Worst System (Except for All the Others)
Sep. 4th, 2013 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThe WSFS Business Meeting is taking a fair amount of abuse for using a parliamentary rules manual (Robert's Rules of Order, the most common, but not the only such manual) for its formal decision-making process.
WSFS actually manages only two things of significant importance: The Hugo Awards rules and the rules for selecting future Worldcon sites. (There are other things, which I can detail upon request.) Everything else about how Worldcons are run is done by the individual Worldcon committees.
So, before I hit the road for El Paso, I leave this question before you all: Direct Democracy as WSFS practices it is extremely messy. If you were allowed to change things to suit yourself (other than simply saying, "I'm King and You'll All Required to do what I say when I say it"), how would you change the governance process for the Hugo Awards and Site Selection rules?
Come up with a better system that doesn't have the flaws you perceive are present in the current system. Please.
WSFS actually manages only two things of significant importance: The Hugo Awards rules and the rules for selecting future Worldcon sites. (There are other things, which I can detail upon request.) Everything else about how Worldcons are run is done by the individual Worldcon committees.
So, before I hit the road for El Paso, I leave this question before you all: Direct Democracy as WSFS practices it is extremely messy. If you were allowed to change things to suit yourself (other than simply saying, "I'm King and You'll All Required to do what I say when I say it"), how would you change the governance process for the Hugo Awards and Site Selection rules?
Come up with a better system that doesn't have the flaws you perceive are present in the current system. Please.
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Date: 2013-09-04 04:58 pm (UTC)1) very small cons (so no rules needed for governance)
2) no direct democracy (elect continuing committee; let them do it all, and then we can all bitch about that)
3) continue doing it, but don't make us watch (but we can continue to bitch about it anyway)
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Date: 2013-09-04 06:58 pm (UTC)As far as the rules for the Hugos go, I don't think that there's anything that can be done there other than tweaking around the edges.
Site selection is a different problem. I'm still convinced that the current exclusion zone is way too big, but I grew up fannishly in the Midwest where physical distances between different fannish groups are smaller. Things may look different from either edge of the North American continent.
I also think -- contrary to the view of those who believe that Worldcon should spend more of its time out of the U.S. -- that sending the Worldcon out of the country as often as has happened lately is bad for the long-term viability of Worldcon. I understand that this may be a minority view on my part.
If the question is about the governance process itself, then the biggest single change that could be made would be to allow for a member at the Business Meeting to carry proxies, either for Supporting Members (who can't attend the meeting) or for any member who cannot / chooses not to be there for one reason or another.
Obviously, this would complicate the counting of votes. :)
There's a secondary problem with allowing a single member to be swinging too many proxies. Limiting the number of proxies that a single person could carry to, say, ten would help reduce that problem.
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Date: 2013-09-05 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 06:42 am (UTC)--J. Kreitzer
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Date: 2013-09-05 03:46 am (UTC)The site selection exclusion zone is meant to minimize the "one day's drive" effect; that is, people voting for a successor Worldcon site solely because it's a single day's drive from the host convention, near which they attend. ("Hey, this Worldcon thing in Chicago is really neat! I'll vote for the Ann Arbor site that's awful over the North Las Vegas site that's great because I can drive to Ann Arbor, but Las Vegas is Too Far Away.")
I would react really strongly against the idea of allowing proxy voting at WSFS Business Meetings. All that would happen is that every member would work to carry ten votes to the meeting. Proxies are, in my opinion, profoundly undemocratic. If you want proxies, you might as well go whole hog and have a Congress of WSFS, where the entire membership votes on the delegates that can actually make the decisions. I'd be vastly happier with that than with proxy voting.
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Date: 2013-09-05 12:47 pm (UTC)The problem with the Business Meeting as it exists now is that there is a large "poll tax" which is also undemocratic. If you cannot afford to attend Worldcon, then you can have no actual say in the Business Meeting. Proxies are one method of working around that . If you wanted to limit proxies to "Members who are not physically present at the convention", which would include Supporting Members and those who bought Attending Memberships, but couldn't actually get there for some reason, that wouldn't be unreasonable.
