Not Getting It
Sep. 27th, 2019 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeI am pretty much convinced that a huge number of fan fiction writers at AO3 have a completely toxic and utterly wrong understanding of how the World Science Fiction Convention, the World Science Fiction Society, and the Hugo Awards work. After all, one of them just implied to me that they are the only people who have ever won Hugo Awards who did their work for love, rather than for the Big Money, and that of course all of those people at WSFS hate that. I guess that means that every fan writer and fanzine publisher and fan artist has been lying and they were all paid millions of dollars, right? And that those of us who run Worldcons are only doing so because of the Big Money we're all being paid to do so, right?
Also, they're not going to be satisfied until WSFS announces that every single person on Earth who has ever lived or ever will live has won a Hugo Award. Oh, and that I personally have been burned at the stake.
Also, they're not going to be satisfied until WSFS announces that every single person on Earth who has ever lived or ever will live has won a Hugo Award. Oh, and that I personally have been burned at the stake.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 11:07 pm (UTC)If you were a professional astronomer, you'd have no basis for communication with someone whose idea was that "the Sun comes up in the morning because he's afraid to show his face until all the witches have gone to bed." And that's the level of understanding you're dealing with here. I genuinely don't know what you can do other than keep repeating "the award was made to the Archive as an entity, not to its contributors either individually or jointly". Then again, I find that particular award perfectly baffling — seems much more like a "fanzine" than a "related work" to me, if I had to classify it, which thankfully I don't!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-27 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 07:29 am (UTC)And yes, it sounds like one of those instances where you need to stop communicating with them, once you've hit that wall, and commmunicate with others around them who will (or at least might) listen.
Teddy
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 05:58 pm (UTC)Because while I admit that I'm playing the game at the lowest difficulty setting, I still had to play it, and apparently studying hard, getting a college degree, somehow managing to find a long-term well-paying job that I've had for more than twenty years, and building up enough money that now, in my fifties, I'm able to travel and enjoy myself is EVIL. And Worldcon is EVIL because it costs money to attend!
Honestly, do people not understand that "amateur" doesn't mean "free of all cost?" Or is it only "amateur" when they do it, not when other people spend their disposable income on it? Or maybe it's just that because I keep fairly good financial records and know where my money is going that I can say with some confidence how much my hobby costs me.
Heck, it's not like I'm independently wealthy or a multi-millionaire or something like that. There are plenty of people (some of them reading this journal) who are much better off than I am. I don't resent that. The small number of pretty wealthy fans who have poured their money back into the community should be honored, not criticized as "you should spend money on my friend's Kickstarter projects instead!"
no subject
Date: 2019-09-29 09:57 am (UTC)I see these kinds of mismatched conversations wherever the things that form people's core identities clash, particularly when helped along by an unhealthy dose of feeling persecuted. You and I formed ourselves in our fandom, these guys are forming themselves in theirs. (I don't know about you but at a particular time in my life I defined myself against other ("mundanes") rather than as myself, if that makes sense, but that sense of persecution never came into it, and I do think it makes a difference.) The people who will be able to speak with them are the wise ones of their own community; you can't give them wisdom from where you stand.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 09:31 am (UTC)I suspect that the existence of fanzines for nearly a century undermines some AO3 people's belief that they're doing something quite new. People cling hard to such ideas.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 10:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 06:09 pm (UTC)However, a lot of us do know the background, and have just reached a different set of conclusions from the same starting facts.
AO3 was designed, from the beginning, to welcome, encourage, and recognize the contributions of the people who built the corner of fandom we inhabited. Treating the entire archive project as a community is built into the infrastructure. It's very much not, "the experts in our corner of fandom built an archive for the rest of us." It's, "we fans are getting together to build the archive we want."
* The reason we built AO3, was because we'd gotten tired of getting kicked out of other places for what boiled down to, "you're doing fandom wrong."
* These places include literary scifi conventions that refused to have panels related to fanfiction, or would only hold them late at night, or insisted on "both sides" panels where we were told to justify our hobbies, rather than discuss how they connect to other aspects of scifi fandom.
* The AO3 codebase was not on the ballot. Neither was the AO3 infrastructure. The archive, as a whole, was; that includes a hell of a lot of content.
