Worst System (Except for All the Others)

[kevin_standlee]

The 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.

Comments

[pwilkinson.livejournal.com]

OK - a system that meets every criterion in your final request except, almost certainly, "better". The British Eastercon system.

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.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

While acknowledging that it works for them, I find the Eastercon situation nerve-wrackingly imprecise. I really doubt it could be scaled up. Having individual people own the service marks seems like sheer madness to me. One of the reasons WSFS has had so much difficulty fixing its web site was that one of the domain names was in the personal control of a gafiated fan, and the process for uncorking it is vastly more difficult than most people assume it to be. We finally this year managed to get it sorted out, so that maybe this coming year we can do the decade-overdue revamp of the site. (If we didn't get the domains squared away, when we moved the site to a new server, which I think we will, one of the domains would get left behind and people using it would get the old site or a 404.)