Too Much Solution

[kevin_standlee]

I have decided that the pending WSFS Constitutional amendment "The Five Percent Solution" (item A.2 in the 2016 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda goes farther than it should have done. The ostensible reason for the amendment is to remove the rule that requires that the fourth and fifth-place finalists in each Hugo Award category draw at least 5% of the nominations in that category. That part is fine and is dealt with by the first clause, which strikes out section 3.8.5. However, the second clause strikes out wording about "five percent" in section 3.11.4. That section is the requirement that the Committee publish a list of every nominee in the top 15 positions or with at least 5% of the nominations in that category, as long as the nominee got at least 5 nominations.

I don't think that the second section has any actual connection to the first, and is beyond the intended scope of the original change. I therefore intend to move, at the Preliminary Business Meeting this year, to strike out the second clause, which means to retain all of the words in section 3.11.4 and to limit the scope of the amendment to only removing the minimum of 5% to make the final ballot.

This is in my opinion a lesser change (because it reduces the scope of the change), and therefore if my proposed change is adopted by the Preliminary Meeting, the Main Meeting could adopt the modified proposal this year without it having to lay over for another year.

I'm willing to put my name to this because it would not oblige me to recuse myself from business next year in Helsinki. Any proposal on this year's agenda as new business that has my name on it that gets first passage this year and thus is passed on to Worldcon 75 necessarily requires me to recuse myself from presiding over its ratification.

ETA: timill catches me napping on the Standing Rules; thus the strikeouts above. Sigh.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What a strange second provision. The first provision increases the number of choices given to the voters (in some circumstances), while the second provision potentially decreases the amount of statistical information given out after the voting - although not necessarily, because the saving clause "at least" remains in the instructions, but without the second minimum guideline. So it turns what was a rule into administrator discretion.

How did this pass last year without some explanation as to what the point was? It looks awfully as if the writers just looked for anything in the Hugo rules with the term "5%" and deleted it, regardless of what it said.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

You'd think.

But I can't count how many times I've come back to oddly behaving code and said, "What? That's not what I meant to write..." Never mind doing it days (or years later); I've done it tonight, minutes after typing the code.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I think it's my own fault. I can't recall now, but I'm pretty sure I drafted this motion, and I must have made this mistake by searching for all 5% mentions and not thinking it through, as you said. Too many parliamentary balls in the air, I guess. And because of all of the focus on Puppies, nobody actually read the thing through sufficiently to realize what it actually did as opposed to what the proponents wanted.

Well, this is one reason that we require two consecutive Business Meetings to amend the Constitution.