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kevin_standlee) wrote2022-09-02 03:50 pm
kevin_standlee) wrote2022-09-02 03:50 pm
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Worldcon 2022 Day 2: Preliminary Business Meeting Report
This post is my personal opinion and does not reflect any official position I hold. For my more-or-less official report of the Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting, see the item published in the Chicon newsletter. I did write that, but it by necessity has to be short.
We knew that recording in This Hotel would be difficult. Back at Chicon 7, Lisa could not be listed in the convention staff list, so that the committee and the hotel could pretend that she was just a random convention member, not an official member of the staff. Otherwise, we were told, if it was an official convention function, only Union Labor could operate the cameras.
This time around, we were told, things would be different, but still difficult. The plan, as we understood it, was that Lisa could set up the camera (in this case, the medium Panasonic camera we used in Ireland, not the large camera we last used in DC) and turn it on at the start of the meeting, but not otherwise touch it other than potentially to swap video cards. As it happens, the large SD cards look like they'll hold up to 3 hours, so even that wouldn't be necessary. No panning, zooming, or other "active" camera work. That wasn't so awful, but it did bug Lisa that she couldn't do as good a job as she's done in the past. Also, we wouldn't be allowed an audio line from the mixer to the recorder, so we could only get whatever comes over the room speakers. This is not ideal, but other people prefer the "live" sound even though I know I find it harder to understand.
Less than twelve hours before the Preliminary Business Meeting, we discovered that the rules had changed. If a camera is plugged into a power outlet, that means it has to operated by a Union operator at ruinous expense. A battery-operated camera on a tripod was okay, but not one plugged into the wall. And indeed, the rooms at the Hyatt work against that anyway. They don't have standard US power outlets, but special ones that Union electricians connect to power that mere mortals can use. Mechanically, we could have run a long extension cord to the Panasonic, but that would have violated the new rules.
I stress here that according to our division manager, Jesi Lipp, this was not what we were told in advance. This isn't a convention decision. It is not a technical issue. It entirely a Union work rule issue.
Lisa was horrified when she heard this. As far as she originally reckoned, she needed to be able to connect the medium Panasonic camera to ground power. While she does have three of the proprietary batteries (not just something you could run down to the corner store to buy), she did not think they would be enough to cover a three-hour meeting. Faced with this, she scrambled to see if she could make the older, smaller Sony DSC-H2 work. This is the camera that we did use at Chicon 7, and most recently the 2014 Worldcon in London. Now normally that wouldn't work either, as the camera burns through AA batteries very quickly; however, long ago Lisa built a kit with a dummy AA pair that fits into the camera's battery slot, to which she wired 3 D cell batteries. She needs 3 rather than the 2 normally used to handle a voltage-drop issue using the external batteries, but the advantage here is that D cells last for many hours. On the other hand, there is an issue with recording video on that camera: recordings are limited to not more than 30 minutes. That's not due to the capacity of the recording media. You could put an unlimited memory on it and it would still stop at about 30 minutes. It's a restriction on the camera's firmware that can't be fixed.
Jumping ahead slightly, here's a picture from the rear of the room of the Preliminary Business Meeting. I forgot to take a picture of Lisa's camera stack, but we can deal with that tomorrow.
We got over to Crystal Ballroom B in the West Tower of the Hyatt early, to give Lisa more time to try and cobble together something that might work. She used the tripod to set up the medium Panasonic and strapped the small Sony onto a small portable table we found. Approximately every 30 minutes, we had to call a short technical time-out (usually less than two minutes) to allow Lisa to swap a memory stick on the Sony and a battery on the Panasonic. She could then take the Panasonic battery out into the lobby where there are power outlets for mere mortals to use. However, the Panasonic batteries do not charge as quickly as they decharge, of course, and by the time she got back around to battery 1, it wasn't fully charged.
Not including a recess in the meeting, and including the fact that we had to adjourn 30 minutes early today due to a request from Programming, the Preliminary Business Meeting lasted almost exactly two hours. Amazingly to both Lisa and me, the recordings on the Panasonic covered the whole meeting.
The net result, once we got back to our hotel room and I was able to edit together the individual segments from the Panasonic, was this recording. Thanks to my having found that the wired internet connection in my room works and has 10 mbps upload speed, the compiled 2-hour recording took less than an hour to upload.
If you have two hours to spend, you can watch the whole thing. I'll say up front, through, is that there was a vast amount of futzing around with people who don't pay attention.
If you want to follow along, you'll need the Business Meeting Agenda from the Chicon website. If you're reading this long after Chicon 8 is over and their website dead, the agenda will possibly be available from the WSFS.org site.
Constitutional Amendments: We got debate time limits set for all of them. The "running order" was changed a little bit. F.2 and F.1 got swapped around because of their overlapping subject matter. F.6 was postponed definitely to Sunday's meeting for religious reasons. (The lead sponsor is an observant Jew who would really, really prefer not to have to engage in debate on the Sabbath.) So F.6 can't be debated until after Site Selection business on Sunday and also not until after F.5 is resolved.