That's background. I don't think we're in disagreement on those details. We may disagree (we almost certainly disagree) about what they mean.
* The Hugo Awards trademark is for "the Designation and Recognition of Achievement by Persons in the Field of Science Fiction and Fantasy..." (bold added)
* We all knew - we all know - that "I won a Hugo!" is a joke, and that "We won a Hugo" is much closer to a sports team fan's declaration than the team itself. However...
* When sports fans say, "we won the World Cup!," they know that someone is able to say, "I won the World Cup," even though it means, "I am part of a group that won the World Cup."
* There is a long, long, history, in business, in fandom, in the world in general, of ignoring women's contributions, and of celebrating our accomplishments while not crediting us with having made those accomplishments.
* AO3 was built, in part, to fight that system.
We are, for the most part, entirely willing to say that "we won a Hugo" is true like it is for sports fans... as long as there's a team who can say, "We, ourselves, actually won a Hugo." And we would understand that if members of that team say "I won a Hugo," they're exaggerating or leaving out details.
Name the team, and 90% of this drama evaporates.
(Well, it would have two weeks ago. Now, I think "name the team" would need to come with a cogent explanation of why only that group is the real winners.)
My understanding of "the team" who built AO3, who manages AO3, who decides on what AO3 will be doing in the future, is "all of us." A lot of people agree with that understanding. Some don't, and think we're somewhere between "mistaken" and "delusional."
Ultimately, we don't need to convince anyone that we are correct. If there are legal trademark violations, there's a committee to deal with those. (It may not be able to address people saying "I won a Hugo" when they didn't - that's not a trademark violation, any more than calling the family Subaru "my Porsche" is a trademark violation. It's fraud if I try to convince anyone of that to sell it, but that's still not a matter for Volkswagen AG.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 06:41 pm (UTC)That is categorically not so. If it were true, people selling merchandise claiming individual and personally that they are Hugo Award winners would respect the request that the work be withdrawn, and not secretly send out notes to their friends saying, in effect, "I'll sell you the pin that the meanies at WSFS made me take off public display anyone, and they can't make me stop." (And yes, the MPC is taking action on this when we learn about it. Just because the MPC isn't sending out press releases does not mean it's not happening.)
If you say, "Those are outliers and should be ignored," then I'll say that anyone saying that AO3's win was illegitimate is an outlier and should be ignored as well. As I said elsewhere, the final word on this was when 2019's Hugo Award Administrators ruled it eligible for Best Related Work, which means that the fictional content was only incidental. That's the rules. (And note that I'm co-author of a pending change to WSFS rules that makes explicit what is currently only implicit, namely that no other Worldcon or other entity can override the decisions of a Worldcon regarding the Hugo Awards given by that convention. Would I do that if I somehow was hating on fanfic archives? Wouldn't I instead be scheming to somehow take away AO3's Hugo Award by nefarious SMOF-filled room shenanigans?)
I do not in the slightest bit dispute this. But you also don't get to say, "And all other fandoms are illegitimate and we are the Only True Fans, and those of you who have spent generations building a community with your love, work, and money are Not True Fans!"
For the record, no matter what anyone else wants to read into my words, I am happy that people writing fanfic can take pride in their joint accomplishment. I really am a "big tent" fan. After all, I came into fandom via Elfquest, comic books, role-playing games, and "media fandom" such as Doctor Who, including directing and acting in two amateur (dare I say "transformative") DW movies. I know what you mean about "literary" fans looking down their noses at the fandom from which I came. So I decided to do my part to help make the community that made such an impression upon me when I attended my first SF convention (the 1984 Worldcon in Anaheim), and for the past thirty-five years have essentially been "paying it forward." I have no desire to exclude anyone from the tent. What I do not appreciate is people who would, in their understandable exuberance, accidentally burn the tent down during their celebratory bonfire. Just because the act isn't deliberate doesn't mean it isn't destructive!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 07:08 pm (UTC)The reason the extremists who are saying, "I personally won a Hugo for writing fanfic" are not being shouted down by the larger, more reasonable AO3 and OTW communities, is because we're not willing to say, "well, nobody actually won this..." and right now, the various "you did not win" groups are not acknowledging a difference between "some of us won" and "all of us won."
