Co-location Needed

Sharon Sbarsky told me yesterday afternoon that the Events Tech team down at the Peppermill want me to come down on Saturday and make sure that I can raise the internet there for the CoverItLive coverage of the Hugo Awards ceremony. That's good, and I want to do it, but when Sharon said they wanted me there sometime between 9 AM and Noon, I said, "Nope. Business Meeting. Mark Protection Committee Meeting." She knows that, and told them so. I'll come over there when I can, but Saturday will be really busy.

( Keeping Busy This Weekend )

Preliminary Business Meeting Report

My apologies for not putting this out sooner. After the Business Meeting this afternoon I absolutely had to have lunch, and then I had responsibilities around the convention including a panel at 5 PM, and besides, it takes a long time just to pull the recorded video off of my camera and into my computer.

The Preliminary Business Meeting used the entire 3-hour program slot, and really didn't actually get through the entire agenda even then. The meeting adjourned leaving one item unresolved, and will have to deal with the resulting conflicts at Friday's Main Business Meeting.

( The gory details in bullet-point form )

Because the Preliminary Business Meeting did most of its job (resolving conflicts and setting agendas), the agenda for Friday's Main Business Meeting is substantially shorter and manageable.

( Outline agenda; actual official agenda may vary )

Yes, it was a very long, tough meeting. Seriously, the Westercon Site Selection Business Meeting at San Jose last month was relatively easy — only one issue, albeit a vastly contentious one — compared to this. I'm really amazed we accomplished as much as we did.

PBM Commentary: Success!

As I reckon most people reading this LJ know, my two highest-priority items for this Worldcon Business Meeting were not necessarily those held in the highest priority by many attendees. I wanted the Business Meeting to pass a resolution overturning the Mark Protection Committee's rule effectively banning any of its members or subcommittee members from being eligible for the Hugo Award, and I wanted to defeat a constitutional amendment that would have written that rule into the WSFS Constitution. After a whole lot of debate, a significant amount of which was technical rather than substantive, the resolution passed, and the constitutional amendment wasn't even debated, but was killed without debate by an Objection to Consideration. (By a 2/3 vote, the meeting can kill an item of new business without debate immediately after it is introduced, but not after debate has begun.)

( There's a significant constitutional question involved in the debate. )

Thank you to everyone who voted to support the Resolution and reject the Amendment. I'm happy on many grounds, not the least of which is that we can, I hope, get rid of any nonsensical implication that the Hugo Awards for Best Semiprozine in 2010 and Best Fan Writer in 2009 were somehow unfairly obtained.

Preliminary Business Meeting Video

I've managed to throw together the relatively raw video from the Preliminary Business Meeting and generate a low-resolution video of the master shot. The audio isn't very good, partially due to people not using the microphone.

My thanks to Cheryl Morgan for letting me use her Vimeo Pro account so that the file went to the front of the queue instead of having to wait for hours to release.