(If I understand correctly, Supporting Members can put items onto the agenda, but without being able to actually vote on them, which is perhaps not as helpful as it might seem. :) )
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:09 pm (UTC)When the current system was being debated, there were people who thought 300 miles was more sensible. I and others said, "If Worldcon was in San Jose and Anaheim were bidding, wouldn't you consider that unfair?"
"But they'd be excluded, wouldn't they?"
"Nope; Anaheim is more than 300 miles from San Jose."
They couldn't believe it. There are a whole lot of people who simply don't get how long California is. These are the people who think Disneyland is a simple day trip by car from the Bay Area, which is roughly like deciding to pop down from New York to Charleston for the afternoon. Until we build the high speed rail system, that's unrealistic.
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:58 pm (UTC)Spokane, at least, is unlikely to result in any possible bid being excluded. :)
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Date: 2013-09-06 02:33 am (UTC)What we have is a compromise, but I think it's a good one and it does have a self-limiting action in that it's impossible to have more than two Worldcons in a row nearby each other. (Theoretically, the same site/committee could run two in a row, but aside from being insane, it's unlikely that the electorate would let them do it.) It forces geographic diversity, but doesn't guarantee that any particular region of the USA (or anywhere else in the world) will host the convention every N years.
And I'm not convinced that the three zones we had were ideal geographic rotation, anyway. How tighly tied is Chicago to Texas, or Atlanta to Boston?
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:13 pm (UTC)I think "popular ratification" (replacing the current second year vote with an up-down vote of all members, attending and non-attending) is a better solution than the nightmare that proxy voting would rapidly become.
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Date: 2013-09-05 05:04 pm (UTC)However, the current situation also produces undemocratic results if we assume that Supporting Members should have rights similar to those of Attending Members. (You're allowed to make a different assumption, of course. :) ) As it stands, Supporting Members have no ability to participate in the Business Meeting and -- if we assume again that that's an important right -- then that's fundamentally undemocratic.
I agree that popular ratification would improve the situation.
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Date: 2013-09-06 02:35 am (UTC)Had Helsinki won, I think I might have had a better tactical shot at it, with two non-US Worldcons in a row voting on it (and then the 2016 Worldcon, which looks to be headed to Kansas City, voting on the final ratification by ballot).
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Date: 2013-09-08 02:13 am (UTC)At the moment, if I'm not fudging the math too badly, Attending Memberships generally outnumber Supporting Memberships by something like five to one. I have a gut feeling (mind, given the state of my gut, I don't insist that it can be trusted) that WSFS would be healthier, & concerns about the viability of the Worldcon (particularly with regard to the question of the effects of holding it outside the US, which I personally tend to think a good thing) much less urgent, if the number of Supporting Memberships were substantially larger.
Maybe one way to accomplish this is to attach more in the way of 'political' rights ; another might be to lower the price. I have also, just now, thought of the possibility of allowing/encouraging national & large regional conventions to 'bundle' Worldcon Supporting Memberships with their own memberships, at some kind of add-on rate. This would create a 'shortcut' for the process, so that people who might be interested in (say) voting for the Hugos wouldn't have to go out of their way : just check a box, pay the extra fee, & you're on the list.
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Date: 2013-09-08 06:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 02:12 pm (UTC)It's possible to argue, of course, that people should buy a Supporting Membership (at least) in every Worldcon, but that's a not-inconsiderable chunk of change, as we were discussing in another thread. :)
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Date: 2013-09-04 07:16 pm (UTC)Concretely, a bunch of things we could do that wouldn't mean throwing out everything we're doing now:
- Allow participation in the BM by proxy
- Disallow amendments that are "hostile to, or even defeat, the spirit of the original motion" (RR11 163:18)
- Second ratification of constitutional amendments by mail (with ballot distributed in a PR for the next Worldcon, as with the Hugos) instead of at the next BM
- Require new business to be referred to a committee appointed at the relevant BM, perhaps with only single ratification (and no amendments) if a committee reports positively
- Generally do more business in committees, reserving the BM or paper mail for providing direction to the committees and not for specific spelled out rules changes
Keeping the BM short is currently at odds with having any debate, and so the BM procedure is fundamentally at odds with letting people feel they have been heard. We have a few adaptations that might help people get that out of their system beforehand except that arcane wording is a barrier and then the amendment system twists things beyond all recognition. If we weren't working out the wording of motions in the meeting there'd be more time for talking about whether we liked them or not. This could happen by committees working out that wording for us, or it could happen by letting motions be general ("Moved to direct the Hugo committee to bring an amendment introducing a best YA Hugo") so that we could talk about the substance instead of the form.