Even attempts to say, "I won part of a Hugo" or "We, as a team won a Hugo," have been met with, "well, you'd need to hire your own lawyer to confirm that." (They've also been met with "yeah, that sounds fine to me." And some people are going with those kinds of phrasing.)
If it were true, people selling merchandise claiming individual and personally that they are Hugo Award winners would respect the request that the work be withdrawn
Because nobody would continue to share a joke if the authorities told them it was inaccurate, in bad taste, and possibly illegal?
Admittedly, nobody would continue to sell (or attempt to sell) merch if they respected WSFS's authority on the Hugo awards and what they mean. Which is why the early reactions were, "oh, I guess you gotta shut down the pins and t-shirts, yep" and the later ones were "DM me for the secret link where..." (Hypothetical. I know of no secret links selling "Hugo Award" merch.)
Also, WSFS flubbed horribly by not immediately partnering with OTW to come up with an official line of Hugo Award Winning AO3 merch. "My Archive Won a Hugo Award and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt/Coffee Mug/Pin" would've sold like hotcakes, and WSFS or the trademark group would have an income stream with a million potential contributors.
you also don't get to say, "And all other fandoms are illegitimate and we are the Only True Fans, and those of you who have spent generations building a community with your love, work, and money are Not True Fans!"
I'm not. I know some people are; it's a diverse community with a lot of conflicting opinions. I'm pretty sure there are some regulars at File 770 who believe other Filers are either "those new idiots who don't understand how fandom works" and others who believe "those ancient jerks have no idea how fandom works today." I'm pretty confident that the majority of AO3 users, inasumuch as they know Worldcon and the Hugos exist, believe it's part of fandom, even if they don't understand that way of participating in fandom.
We are now at the stage of the wankfest where most of the serious participants have reached their conclusions, and the fringe participants are now insisting that whatever wacky delusions they have are the "real complete truth." Those of us who regularly participate in these roll our eyes and move on; arguing with those people is a waste of time (although it can be informative to lurkers), and arguing about their points is a distraction.
Bringing up, "someone said they really won a single Hugo for their fanfic!" or "someone said only the OTW fans are trufen!" or "someone said anyone who gets paid for scifi work can't be a real fan!" are pointless. I'm sure someone did. I'd posit that "someone" might be "a group" in each case. None of those opinions are widely accepted, and none of them are going to slowly persuade more people. Do not waste your time or mental energy arguing with or about the snapewives.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 07:35 pm (UTC)In fact, I have done so, and I posted it earlier today, before I saw your earlier comment.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 07:46 pm (UTC)How do you know what they weren't?
Guess what? The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee was working with OTW to work out what would be appropriate uses of WSFS's registered service marks, without even mentioning royalties, because it was the right thing to do. The HAMC will provide Hugo Award winners with official "Hugo Award winner" versions of the Hugo Award logo upon request and without royalty, because is strengthens the WSFS service marks when they are used appropriately. All that HAMC (a delegated subcommittee of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee) asks is that service marks be used appropriately and with attribution. Specifically, the main request was that the ® symbol appear next to the Hugo Award logo because it is a registered service mark in 29 different countries, including all but three of those that have hosted Worldcons in the over eighty years of the convention's history.
You'd have to ask OTW why they have as yet not done anything with the material we endorsed. I speculate (but do not know) that they fear that anything they do is likely to add fuel to the fire, and I wouldn't blame them in the slightest for deciding to stay quiet about it after they formulated what they thought (as did I) was a nice and factual statement — not a press release imposed upon them by the Big Bad WSFS — about the matter. My only mistake was in volunteering additional information about the context. I clearly understand now that I should have said nothing at all, and for that, and for any offense I gave to the contributors to AO3, I apologize and have said so repeatedly.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:59 pm (UTC)Had you not spoken up, much of this drama would not have happened; I'm not sure we'd all be better off for that. If the end goal was "get the Etsy store to remove a few items, get the Kickstarter to change their pin design, get a couple of Patreons to change their description" maybe not. But if the end goal is/was, "get (some) AO3 fans to understand how the Hugos work and their place in the history of Hugo Awards," then we needed a long complex meandering discussion about that.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:08 pm (UTC)Whereas I do. And no, I'm not going to share links to such infringements, because why should they be given any oxygen? I'm sorry if this sounds like "the lurkers support me in e-mail." It's not intentional, but I'm aware of how it may look. (I'm more self-aware than some people believe.) I'm telling the truth, but giving further publicity to people deliberately flaunting WSFS service marks is not something that a member of the committee charged with protecting those marks is a Really Bad Idea.
