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kevin_standleeThe Preliminary Business Meeting was held at DisCon III on Thursday morning, starting shortly after 10 AM. Prior to the meeting proper, Ben Yalow, Fan Guest of Honor of DisCon III, gave a short statement thanking the community of the Business Meeting for the 51 WSFS Business Meetings he has attended.
Refer to the Business Meeting Agenda posted on the DisCon III WSFS Business Meeting Page for references to my summary of what happened today.
Resolutions
D1 through D4: Hugo Award eligibility extensions adopted with little to no objections.
D5: A request to rearrange the order in the WSFS Constitution of Best Related Work and Best Graphic Story or Comic so that the first six categories in the Constitution will all be what we generally call "story" categories. As this is an editorial, rather than a substantive change, it doesn't need to go through the constitutional-amendment stage. It will make certain types of constitutional amendment easier to manage. This passed by unanimous consent.
Ratification of Constitutional Amendments
The Preliminary Business Meeting only sets debate times for these items and could make no changes to them.
New Constitutional Amendments
These being new proposals, the Preliminary Meeting could amend them or kill them by moving to Postpone Indefinitely. (Postpone Indefinitely allows a new proposal to be killed by a 2/3 vote, with four minutes of debate, divided evenly, between those who want to consider the proposal and those who want to kill it.)
F1-F3 had debate times set.
F4 is a proposal about how Worldcon committees handle name and contact details for site selection voters and pass them on to the winning Worldcon committee. The original proposal would only allow the voter information to be passed on if the voter gave permission to pass it on. (This means that if you didn't give permission, whichever Worldcon bid won the bid would have members, but wouldn't know who they were or any way to verify who they were.) An alternative proposal to replace this with a rule that would require that in order to vote on site selection, you have to agree to pass your name and address information to the winning bid. The alternative proposal was substituted for the original proposal on a 33-20 vote. That doesn't mean the alternative was actually adopted, though: it still has to go to the Main Meeting for debate.
Reading the above, I understand that it could be confusing. What is amounts to is that there were two possible changes proposed: call them A or B. The Preliminary Meeting had to pick whether A or B would be considered by the Main Meeting tomorrow. Neither proposal could be passed today; it was merely a selection between the two to be placed on the main meeting agends.
F5-F6 had debate times set.
F7, a proposal to add a Best Audiobook Hugo Award, survived an attempt to kill it by Postpone Indefinitely. Fewer than than two-thirds voting were opposed to considering the proposal.
Things went as smoothly as they could considering that the new chair, Donald Eastlake III, only learned that he would be chairing the meeting yesterday evening when I advised him that I'd been fired.
Lisa was able to record the meeting, and the video is shown above. Due to a technical issue, the sound input from the room sound board was unusable, so the sound here is what the camera's built-in microphone picked up from the room sound speakers. This is audible, but could be better, and Lisa expects that it will be better tomorrow.
Aside from presenting the report of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee (I'm the senior officer of the committee present at the convention), I restrained myself from speaking to anything other than a few technical matters. I did, however, make it very clear when presenting the MPC report that I was speaking only on behalf of the MPC, and not of any other organization that I ever have been a member in the past, or might be in the future.
I brought and helped hang the small vinyl Banner of WSFS from the head table, and also carried Lisa's tripod down. We were able to bring the heavy camera case down to the room on one of the smaller elevators. Unfortunately, that elevator broke later in the morning, and consequently, without a long detour, we're going to have to haul that case down some stairs from now on. That's a pity, as that particular elevator is right across the hall from our room.
The Preliminary Meeting lasted about 90 minutes, so there was no difficulty getting out before 12:30. I doubt we will be so lucky tomorrow.
Refer to the Business Meeting Agenda posted on the DisCon III WSFS Business Meeting Page for references to my summary of what happened today.
Resolutions
D1 through D4: Hugo Award eligibility extensions adopted with little to no objections.
D5: A request to rearrange the order in the WSFS Constitution of Best Related Work and Best Graphic Story or Comic so that the first six categories in the Constitution will all be what we generally call "story" categories. As this is an editorial, rather than a substantive change, it doesn't need to go through the constitutional-amendment stage. It will make certain types of constitutional amendment easier to manage. This passed by unanimous consent.
Ratification of Constitutional Amendments
The Preliminary Business Meeting only sets debate times for these items and could make no changes to them.
New Constitutional Amendments
These being new proposals, the Preliminary Meeting could amend them or kill them by moving to Postpone Indefinitely. (Postpone Indefinitely allows a new proposal to be killed by a 2/3 vote, with four minutes of debate, divided evenly, between those who want to consider the proposal and those who want to kill it.)
F1-F3 had debate times set.
F4 is a proposal about how Worldcon committees handle name and contact details for site selection voters and pass them on to the winning Worldcon committee. The original proposal would only allow the voter information to be passed on if the voter gave permission to pass it on. (This means that if you didn't give permission, whichever Worldcon bid won the bid would have members, but wouldn't know who they were or any way to verify who they were.) An alternative proposal to replace this with a rule that would require that in order to vote on site selection, you have to agree to pass your name and address information to the winning bid. The alternative proposal was substituted for the original proposal on a 33-20 vote. That doesn't mean the alternative was actually adopted, though: it still has to go to the Main Meeting for debate.
Reading the above, I understand that it could be confusing. What is amounts to is that there were two possible changes proposed: call them A or B. The Preliminary Meeting had to pick whether A or B would be considered by the Main Meeting tomorrow. Neither proposal could be passed today; it was merely a selection between the two to be placed on the main meeting agends.
F5-F6 had debate times set.
F7, a proposal to add a Best Audiobook Hugo Award, survived an attempt to kill it by Postpone Indefinitely. Fewer than than two-thirds voting were opposed to considering the proposal.
Things went as smoothly as they could considering that the new chair, Donald Eastlake III, only learned that he would be chairing the meeting yesterday evening when I advised him that I'd been fired.
Lisa was able to record the meeting, and the video is shown above. Due to a technical issue, the sound input from the room sound board was unusable, so the sound here is what the camera's built-in microphone picked up from the room sound speakers. This is audible, but could be better, and Lisa expects that it will be better tomorrow.
Aside from presenting the report of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee (I'm the senior officer of the committee present at the convention), I restrained myself from speaking to anything other than a few technical matters. I did, however, make it very clear when presenting the MPC report that I was speaking only on behalf of the MPC, and not of any other organization that I ever have been a member in the past, or might be in the future.
I brought and helped hang the small vinyl Banner of WSFS from the head table, and also carried Lisa's tripod down. We were able to bring the heavy camera case down to the room on one of the smaller elevators. Unfortunately, that elevator broke later in the morning, and consequently, without a long detour, we're going to have to haul that case down some stairs from now on. That's a pity, as that particular elevator is right across the hall from our room.
The Preliminary Meeting lasted about 90 minutes, so there was no difficulty getting out before 12:30. I doubt we will be so lucky tomorrow.