Several of the newly-proposed amendments had Postpone Indefinitely moved against them. PI kills a proposal without taking a direct vote on it. Four minutes of debate regarding whether we should consider the proposal is allowed, and a 2/3 vote kills a proposal. None of the attempts to kill these new amendments succeeded; there was always less than 2/3 in favor of killing the proposals.
Hugo Award Eligibility Extensions (D.1 through D.4): These all passed without debate or objections at the very end of the meeting.
Standing Rule Changes (C.1 through C.2): While we set debate times for these, we did not have enough time to actually consider them. Therefore, they come up on Saturday.
Non-Hugo-Related Resolutions (D.5 through D.6): These are two likely-to-be-controversial resolutions. D.5 is called Solidarity with Ukraine, and D.6 condemns the selection of Sergey Lukianenko as one of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon's guests of honor. Because we ran out of time today, they will come up tomorrow after the Standing Rule Changes.
Worldcon Financial Reports: A number of questions were raised about some Worldcons' financial reports, some of which could be answered by representatives of those Worldcons present at the meeting. There was a motion introduced to censure the 2015 Worldcon for having done nothing for several years to spend down their remaining surplus, but the motion failed.
Standing Committees of WSFS: I presented the WSFS Mark Protection Committee report, for which there were no questions about the written report. Nominations were received for the MPC's three positions. I'm one of the three people whose terms end this year, and I am one of the five people nominated to fill those terms. Elections will be at the start of tomorrow's meeting.
Standing Committees of the Business Meeting: We received reports from the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee and the Worldcon Runners Guide Editorial Committee. These committees were reappointed with their existing members.
Ad Hoc Committees: Most of the ad hoc committees were reappointed, with one exception. The motion to continue the Hugo Awards Study Committee drew opposition and was debated hotly. There was also a motion to amend the motion to continue to add additional instructions, and then a motion to Stop Recording on the grounds that the discussion would be too sensitive. The motion to Stop Recording failed, as did the attempt to add instructions to the committee, and all of that took a lot of time because a lot of people aren't that quick on the uptake. And in the end, the motion to continue the HASC failed entirely, so the committee was not continued. All of the motions that came out of the committee that are before the meeting this year are still before the meeting, however.
I think that's everything. In effect, we spent around two hours in a three hour time slot doing a lot of debating, but not doing a lot of substantive business. But sometime that is how it works.
It's possible that we've got the workarounds in place for recording the remaining Business Meetings here in Chicago, but it will still be more stressful for Lisa than either she or I wanted.
We knew that recording in This Hotel would be difficult. Back at Chicon 7, Lisa could not be listed in the convention staff list, so that the committee and the hotel could pretend that she was just a random convention member, not an official member of the staff. Otherwise, we were told, if it was an official convention function, only Union Labor could operate the cameras.
This time around, we were told, things would be different, but still difficult. The plan, as we understood it, was that Lisa could set up the camera (in this case, the medium Panasonic camera we used in Ireland, not the large camera we last used in DC) and turn it on at the start of the meeting, but not otherwise touch it other than potentially to swap video cards. As it happens, the large SD cards look like they'll hold up to 3 hours, so even that wouldn't be necessary. No panning, zooming, or other "active" camera work. That wasn't so awful, but it did bug Lisa that she couldn't do as good a job as she's done in the past. Also, we wouldn't be allowed an audio line from the mixer to the recorder, so we could only get whatever comes over the room speakers. This is not ideal, but other people prefer the "live" sound even though I know I find it harder to understand.
Less than twelve hours before the Preliminary Business Meeting, we discovered that the rules had changed. If a camera is plugged into a power outlet, that means it has to operated by a Union operator at ruinous expense. A battery-operated camera on a tripod was okay, but not one plugged into the wall. And indeed, the rooms at the Hyatt work against that anyway. They don't have standard US power outlets, but special ones that Union electricians connect to power that mere mortals can use. Mechanically, we could have run a long extension cord to the Panasonic, but that would have violated the new rules.
I stress here that according to our division manager, Jesi Lipp, this was not what we were told in advance. This isn't a convention decision. It is not a technical issue. It entirely a Union work rule issue.
Lisa was horrified when she heard this. As far as she originally reckoned, she needed to be able to connect the medium Panasonic camera to ground power. While she does have three of the proprietary batteries (not just something you could run down to the corner store to buy), she did not think they would be enough to cover a three-hour meeting. Faced with this, she scrambled to see if she could make the older, smaller Sony DSC-H2 work. This is the camera that we did use at Chicon 7, and most recently the 2014 Worldcon in London. Now normally that wouldn't work either, as the camera burns through AA batteries very quickly; however, long ago Lisa built a kit with a dummy AA pair that fits into the camera's battery slot, to which she wired 3 D cell batteries. She needs 3 rather than the 2 normally used to handle a voltage-drop issue using the external batteries, but the advantage here is that D cells last for many hours. On the other hand, there is an issue with recording video on that camera: recordings are limited to not more than 30 minutes. That's not due to the capacity of the recording media. You could put an unlimited memory on it and it would still stop at about 30 minutes. It's a restriction on the camera's firmware that can't be fixed.