The WSFS MPC is taking actions against known infringements and will continue to do so. Saying "I'm [a tiny fraction of] a Hugo Award Winner" isn't one. Saying "We won a Hugo Award" isn't. Saying, "I'm [personally and individually] a Hugo Award Winner" is inaccurate and annoying to people who know better, but isn't likely to have cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits served upon you unless you start trying to merchandise and monetize it.
Here's possibly where we went wrong. I do not think that the WSFS MPC wanted to make a strong public statement about this precisely because it would be seen as overarching. Instead, the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, while working out how OTW could legitimately (and at no cost to them, and while strengthening WSFS's service mark) promote and take advantage of their win, expressed concerns about improper usage. I think that there was an expectation that, should WSFS have to call out improper merchandise/monetization/misuse of its service marks, they could point to OTW's own statement (which was written by OTW, not placed in their mouths by the Big Bad WSFS). But apparently working in the softer way was wrong, and we should have simply started serving lawsuits upon anyone selling unlicensed merchandise, eh? Because of course the very first thing you do is shout LAWSUIT!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:20 pm (UTC)I was re-elected as a member of the WSFS MPC, but choose not to stand for re-election due to commitments I have to another event in 2021. Donald Eastlake III was elected Chair, and is taking actions on behalf of and with the concurrence of the 15-member WSFS MPC. The membership of this committee, which consists of members elected at large and appointed by Worldcon and NASFiC committees, is not secret: it is listed on the WSFS web site. (I admit that I didn't update the list until some days after I got back from my post-Worldcon travels, for which I apologize.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 08:51 pm (UTC)We're also aware that a C&D over trademark is not the same as "filing a lawsuit." I don't know if starting with C&D's instead of discussion outreach would've been better, but it would definitely have been better than discussing "who gets to call themselves a Hugo winner" and then bringing up the idea of trademark dilution.
(I didn't know the details of the committee, but I knew that none of WSFS's activity is "secret hidden behind-the-scenes maneuvering." Some of it is just "happens in closed rooms because nobody else is interested and otherwise there's a draft.")
If the key concern is the trademark, that should've been the lead point, not whether or not fans are representing themselves accurately. And someone should've slammed scifantasy's post down hard, because he continued to throw around vague not-quite-threats without quoting case law or precedent, and without giving any hint of reasonable adaptations. Dodging the question when people asked, "well, can I call myself 0.000005213 of a Hugo Winner?" means he came across as saying, "Stop having fun!" instead of giving a legal opinion. Refusing to answer, "can I say this instead" left a lot of us with the impression that the next round of objections might go after that phrasing, so why bother changing this version until there's a solid reason.
Any claims that trademark was the core issue, however, were diluted by the number of people chiming in with comments about how the archive shouldn't have been nominated and how disrespectful all these fans were being of the honorable tradition of Hugo Awards. Those might both be valid points, but they weren't helping anyone decide that the trademark concerns were anything other than a random tool being used to punish fangirls for having the wrong kind of fun.
I don't think that's how they were being used. I do think the public discussion was muddy as hell, and part of that was lack of input from official leaders who are qualified to release a statement on behalf of their organization.
AO3 did that too... but AO3 leadership has a lot of practice in pointless online debates, and, I am assuming, saw no reason to make any official statements after the first, "be it here noted: No fanfic 'won a Hugo' and no fanfic author 'won a Hugo' as an individual." I did note them not saying, "So stop telling people you won a Hugo."
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 09:38 pm (UTC)Absolutely. Frankly, much of this stuff is rather boring, but necessary. The meetings at Worldcons are public and any WSFS member can attend, but it's really rare for there to be many people who aren't on the committee to be there. Indeed, I reckon our meetings at Dublin 2019 might have been among the few that didn't have a queue to enter.
