fee to convert from voting (supporting) to attending


• Clarification of the status of electronic voting for the Hugo Awards and Site Selection


• Allow electronic distribution of WSFS rules in lieu of paper distribution, when practical


• Expand Hugo Award nominating eligibility to include the members of the following year's Worldcon to nominate as well as the past Worldcon's members


• Technical Change: Clarify cross-references to "run-off candidate"


• Technical Change: Include the Hugo Award Logo and the design of the trophy rocket in the list of claimed service marks

I am in favor of all of these except the expansion of Hugo nominating to the follow year's members. On that proposal, I am neutral. I haven't been convinced one way or the other.

There will definitely be proposals dealing with Semiprozines, as the Semiprozine Committee Report has been published, and it's likely to generate a lot of debate, especially with four minority reports attached as alternatives.

I also foresee two competing proposals to deal with the so-called "Podcast Problem," including the Best Fancast proposal.

And that's just the stuff I know something about. There's usually at least one proposal that surprises me.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, in that case, we shouldn't allow anyone on a Worldcon committee to be eligible for a Hugo Award

Well, yes. This.

At least in my opinion.

I'm not really sure I see how anybody not explicitly involved in counting or handling the ballots is really in a position to have any kind of conflict of interest.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Promotion -- voters see the name of someone nominated for a Hugo (probably a fan Hugo) and they also see that that person is involved in some nebulous way with organising the Hugos so it seems to them that there's a connection. It also leads to encouraging one of Kevin's bugbears, the widespread idea there's a nebulous secretive Hugo Awards committee who decides who gets nominated and chosen to win one. Of course these committee folks will hand them out to each other, goes the thinking. Better for anyone directly involved in administering the Hugos in any way to step back from the nominations and I think the Marketing Committee and the Mark Protection Committee are close enough to the process that membership should result in automatic disqualification from being nominated. Kevin's strawmen arguments about Guests of Honour etc. are just that; their focus is not tightly bound to the silver rockets the way the Hugo administrator(s) and the MPC are. Worldcon committee members and not the HAMC/MPC are the edge case in my opinion; I don't know the statistics but has any Worldcon committee member ever won a Hugo during their Worldcon? I feel that most if not all of them would actually refuse the nomination if offered in such a circumstance (or at least they should refuse it).

Similarly I don't know if a GoH has ever won a Hugo the same year they were honoured; it's entirely possible they did but they're not involved in operating the Hugo process the way the Hugo administrators, MPC, HAMC and the Worldcon committee are so conflict of interest cannot really be raised as an argument against them.

If I was at Reno I'd be voting against the resolution to overturn the marketing committee's decision. If it is overturned or even if it passes this first year I would expect many of those committee members to immediately resign, regarding the result as a vote of confidence. It will be interesting to see who would be willing to step forward and replace them at that point when it has been made clear their Caesar's Wife decision on a matter of ethics was rejected by the members of WSFS.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The issue of Worldcon committee members being nominated for a Hugo Award is precisely why the current rule that allows the Worldcon committee to firewall off the Hugo Administration Subcommittee was adopted in the 1970s. The Treasurer of a Worldcon was nominated for a Hugo Award and was going to decline nomination, but instead the committee "fired" him: Hal Clement.

It's not that odd to have Hugo Award nominees on your convention committee. I see at least five of this year's nominees on Renovation's Staff Page, including at least one past winner. (I didn't look that hard; there may be more than I overlooked.)

Two of the five Mark Protection Committee members (that's who imposed this rule, not the HAMC itself) are up for re-election this year. Just as I asked the members of WSFS last year to make my election a vote of confidence in my actions as leader of the MPC and HAMC during the previous three years (and was overwhelmingly re-elected), I'm going to ask the members to consider those members' past actions when they vote this year.

If there really was a WSFS Inc. whose board of directors was the membership of the Mark Protection Committee, and who administered the Hugo Awards, there would be a much more plausible argument for disqualifying the MPC members (and any subcommittees). But we go out of our way to insist that every Worldcon is totally independent of one another and that the body that holds the service marks is weak and nearly powerless and merely a custodian of the intellectual property and a source of publicity because that body nominally owns the common web sites (worldcon.org, thehugoawards.org, etc.). You can't have it both ways: either those committees are the real powers behind the throne or they aren't.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

If we're so all-fired worried about self-dealing of any sort, then we should also prohibit anyone who participates in the Business Meeting from being nominated for a Hugo Award. After all, the Business Meeting is the legislature of WSFS, so people obviously are going to jigger the rules so that they can award Hugos to themselves, right?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I have two problems with this position.

Promotion & Awareness.

Now that John Scalzi (yes, yes I know promotion, but entirely of his own making) has produced the voting packet the typical voter actually can make an informed choice. Prior to being able to look at, say, Fan Art, or read some of the Fan or Related Writing I'll admit I was either leaving it blank OR voting nominally for somebody I had heard of and liked, or nominally had heard of and knew the win would hack people off whom I don't like as much.

I think it's much weaker an argument now that the voters actually can make informed choices.

Second: Awareness - I honestly, with the exception of Kevin, couldn't name another individual involved in the MPC or HAMC - I didn't even know Cheryl had been.

