How to Bid for a Westercon
Jun. 29th, 2015 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeOn Sunday I was contacted by someone on behalf of a group of people interested in bidding to host Westercon. The would-be bidders had read the Westercon Bylaws and knew that there were documents they needed to file in order to bid, but they could not figure out where to file them. This puzzled me initially, because I pretty much take it for granted that anyone bidding for Westercon has attended a few of them and been involved in their politics, but upon looking at the Bylaws, I guess I can see how someone could be confused about where you file. It's not like the Bylaws have explicit language that says, "To bid for Westercon, fill out this checklist and send it to this fixed address."
Because the election is administered by the Westercon two years before the target year, the address to which you submit your bid changes every year. This year being 2015, the election is for 2017, and would-be bidders file with the 2015 Westercon in San Diego. If you want to bid for 2018, you file your papers with the 2016 Westercon in Portland. There's no single fixed address, no online form on a single web site, and no single point of contact, and this apparently is confusing to people coming to Westercon out of the blue. Worldcon is the same way, which is presumably why sometimes the Worldcon web site gets e-mail from groups who want to know how they can persuade the WSFS Board of Directors to award a Worldcon to their city.
Anyway, in light of the request for clarification, I wrote an article for the Westercon web site entitled How to Bid for a Westercon. I hope it helps. I'm so close to the process that I clearly cannot see what things newcommers cannot see, so I'm likely to not be fully explaining everything you have to do.
Because the election is administered by the Westercon two years before the target year, the address to which you submit your bid changes every year. This year being 2015, the election is for 2017, and would-be bidders file with the 2015 Westercon in San Diego. If you want to bid for 2018, you file your papers with the 2016 Westercon in Portland. There's no single fixed address, no online form on a single web site, and no single point of contact, and this apparently is confusing to people coming to Westercon out of the blue. Worldcon is the same way, which is presumably why sometimes the Worldcon web site gets e-mail from groups who want to know how they can persuade the WSFS Board of Directors to award a Worldcon to their city.
Anyway, in light of the request for clarification, I wrote an article for the Westercon web site entitled How to Bid for a Westercon. I hope it helps. I'm so close to the process that I clearly cannot see what things newcommers cannot see, so I'm likely to not be fully explaining everything you have to do.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 06:37 pm (UTC)(And how did they leave out a "if Canada or Mexico annexes Australia" clause?)
Also, for whoever runs westercon.org, the links to the "past papers" (bylaws and minutes) from 2010 and earlier seem to be broken.
no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-30 08:19 pm (UTC)A few years later, at a Westercon in Seattle, a member decided that Fun is Fun but Enough is Enough and moved to strike the Australia clause. To his dismay, other members voted to amend his proposal in such a way as to leave the Australia clause in place but take out the annexation clause. The net result was that the amended proposal (which would have roped Australia into the valid locations that could hold Westercon failed, leaving us with the current state of affairs. We thus have a provision that is never going to happen in practice, but that we also can't remove because the Business Meeting regulars will get silly.
In a sense, this is probably Australian fandom's payback for how the DUFF delegate the other direction, Jerry Kaufman, attended the Australian National SF Convention business meeting and presented a bid to hold the 1985 NatCon is Seattle. It won, there being at that time no provision to limit the Australian NatCon to Australia. In the end, the 1985 NatCon that most people attended was in Adelaide, the intervening NatCon having effectively invalidated the Seattle selection; however, as I understand it, Jerry held a panel at the 1985 Norwescon and declared it to be the 1985 Australian National Science Fiction Convention, SpawnCon.
And people say SMOFS have no sense of humor!