At that point in the discussion, the members of AO3 participating in the discussion were working at cross-purposes, with some wanting an answer and others saying that the person who was being asked should SHUT UP AND GO AWAY AND NEVER SAY ANYTHING ELSE EVER AGAIN AND MAYBE SHOULD JUST DIE IN A FIRE ANYWAY. I would have liked to have seen the various members argue over that point, but by then I only saw direct replies to me since it was made clear that it would be better for all concerned if I had never been born.
That is so, but I don't recall saying that. I have repeatedly said that the decision was up to the 2019 Worldcon Committee, delegated irrevocably to the 2019 Hugo Award Subcommittee, and by the rules, the HASC is sovereign and its decisions irrevocable when it comes to things like eligibility. The WSFS MPC and its own subcommittees have no choice but to defer to those decisions.1
The opinions of individuals, whether or not they were WSFS members, or even if they have positions of authority within what little structure WSFS has, are not especially relevant here. The decision was made and cannot be undone for any reason at all.
Look, there are people who are still angry over the 2015 Hugo Award finalists. There are people who have insisted that the Administrators should have disqualified anyone that they thought was "illegitimate" (how one determines that is a matter of opinion). Others have informed those of us on the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee that we should erase from WSFS history the finalists who finished below No Award on the final ballot. Regardless of our personal opinions about the 2015 shenanigans, we will not do that, and here I deliberately use "we" to include "me." Those finalists were finalists; AO3 was a finalist and a winner. That's never going to change. How I might personally feel about any particular finalist or winner is irrelevant.
If Will Frank wasn't an IP attorney, I'd agree with you. But because that is his Day Jobbe, I contend that he had to be evasive like that. He's not allowed to moonlight, and even if he was, he'd probably need to have an actual client. I respect his position on this. And Will is a good person, and a member of "both camps."
Now say I'd said something about this while still chairing the WSFS MPC. In that case, it would probably be seen as more authoritative, but dammit Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not an attorney!
Note that the WSFS MPC has employed and does from time to time employ legal counsel that includes people who are part of SF fandom and have attended Worldcon. (Not Will; I didn't even know he was an IP attorney until he posted.) When we do so, we pay them their normal commercial rates. We have had to do so on multiple occasions dealing with service mark infringements and registrations, albeit never even as far as a formal C&D, but more in the sense of initial communications and negotiations with other parties engaging in potentially infringing uses. Even a formal C&D is not the first step in almost all cases, and never in those that the WSFS MPC has encountered.
I do not think that any official statement would do much good either then or now. No matter what is said, there are going to be a whole bunch of people who jump on it, find edge cases, complain about anything other than "You can do anything you want, anytime, for any reason, and nobody has any right to say otherwise." That doesn't mean the MPC isn't going to say anything about it, but I doubt it will do much good, because as far as I can tell, there are a whole lot of people who won't listen to anything other than their own opinions. I'll be happy to listen to an argument that says that "middle of the road" people such as you are prepared to debate with your fellow contributors about this and consider the possibility that WSFS may actually have some rights to manage how its intellectual property is used by others.
1WSFS Constitution 2018-19, sections 1.6, 3.2.12, and 3.13. This gives Worldcon committees authority over nearly everything having to do with WSFS and Worldcon, but not an unlimited amount of it, and only in regard to their own Worldcon and the Hugo Awards held at that Worldcon. Nor can they interfere with previous Worldcons' decisions, nor can they bind future Worldcons. For example, they can sub-license certain usages (like merchandise that says "Worldcon" on it), but they can't sell or otherwise alienate the service marks of WSFS, because they don't own them; they only have a license to use them from WSFS. This is not a mere theoretical consideration. Past Worldcon committees have been insolvent, albeit as far as I know never in formal bankruptcy, but the WSFS service marks are not assets that could be sold off to the highest bidder in a forced liquidation, because they don't belong to the convention.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-28 07:31 pm (UTC)The real issue here, may not be "who, if anyone, won the BRW Hugo," but "how will AO3 fandom's connection to the Hugo change how the Hugo is treated publicly, discussed online, and eventually, how it is respected?"