Maybe I'm ill-informed but I'd be interested to conduct a straw poll on this and see who can name the officers.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

And you see, it's precisely because Cheryl had won and been nominated for a Hugo in the past that she was careful to not sign her posts on TheHugoAwards.org with her own name or take anything but nominal credit for it. Oh, sure, a bunch of WSFS SMOFS — particularly MPC members and Business Meeting regulars — knew that she'd done most of the heavy lifting that made THA.org possible, but I'd say that most of her notoriety came from Emerald City and her other fanwriting. But those same SMOFS tend not to like Cheryl, so they've (IMO) convinced themselves that the only way she ever won a Hugo (including the one she won before the HAMC was formed — must have been time travel) was due to nefarious means.

Remember that when Emerald City was first nominated, there were a bunch of people screaming that it wasn't a "real" fanzine because it was published primarily online and that only ink-on-paper fanzines were "real." (Yes, I know that seems absurd today, but it was common in the early days of e-zines.) Cheryl's been collecting brickbats from hidebound traditionalists for years. I think they've convinced themselves that "Since I don't like her or her work, and I'm obviously the Standard Fan And Everything Thinks Like Me, then clearly she must be doing something illegal and Must Be Stopped."

If anyone could be accused of using THA.org to put his own name forward, it would have been me. I signed my own posts on the site and happily made much of the site's existence. And I have been known to appear in the "they also ran" lists for Fan Writer. If being a notable SMOFS with a high-profile position running the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee was an automatic ticket to a silver rocket, it would be me. But no, I got my Hugo trophy the hard way — by chairing a Worldcon that had two leftover trophies. (And even then, I've tried to "give something back" by loaning that trophy out to a library exhibit, the SF Outreach Project at WonderCon, and to this year's Hugo Award Administrator because she needed a trophy rocket to use to help evaluate base designs this year.)

It's not as though Cheryl isn't aware of potential conflicts of interest. In 2002, when she was one of the people helping run the ConJosé web site, and in particular our version of online Hugo nominating and voting, she quietly took her name out of contention because there was too much possibility of her being accused of manipulating the Hugo results by means of the online voting process. But because she didn't make a big deal about it, hardly anyone knows and doesn't give her credit for doing something that, as far as I know, no other Worldcon webmaster has ever done. (Not that there have been too many Worldcon webmasters who are past Hugo Award nominees!)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I'm going to promote part of your comment to a main post, for the benefit of people who aren't following the comment on this one.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

has any Worldcon committee member ever won a Hugo during their Worldcon? I feel that most if not all of them would actually refuse the nomination if offered in such a circumstance (or at least they should refuse it).

Similarly I don't know if a GoH has ever won a Hugo the same year they were honoured;

Leslie Turek, a key member of the Noreascon 3 committee and chair of Noreascon 2, won for Best Fanzine for N3's publication, The Mad 3 Party.

I believe Neil Gaiman is the latest GoH to win a Hugo during his GoH-ship (2009); there have been others.

So yes, it does happen, and frequently. Generally, only the Hugo subcommittee people are excluded.

[(Anonymous)]

Besides Neil Gaiman in 2009, the following other Worldcon guests of honor won Hugos the same year:

2010 - Shaun Tan (GoH, Best Professional Artist)
2006 — Connie Willis (Author GoH, Best Novella)
2002 — Vernor Vinge (Author GoH, Best Novella)
2001 — Gardner Dozois (Editor GoH, Best Professional Editor)
1987 — David Langford (Special Fan GoH, Best Fanzine & Best Fan Writer)
1981 — Clifford D. Simak (Pro GoH, Best Short Story)
1978 — Harlan Ellison (Pro GoH, Best Short Story)
1975 — Ursula K. Le Guin (Pro GoH, Best Novel)
1968 — Philip Jose Farmer (Pro GoH, Best Novella)
1957 — John W. Campbell Jr. (GoH, Best American Professional Magazine)
1956 — Arthur C. Clarke (GoH, Best Short Story)
1953 — Willy Ley (GoH, Excellence in Fact Articles)

I think that's all of them.
-- J. Kreitzer

You underestimate us

[(Anonymous)]

We voters are smart enough to grasp the difference between the (as Kevin put it) "firewalled" Hugo admins -- the only place mischief could occur -- and committees and subcommittees that manage IP, promote the award, etc. I don't know/care who's on those committees -- very different beast. (Heck, I don't know/care who administers the Hugos, either!) I suspect most of my Worldcon-going friends would also care about people who could actually cause mischief (vote counters/admins), not things like MPC/HAMC. And if not, IMHO the solution is education, not over-compensating by punishing people for good volunteer work. (I mean "people" in the broader sense; while Cheryl might be the only person affected by this right now, I take a broader view.)

Kevin's "bugbear" is real, but this isn't what triggers it. I've seen it.

Re. people taking their marbles and going home over one vote: Meh. I'm skeptical (fen, or, heck, humans, give up control? heh), but it's volunteer work. Worldcon and the Hugos would survive just fine. The real issues were already handled properly under the previous rules, IMHO.

Kendall