Time Enough for Hugo Love
Mar. 21st, 2012 01:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeOver on The List That Shall Not Be Named, there is a discussion about how the last few years have seen the Hugo Award nominating deadline adjusted so that the nominations can be announced at various conventions held on Easter weekend. When Easter is relatively early, this shortens the period for nominating, and this has led to the complaint that we're not giving people enough time to evaluate the works published in the previous year.
(There's a separate issue — which was actually the root of the original discussion — about whether announcing the Hugos at conventions over Easter is better than issuing a press release on a Tuesday (the best day for press releases) in a non-holiday period, but that's a different discussion. As usual on THLTSNBN, the discussion drifted away from the original question.)
In my opinion, no matter when you set the deadline, you will still have many people complaining that they didn't have enough time to evaluate the previous year's works. So the question becomes "how much enough to satisfy most people?"
I've suggested that instead of the default eligibility period being the previous calendar year, we make the eligibility year run from September 1 through August 31. Stuff published in the fourth quarter of the calendar year N would be eligible at Worldcon N+2, not N+1 as it currently stands. Furthermore, I would prohibit nominations from being accepted prior to February 1. (This last dovetails with the current requirement that you be a member by the end of January to nominate and would slightly simplify voter administration.) This would guarantee a minimum of four months of "evaluation time."
One bad thing with this proposal is that it means that works released at Worldcon when Worldcon is held on its traditional first-weekend-of-September dates wouldn't be eligible at the following Worldcon, but would have to lay over another year. This can be solved in the simple case by running the eligibility year October 1 - September 30 or by a more complex formula based on the actual dates of the Worldcon, although the latter would lead to the eligibility year varying between 11 and 13 months.
Do I think this is a good idea? I'm not sure. I am sure that it would complicate the Adminstrator's life because it would probably make it more difficult to determine whether a work was published in the correct period. Some works only have a year of publication, not a month. (For instance, works published with no stated publication date only have a copyright date, which is a year.) The current calendar-year system is easier to administer at the expense of possibly penalizing works published late in the year. Or maybe not, since works published early in the year sometimes are forgotten by the time next January rolls around, and this proposal would exacerbate the problem.
I expect the proposal would significantly reduce the credibility of the "I didn't have time to evaluate the works" complaint, although it will never eliminate it entirely.
Should anyone really want to take up this proposal, I'll draft it in the proper technical form for you. I don't expect to introduce it myself.
(There's a separate issue — which was actually the root of the original discussion — about whether announcing the Hugos at conventions over Easter is better than issuing a press release on a Tuesday (the best day for press releases) in a non-holiday period, but that's a different discussion. As usual on THLTSNBN, the discussion drifted away from the original question.)
In my opinion, no matter when you set the deadline, you will still have many people complaining that they didn't have enough time to evaluate the previous year's works. So the question becomes "how much enough to satisfy most people?"
I've suggested that instead of the default eligibility period being the previous calendar year, we make the eligibility year run from September 1 through August 31. Stuff published in the fourth quarter of the calendar year N would be eligible at Worldcon N+2, not N+1 as it currently stands. Furthermore, I would prohibit nominations from being accepted prior to February 1. (This last dovetails with the current requirement that you be a member by the end of January to nominate and would slightly simplify voter administration.) This would guarantee a minimum of four months of "evaluation time."
One bad thing with this proposal is that it means that works released at Worldcon when Worldcon is held on its traditional first-weekend-of-September dates wouldn't be eligible at the following Worldcon, but would have to lay over another year. This can be solved in the simple case by running the eligibility year October 1 - September 30 or by a more complex formula based on the actual dates of the Worldcon, although the latter would lead to the eligibility year varying between 11 and 13 months.
Do I think this is a good idea? I'm not sure. I am sure that it would complicate the Adminstrator's life because it would probably make it more difficult to determine whether a work was published in the correct period. Some works only have a year of publication, not a month. (For instance, works published with no stated publication date only have a copyright date, which is a year.) The current calendar-year system is easier to administer at the expense of possibly penalizing works published late in the year. Or maybe not, since works published early in the year sometimes are forgotten by the time next January rolls around, and this proposal would exacerbate the problem.
I expect the proposal would significantly reduce the credibility of the "I didn't have time to evaluate the works" complaint, although it will never eliminate it entirely.
Should anyone really want to take up this proposal, I'll draft it in the proper technical form for you. I don't expect to introduce it myself.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 01:46 am (UTC)Specific example: John Hertz, recent nominee for Best Fan Writer.
Nearly zero and zero are not the same thing.
1. There are hundreds of members of WSFS who are voting who aren't attending the convention.
2. I am talking about members of the organization who do not have e-mail addresses and do not use computers. You obviously are having difficulty comprehending that there are any living breathing literate human beings who are fans of SF/F who do not do this, but I know it's true because I'm married to one of them. My wife owns a computer but doesn't have e-mail and eschews web sites. She meant to nominate by paper ballot but forgot to fill it out in time. I had to make out her e-ballot for her. Had she not had me there to do it for her, she wouldn't have been able to nominate.
No, not really, especially as there aren't a lot of paper ballots. Most of the time is spent contacting nominees (not always as easy as you seem to assume it is) and discharging the requirements of WSFS Constitution Section 3.9:
Counting nomination ballots is much more difficult than counting final ballots, because you have to review all of the ballots and deal with variations in spelling and naming, and computers are very bad at that sort of thing. Humans can do it better, but it still takes time. I'd say two weeks is the bare minimum, actually, and only because good administrators are trying to get things done ahead of time when they can; however, as most of the votes come in during the last few days, there's only so much you can do.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-22 05:40 am (UTC)For one thing, the fewer paper ballots there are, the less trouble counting them is, so why bother eliminating them? And while computerization is oceans of help with the final ballots, as you note it doesn't make the nomination ballots much less work at all.
The root problem with the nomination deadline is that, no matter when you set it, voters will have to remember items that are a year or more old. There's no way jiggling with the deadline is going to fix this so long as the awards are annual. Attempts to try are like thinking that DST gives us more daylight. But then, there are people who seem to think it does.