This is not an issue that can be addressed by C&Ds. Nor can it be addressed by telling enthusiastic fans, no matter how misguided, that they are using the wrong words to express their pride and joy in a shared achievement.
The PR damage from this multi-blog drama is going to be notable; there are now hundreds of new, young fans who believe Worldcon and the Hugo Awards are managed by people who hate fanfic-fandom. And they're not sticking around to find out how off-base that is. This opinion likely isn't fixable as long as there are plenty of people insisting AO3 shouldn't have been nominated, it wasn't right for the category, and/or they went and looked at the archive and the stories they saw were shockingly bad.
That's an unfixable, accept-and-move-on point. There is no "make that better"; any interference will only make it worse.
Fortunately, that crowd of new, young fans who knew nothing about the history of WSFS, Worldcon, or the Hugos before this April, are not the ones who try to join the board of AO3, or try to join and run committees, or do extensive cross-community outreach to other fans.
So far, as far as I can tell from private communications and such, everyone in that group loves Worldcon (at least in abstract; like most convention attendees, a lot of us have ideas on how it could be better), loves and respects the Hugos, and recognizes scifi fandom as the starting point for our own communities.
So that's the good news. The bad news is, this whole drama has reinforced the belief that much of mainstream scifi fandom still thinks of us as the fringe kooks who are only to be tolerated as long as we don't speak up about what matters to us.
Insisting, "Of course you can express your opinions; it's just that, in this case, you shouldn't, because those opinions are wrong," does not alter our opinion. After all, that's what we've been told for decades.
For a whole lot of us, this isn't coming across as notably different from "Kirk and Spock cannot possibly be a romantic couple and how dare you try to insist they are." The end result is likely to be about the same, unless the Worldcon community (and yeah, I know how disconnected that is) figures out how to indicate some level of respect and understanding for our choices and perspectives.
WSFS Leadership Diversity and Inclusion
Date: 2019-09-28 07:47 pm (UTC)I do not deny this. In fact, I set out to do my part to change my corner of fandom in part recognizing this.
Consider the first day of the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting, over which I presided. I don't have still pictures of the meeting staff here, but I ask you to watch the first four minutes of this video to (a) see where I make an effort to remind everyone to be respectful of both the new attendees (of which there were many) and also the long-time attendees, and (b) note how many women were part of our team (not all of whom were on camera). Roughly half of the 2015 Business Meeting team were women, including my own manager.
In 2016 I was not part of the management of the Business Meeting, although I was part of the team, as I was Lisa Hayes' assistant videographer. (Yes, I went from Chair one year to a second-level staffer; that's not uncommon.) Four of the ten total staff (again, not all pictured here) were women.
In 2017, we had a smaller staff, but still, 40% of the team were women, not including one of my managers, deputy WSFS Division Head Kate Secor.
In 2018, I was the WSFS division manager, and we finally managed to get the entire Business Meeting staff (many of whom are normally behind the camera or in the audience) in one picture. Six of the nine staff were women or non-binary. Jesi Lipp, the deputy presiding officer, became (to the best of my knowledge) the first non-binary person to ever preside over the meeting when Chair Tim Illingworth had to recuse himself for a while, and the first non-male to preside since Anna Moffat did so in 1958.
This year, we did miss one member of the staff (Anne Davenport was away that morning attending a Masquerade meeting), but once again six of the nine staff were women or non-binary. (Six out of ten if you include Jared Dashoff, who managed pre-convention organization of the meeting but was unable to attend.)
And finally we get to the closing five minutes of the 2019 WSFS Business Meeting (starting at 5:25). Please watch this. I don't think it's possible for me to express how proud I am of Jesi Lipp's achievements presiding over this year's meeting, in no small part because I'm the person who sort of recruited them and helped encourage them to form part of the next generation of WSFS leadership.
Now really, could I possibly be one of those Old Straight White Cisgender Men who hates all women and young people if I deliberately set out to make the governance of the World Science Fiction Society more open, transparent, and welcoming to more than just a handful of Old White Men?
Edit: I did not realize that DW wouldn't let me embed video in a comment, at least not with the YouTube embed codes, so I had to change it to links to the videos. Sorry about that.
