Hugo Awards: What's "Professional?"

[kevin_standlee]

The Hugo Awards Ballot doesn't have room to include the entire WSFS constitution, or all of Article 3, and therefore there are times when it might not be completely obvious what the terms on the ballot mean. I got tripped up by this myself when answering a query about what "professional" means, specifically when hearing discussion on The Coode Street Podcast about eligibility for Semiprozine. They thought that Locus wasn't eligible, but the list of qualifications for Semiprozine, read in isolation, suggested that it was.

Here's the rub, and it's new this year: "Professional" now has a technical definition. For the past several years, the implicit definition was "If the voter thinks it's professional, then it's professional." But as of this year (that is, adopted last year), the technical definition of "professional" for the purposes of the Hugo Awards is in section 3.2.11 of the 2012-13 WSFS Constitution:

3.2.11: A Professional Publication is one which meets at least one of the following two criteria:

(1) it provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or,
(2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.

It's actually very significant that this definition is part of section 3.2, which is the list of general rules. That includes things about publication date, serial publication, works published in languages other than English, and so on. Anything in 3.2 applies to every category unless there's a specific rule in that category that takes precedence. This is important because the previous written definition of "professional" used to be inside of Best Editor (before we split the category and got rid of the wording about it). Even when it was there, you could made a good case that, being defined locally to only one category, the definition didn't apply to the other categories. You can't make that argument now: both "professional" (and by implication its opposite, "non-professional") are specifically defined for any category that requires that a work or person be "professional" or "non-professional."

Not every category is affected by this. The written-fiction, related-work, and dramatic-presentation categories have no requirement that a work be "professionally" published.

You can't fit the entire WSFS Constitution into the ballot. I do think, however, that it's possible that future Hugo Administrators might have to do some thinking about more explicitly referencing people to the full constitution from the ballot, because otherwise there's a very good chance that people will interpret each category in isolation without any consideration of the rest of the rules that apply to the ballot.

Comments

[lindadee.livejournal.com]

I've been scanning this topic on SMOFs and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what was going on (I must have missed the initial discussion). In any event, thanks for clarifying the issue.

[jorhett.livejournal.com]

Here's an annoying question. Why not split the Hugo rules out of the WSFS constitution, such that the running of conventions and other WSFS matters are not intertwined with the hugo rules?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Who would have the authority to modify the separate Hugo Rules (currently Article III of the Constitution)?

Worldcons are already required to distribute Article III with the ballot to their members. They do this by including it in the same progress report as the ballot.

There are (mostly) no Hugo Rules that aren't in Article III. (There's stuff about what a membership gets you elsewhere, but that's not substantive to the rules about eligibility for the Award itself.) So even if you split Article III out separately, you're still left with a several pages of rules that, to be comprehensive, would have to be printed inside the ballot, I think.

This particular issue is causing heartburn because it's brand new. The definition of "professional" only was adopted last year, and this is the first Hugo Awards conducted under it. Future Administrators will have to learn from this and try to communicate the matter better to people. And that doesn't include (IMO) putting every word of Article III on the ballot, but instead doing a better job of saying, "these are the basic rules, but if there are things you don't understand, look [here] for more information and official rules."