Jumping ahead slightly, here's a picture from the rear of the room of the Preliminary Business Meeting. I forgot to take a picture of Lisa's camera stack, but we can deal with that tomorrow.
We got over to Crystal Ballroom B in the West Tower of the Hyatt early, to give Lisa more time to try and cobble together something that might work. She used the tripod to set up the medium Panasonic and strapped the small Sony onto a small portable table we found. Approximately every 30 minutes, we had to call a short technical time-out (usually less than two minutes) to allow Lisa to swap a memory stick on the Sony and a battery on the Panasonic. She could then take the Panasonic battery out into the lobby where there are power outlets for mere mortals to use. However, the Panasonic batteries do not charge as quickly as they decharge, of course, and by the time she got back around to battery 1, it wasn't fully charged.
Not including a recess in the meeting, and including the fact that we had to adjourn 30 minutes early today due to a request from Programming, the Preliminary Business Meeting lasted almost exactly two hours. Amazingly to both Lisa and me, the recordings on the Panasonic covered the whole meeting.
The net result, once we got back to our hotel room and I was able to edit together the individual segments from the Panasonic, was this recording. Thanks to my having found that the wired internet connection in my room works and has 10 mbps upload speed, the compiled 2-hour recording took less than an hour to upload.
If you have two hours to spend, you can watch the whole thing. I'll say up front, through, is that there was a vast amount of futzing around with people who don't pay attention.
If you want to follow along, you'll need the Business Meeting Agenda from the Chicon website. If you're reading this long after Chicon 8 is over and their website dead, the agenda will possibly be available from the WSFS.org site.
Constitutional Amendments: We got debate time limits set for all of them. The "running order" was changed a little bit. F.2 and F.1 got swapped around because of their overlapping subject matter. F.6 was postponed definitely to Sunday's meeting for religious reasons. (The lead sponsor is an observant Jew who would really, really prefer not to have to engage in debate on the Sabbath.) So F.6 can't be debated until after Site Selection business on Sunday and also not until after F.5 is resolved.
Several of the newly-proposed amendments had Postpone Indefinitely moved against them. PI kills a proposal without taking a direct vote on it. Four minutes of debate regarding whether we should consider the proposal is allowed, and a 2/3 vote kills a proposal. None of the attempts to kill these new amendments succeeded; there was always less than 2/3 in favor of killing the proposals.
Hugo Award Eligibility Extensions (D.1 through D.4): These all passed without debate or objections at the very end of the meeting.
Standing Rule Changes (C.1 through C.2): While we set debate times for these, we did not have enough time to actually consider them. Therefore, they come up on Saturday.
Non-Hugo-Related Resolutions (D.5 through D.6): These are two likely-to-be-controversial resolutions. D.5 is called Solidarity with Ukraine, and D.6 condemns the selection of Sergey Lukianenko as one of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon's guests of honor. Because we ran out of time today, they will come up tomorrow after the Standing Rule Changes.
Worldcon Financial Reports: A number of questions were raised about some Worldcons' financial reports, some of which could be answered by representatives of those Worldcons present at the meeting. There was a motion introduced to censure the 2015 Worldcon for having done nothing for several years to spend down their remaining surplus, but the motion failed.
Standing Committees of WSFS: I presented the WSFS Mark Protection Committee report, for which there were no questions about the written report. Nominations were received for the MPC's three positions. I'm one of the three people whose terms end this year, and I am one of the five people nominated to fill those terms. Elections will be at the start of tomorrow's meeting.
Standing Committees of the Business Meeting: We received reports from the Nitpicking & Flyspecking Committee and the Worldcon Runners Guide Editorial Committee. These committees were reappointed with their existing members.
Ad Hoc Committees: Most of the ad hoc committees were reappointed, with one exception. The motion to continue the Hugo Awards Study Committee drew opposition and was debated hotly. There was also a motion to amend the motion to continue to add additional instructions, and then a motion to Stop Recording on the grounds that the discussion would be too sensitive. The motion to Stop Recording failed, as did the attempt to add instructions to the committee, and all of that took a lot of time because a lot of people aren't that quick on the uptake. And in the end, the motion to continue the HASC failed entirely, so the committee was not continued. All of the motions that came out of the committee that are before the meeting this year are still before the meeting, however.
I think that's everything. In effect, we spent around two hours in a three hour time slot doing a lot of debating, but not doing a lot of substantive business. But sometime that is how it works.
It's possible that we've got the workarounds in place for recording the remaining Business Meetings here in Chicago, but it will still be more stressful for Lisa than either she or I wanted.
no subject
no subject
30 minute limits on cameras
Cameras have 30 minute limits for tax reasons. When digital still cameras first arrived, they soon had basic video recording capabilities. The tax authorities in various countries immediately started trying to classify them as video cameras, which incur higher tax/tariff rates.
Early digital cameras could record only a few seconds or minutes of video, and camera makers regarded this as unreasonable. In 2006, the camera companies and the EU agreed on a recording time limit of 30 minutes as the distinction between static and video cameras. Other countries have copied that rule, so the upshot is that only high-level video cameras don't have the 30 minute limit.
Re: 30 minute limits on cameras