Re: WSFS Leadership Diversity and Inclusion
Date: 2019-09-28 09:12 pm (UTC)It sounded like (still sounds like), "the building wins an award, but not the people who live in it and maintain it, not the builders, and not even the designers or the people who paid for it."
It sounds like the nonsensical, "The team won a trophy, but the players didn't."
It sounds like, "we're not recognizing the actual work done to get here, just the final product. All you women who worked on this may have made an award-winning thing, but you didn't do award-winning work that you can claim credit for."
I'm not questioning your commitment to diversity. I am questioning whether you realize that there is no separation between the team and the fans at AO3, and how insulting it comes across when the reaction is "no human person can say they won this award."
(And yeah. You can embed videos in posts, but not in comments.)
Re: WSFS Leadership Diversity and Inclusion
Date: 2019-09-28 09:43 pm (UTC)There is a difference between "the team of which I am a member won" and "I personally and individually won." If you don't see this distinction, I don't think we'll ever be able to find common ground.
Re: WSFS Leadership Diversity and Inclusion
Date: 2019-09-28 11:47 pm (UTC)I have no problem accepting a difference between "we, our team, won an award" and "I personally won that award." The latter can be humor, or an exaggeration, or even arrogance, but it doesn't clash with normal discussions of team efforts.
Baseball Hall of Fame: Babe Ruth's listing says, "he came to the big leagues as a lefty hurler with the Red Sox, where he won 89 games in six years while setting the World Series record for consecutive scoreless innings."
HE won 89 games. Not, "The team he played on won 89 games."
More baseball: "Even in the year he won the World Series, the Giants only won 92 games..."
Football - Tom Brady, fan comment: "best QB of all time he's won the superbowl 3 times"
More football: "The year he won the Superbowl, he actually only threw 3 touchdowns..."
And again: "He won the Superbowl in 2017 playing with the Patriots."
People regularly attribute team wins to the individuals on those teams.
If Tom Brady won the Superbowl and Babe Ruth won 89 baseball games, why didn't each of the contributors to AO3 win a Hugo?
Everybody Wins!
Date: 2019-09-29 01:30 am (UTC)But it will save future bother, as we needn't bother holding another Worldcon or ever give out another Hugo Award, since everyone who wants to win a Hugo Award merely needs say the are a Hugo Award Winning Author. They don't really need to even actually publish anything on AO3, because it's effectively impossible to prove or disprove their claim.
Congratulations, you just gave everyone in the world who wants one a Hugo Award. Happy now?
Re: Everybody Wins!
Date: 2019-09-29 02:08 am (UTC)Nobody said, "we all should get a trophy." There's one trophy; it's traveling with Worldcon; we're pretty much all happy with that.
As you mentioned, in the past, when two authors shared a Hugo Award, they got one trophy, and it was up to them to sort out where it was housed. But nobody claimed only the one who kept the trophy really won the Hugo.
You're also shifting the goalposts.
This was about, "who gets to say they won a Hugo?" You're changing it to, "We can't acknowledge the people who did the work to make this award-worthy archive, because there might be cheats and liars trying to take advantage of the ambiguities involved."
That's an entirely different issue, and it ties right back into the ways women have often been ignored. "It's not worth recognizing their accomplishments, because that would be complicated and messy, and would bring opportunities for fraud, and anyway, they shouldn't need direct acknowledgement; it should be good enough that something they worked on, got an award!"
I do understand that it's pretty ridiculous to say that two million-ish people "won a Hugo." What I'm not willing to accept is, "It's too risky and complicated to agree that two million unnamed people won, so we'll just say that nobody won."
The simple fix for this, which I suspect is no longer applicable, would have been, "the board of directors of the OTW won the award." Or, "the heads of each of the AO3-related committees." Or some other, similarly focused group of people who manage some aspects of AO3. (At this point, establishing that would need some kind of declaration from the relevant authority/ies, and it might settle the "official" issue but would only create more spite.)
As it stands now: A number of people associated with WSFS insist that nobody won the Hugo; it was awarded to "the archive."