(edited to change userpic)
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:08 am (UTC)- Allow participation in the BM by proxy
See my comments elsewhere about the fundamentally undemocratic nature of proxies in groups that have unitary membership. (Stock corporations are different.) Better to just have a Congress of WSFS and be done with it; it would IMO be vastly more fair.
- Disallow amendments that are "hostile to, or even defeat, the spirit of the original motion" (RR11 163:18)
Well, yeah, but RONR also (as I recall; my copy is in the car packed away right now on my return road trip) uses the example of striking out "commend" and inserting "censure" as a valid germane but hostile amendment.
- Second ratification of constitutional amendments by mail (with ballot distributed in a PR for the next Worldcon, as with the Hugos) instead of at the next BM.
I really want this one. I'd administer the election parallel with Site Selection, not the Hugos, with the balloting closing at 6 PM on the third day of the convention and the results announced at the Site Selection Business Meeting. While I think this would be good for WSFS, the difficulty of getting the Business Meeting to give up any of its authority has kept me from investing the points necessary to try it. If I thought I had sufficient support from people who will show up and vote in two consecutive years, I'd be willing to spearhead such a drive. (OTOH, I'm chairing two years from now, which would put me in the position of having to recuse myself in Spokane when and if the motion comes up for ratification.)
- Require new business to be referred to a committee appointed at the relevant BM, perhaps with only single ratification (and no amendments) if a committee reports positively
We sometimes do something like that, but only if the proposal is technically flawed or if competing proposals are submitted. I think that if we had the programming time to have "hearings" on each proposal, we could at least get people to the point where they think they've had a fair chance to make their case even if they lose.
- Generally do more business in committees, reserving the BM or paper mail for providing direction to the committees and not for specific spelled out rules changes
This pretty much is happening incrementally. See how two new special committees were created to deal with YA and with the Membership Matters this year, and how various committees were tasked with working through the Best Dramatic Presentation Spilt over a ten year period before we finally managed to get something (a compromise) that could actually get the votes. In addition, there is the Hugo Eligibility Rest of the World Committee, which ended up using a bunch of this year's Meeting's time on account of they couldn't reach consensus on things and ended up with a bunch of competing proposals, but at least the technical issues had been worked out first and the BM mainly just had to pick between proposals and then decide whether it liked either of them.
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Date: 2013-09-05 02:15 pm (UTC)As you observe, though, the political reasons are a bit of a problem. :)
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:00 pm (UTC)Roberts totally allows doing this. The BM should not, and really neither should any deliberative body that requires submission of new business in advance -- it defeats the purpose of the advance submission requirement.
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:15 pm (UTC)Perhaps more fair, but a lot harder to achieve while preserving any of the other things anyone likes about the BM.
The trouble with proxies in fandom (I say as the clerk of an organization that makes extensive use of them) is that people give proxies to their friends without sufficient examination or discussion of how those proxies will be voted; the most popular people then get their way. However, from actual experience, the extent of this problem depends on the seriousness of the business. It distorts the Nomic game that some fraction of the membership is playing, and the less popular Nomic players get all upset about that. But when proxy senders are motivated by an issue they care about rather than by some perception that they ought to participate in business that doesn't actually matter, they are more careful in selecting their proxy holders and in communicating their preferences. So the issues that matter are ultimately settled fairly.
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Date: 2013-09-08 02:32 am (UTC)Actually mail-ballotting might work as well as proxies in this application.
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Date: 2013-09-04 07:58 pm (UTC)Only allow OTC on other procedural motions, or items raised at the meeting.
If it's on the agenda, it gets discussed. Minimum 5 minutes.
After that, people can move "Next business" if they want, as a 2/3rds or 3/4ths procedural motion.