A number of people associated with AO3 insist that "we are the archive;" we, collectively, won the award, and that means all of us, as people, have some claim to it.
(You have stipulated this is correct. Other people have insisted it is not correct, and the lawyer related to WSFS refused to agree with it.)
Note: We're not looking for official acknowledgment that we all won a Hugo. We are, for the most part, content with the situation as it stands, with some pretty sharp disagreements about who did or didn't win, and how that should be discussed. AO3's founders and longtime supporters have a lot of practice with "this issue is never going to be resolved."
We swapped a lot of info, established various cultural subgroup norms, defined various terms, and hit different conclusions while starting with more-or-less the same fact base, because we have different priorities and ways of assigning value to those facts. And sometimes that's what happens.
Side thing: A number of other people are making various "I won a Hugo" claims that are not (just) intended to be hyperbolic jokes, and may be infringing on trademark rights. That's not part of the same issue.
Re: Everybody Wins!
Date: 2019-09-29 04:26 am (UTC)Which "lawyer related to WSFS" are you talking about? Will Frank? Will is a fan who was a member of Worldcon and is a lawyer. He's "related to WSFS" the same way ever single member of Worldcon is. Did you join Dublin 2019 so you could vote for AO3? If so, you're "related to WSFS" the same way Will is. He's not on the WSFS Mark Protection Committee (nor has he ever been, nor has he ever even attended one of its meetings that I can recall), and as I said, I didn't even know he was an IP attorney until he volunteered that information.
I'm not a lawyer; I'm a computer programmer. My experience with IP law comes from many years of service to WSFS on the MPC, many of it as the committee's chair, and as the person who led the organization through the process of obtaining mark registration in the EU.1 So you appear to be proceeding from a mistaken assumption that there was some sort of WSFS attorney involved here. The main reason that I took it that Will refused to state something categorically was precisely because no matter what he said, the fact that he does this sort of thing as his Day Jobbe means that people would over-weight it, and he was not speaking in his professional capacity, and in fact couldn't do so because of the terms of his employment. So he ducked it, and if I were him, I would have done the same thing; his legal ethics are IMO sound.
Personally, I think that everyone who had something to do with the creation of AO3 morally (I'm not certain about legally) has a collective claim to ownership ("we won"), but that no one person morally or legally has an individual and personal exclusive claim of authorship ("I won"). I'm not a lawyer and I'm not speaking officially for any organization for which I have been or currently am a member.
1This required us to form a non-profit corporation (Worldcon Intellectual Property, controlled by the WSFS MPC) because the EU Intellectual Property Organization doesn't grok unincorporated societies like WSFS. Fortunately, I have some experience in forming non-profit corporations, too, having done so in both California and Alberta.
Re: Everybody Wins!
Date: 2019-09-30 03:22 am (UTC)IF everyone on AO3 won a Hugo (and that's IF)
Other Hugo winners are still meaningful. It still matters that NK Jemisin won a Hugo three times in a row. It still matters that Lois McMaster Bujold has won an entire fleet of them. For someone to win the acclaim of their field is still meaningful and important.
People will still want to win in the future. Writers will still look over their manuscripts and think, "I want this to win." After all, it's not like people tend to win one award and think, "Oh, that's nice, I think I'll retire from writing now and take up fishing."
If anything, so long as we can diminish the bad blood, I think this is going to make people care about the Hugos MORE. For a long time there was a perception that nobody outside of fanfic is ever going to give a rip about it. On livejournal (I'm
Well damn, that just makes me want to see if fanfiction's best can actually compete against original fiction's best. That makes me want to actually, you know, nominate fanfic for awards and get a Worldcon membership. (I've tried reading the Hugo slate in the past, but never felt motivated to actually vote, because frankly, some of the books were really good but they still didn't scratch my itch the way fanfic can.)
I think that if people win 0.001% of a Hugo, that's not going to make them sit back and say, "Ah yes, my life is complete, I need not achieve anything more."
It's going to make them say, "Holy shit, what I do is eligible. I want another one. I want one that's all mine."
That sounds, to me, incredibly beneficial for the Hugos and Worldcon.
Re: WSFS Leadership Diversity and Inclusion
Date: 2019-09-28 09:48 pm (UTC)