As a quid pro quo for this, I'm prepared to increase the number of "assentors" needed to get something on the agenda from 2 (proposer & seconder) to something higher, probably between 10 and 50.
Basically, it just feels wrong that something can be on the published agenda, pre-discussed (probably with much misunderstanding) on all the fannish e-lists, and then the proposer doesn't even get a chance to make their case, due to a pre-emptive OTC "nuclear strike."
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Date: 2013-09-05 04:24 am (UTC)But for the rest: I think I like the idea of a certain minimum number of co-sponsors guaranteeing a motion can come up for a guaranteed minimum amount of debate. Possibly a mixed case, whereby anything that gets less than that minimum could still make it to the Preliminary Business Meeting, but would be subject to OTC as currently applies.
I think 50 is a good number. It would have been about 1% of LoneStarCon's attendance (a smaller percentage of the total membership). It would complicate the Business Meeting's life by having to more carefully validate co-sponsors. (Currently we tend to take people at their word.) But it might at least get people a way to be able to say they got what they consider a fair chance.
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Date: 2013-09-04 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 09:28 am (UTC)No, I'm not quite sure whether I'm serious or not either...
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Date: 2013-09-04 10:24 pm (UTC)Fan 1: (raising longsword) "I come to establish the YA Fiction Hugo!"
Fan 2: (raising his paired Franciscas) "Never! I will die to prevent the dilution of the writing categories!"
Fan 1: "So be it, traditionalist dog!"
Kevin: "Enough! Two fans enter, one proposal wins! Combat is to submission or unconsciousness. If neither combatant can continue, the item is tabled unless a motion to recombat is passed by a simple majority. All decisions made by Kuma Bear are final, as prescribed by Conan's Rules of Order. If there are no further motions, BEGIN!"
You have to admit, it would make the business meetings a bit more interesting.
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Date: 2013-09-05 05:20 am (UTC)I'm so glad to read that you're feeling better enough to write material like this.
Lisa has recovered from literally (not figuratively) rolling on the floor laughing; admittedly, this was partially due to a massive coughing fit triggered by the laughing. When she recovered, she said, "Is he trying for the Best LiveJournal Post Hugo Award?"
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Date: 2013-09-05 08:46 pm (UTC)Happy to know I made Lisa laugh. After the cancer, I made it my mission in life to make at least one person laugh each day. Needless to say, this has become a bit more difficult.
Of course my favorite part of this came from knowing how you love to dress for the occasion. Picturing you in black and orange robes and hood, with Kuma on the Throne of Fishes is what made me giggle. In my mind's eye, Lisa was in charge of the big Gong.
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Date: 2013-09-06 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-04 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 04:24 pm (UTC)This sounds fair, in that popular ratification imposes a publication and mail handling burden on each Worldcon, when it might be that only regular BM attendees would take part. The resulting expense would be wasted if its only purpose was to make it so that people who did not ordinarily attend the BM could participate. But the other purpose is to free up time at BMs, and it looks from here like many of the problems people have making themselves heard at BMs stem from optimizations the BM has made to save on time.
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Date: 2013-09-05 05:22 pm (UTC)No direct equivalent to WSFS, but a number of the things that WSFS handles get done but differently.
Hugo Awards? BSFA Awards - the difference here is that the awards are run by a completely independent organisation, the British Science Fiction Association, which traditionally not only ballots its own members for the awards in advance by post and email but also allows attending members of Eastercon to vote at the convention in return for Eastercon providing a prime-time programme slot for the awards ceremony. But only BSFA members are allowed to nominate for the awards, and the BSFA could choose to withdraw from the arrangement at any time.
Site selection? Done as a programme item during Eastercon. Voting by show of hands or ballot during the item. Of course, the current Eastercon is under no formal obligation to provide a slot (and probably a chair) for it, but in practice it always happens.
Trade mark? Nothing done until about ten years ago, when a fan, with informal agreement at one Eastercon, registered it in order to make sure that nobody outside fandom did so. No problems so far - the right to use the trademark has always been freely granted to successive Eastercons, and I believe that arrangements are in place for when the fan concerned dies or gets too old to continue with it - but it obviously requires a fair degree of trust.
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Date: 2013-09-06 03:06 am (UTC)