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kevin_standleeBackdated entry: While most people who are really interested will have seen the results elsewhere, I'm going to try and go through the results of the Sunday (Worldcon Day 4) Business Meeting for my own satisfaction. I'd also like to thank File 770 and Gray Anderson for their work, which allowed me to figure out where my notes sprung a leak.
I note that the Business Meeting Day 2 Video off of Lisa's camera that I posted appears to have gotten the audio and video out of sync. This is probably a mistake I made while combining the segments together in Adobe Premiere. Unfortunately, with my personal computer (with Premiere) dead and unlikely to be repaired until some time after I get back to Nevada and am able to ship it off to Dell for warranty repair, I'm not going to be able to fix it for a while. If you are a member of 2024 Glasgow, you should be able to watch the replay of the live stream on their site along with other recorded programming. I've been told that eventually we'll be able to upload the official recordings to the YouTube Worldcon Events channel, but I don't know when that will happen.
If you want to know what the text of any of the matters mentioned here are, you need to download the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda. This post will not restate the text of anything that is already in the Agenda. If no vote tally is shown, it means the vote was by uncounted show of hands. Counted votes were taken by "serpentine" voting, and yes, there were provisions to count people who could not stand for a serpentine vote.
We started by trying to continue through the "First Pass" process to weed through the new business.
At this point the Chair concluded that the First Pass was failing to work as intended and declared it over, which took us back to the Business Passed On (ratification of proposals first passed last year in Chengdu. Items marked as Ratified take effect and become part of the Constitution at the final adjournment of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Items marked as Failed were not ratified and will not become part of the Constitution.
This was a critical point in the meeting, because it meant that Site Selection, the ratification of business passed on, and the MPC elections had been considered and were complete. This meant that from this point forward, the Business Meeting could have
adjourned sine die without finishing the consideration of the remaining new business. Had that happened, anything that didn't get a final vote would "fall to the floor" (die).
Remember that any business that dies at the Business Meeting for any reason (OTC, PI, failed to get enough votes, or left unresolved upon final adjournment) can always be reintroduced at a future year's meeting. The Business Meeting cannot tie the hands of a future Business Meeting other than amending the Constitution, which then would require two years to amend and untie any such restriction.
In any event, we then continued into consideration of New Business that hadn't been already concluded in the First Pass.
The Sunday meeting adjourned leaving parts of F.10 (which was divided into multiple sub-proposals) and F.14-F.20 to consider.
Once again, we did not overflow the room, and indeed, the attendance started to drop off as people whose hot-button issues were resolved in one way or another. Some folks would not be back because they would be leaving Sunday night or Monday morning, or because they were exhausted.
And speaking of exhausted, Lisa was very tired after recording a third very long day of Business Meetings, and she's not fond of award ceremonies, so she took the afternoon off and rested. I, however, had went to the effort of bringing my suit with me, so I escorted Cheryl Morgan to the Hugo Awards ceremony. We forgot to get a picture together, though.
After Cheryl and I had a quick dinner of fish and chips over in the "food trucks" section of Hall 4, she went back to her hotel and I to the Crowne Plaza. Lisa was taking it easy in our room, and had managed to scrounge a fan from the hotel so that the room wasn't sweltering. I changed into my suit and joined the queue to get into the Armadillo for the Hugo Awards ceremony. 19 years ago, I was the Events division manager, in my WSFS uniform, and would have been inside the building long before the doors open, fretting about details and preparing to give my "Captain's Speech" including the at-that-time required safety announcement. This time, I was just another member, holding a place in the queue for Cheryl when she walked over from the Crowne Plaza.
This was my view of the Hugo Awards ceremony. Despite the queue, we did get a seat on the ground floor.
The ceremony did have one major technical glitch, when a pre-recorded award presentation failed to materialize. Kudos to the presenter of the previous two awards who improvised her way through the next two awards. The convention elected to not try to include clips from the Dramatic Presentation finalists, a decision I think was correct and that I hope future Worldcons follow. Those clips lengthen the ceremony without significantly improving it.
After the ceremony, I went back up to my room and got my computer and then went with Cheryl to her hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn, because she had generously allowed me to come down to her hotel where the internet actually worked so that I could get the Hugo Awards website updated. I accidentally left my tie behind in her room when I took off my jacket and tie before getting to work, but she recovered them for me and got the back to me the next day.
It was at this point in the Worldcon when my lack of internet connectivity in my own hotel room overwhelmed me and I was unable to post Business Meeting summaries on the same day. It was very frustrating.
I note that the Business Meeting Day 2 Video off of Lisa's camera that I posted appears to have gotten the audio and video out of sync. This is probably a mistake I made while combining the segments together in Adobe Premiere. Unfortunately, with my personal computer (with Premiere) dead and unlikely to be repaired until some time after I get back to Nevada and am able to ship it off to Dell for warranty repair, I'm not going to be able to fix it for a while. If you are a member of 2024 Glasgow, you should be able to watch the replay of the live stream on their site along with other recorded programming. I've been told that eventually we'll be able to upload the official recordings to the YouTube Worldcon Events channel, but I don't know when that will happen.
If you want to know what the text of any of the matters mentioned here are, you need to download the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda. This post will not restate the text of anything that is already in the Agenda. If no vote tally is shown, it means the vote was by uncounted show of hands. Counted votes were taken by "serpentine" voting, and yes, there were provisions to count people who could not stand for a serpentine vote.
We started by trying to continue through the "First Pass" process to weed through the new business.
- Site Selection: Received the formal results of 2026 Worldcon Site Selection. L.A.con V won handily. The full results will be in the minutes.
- F.12. Site Selection by the Worldcon Community: Attempts to Object to Consideration (OTC; 3/4 vote, no debate) and to Postpone Indefinitely (PI; 2/3 vote, short debate) failed, the latter by a counted vote of 48 in favor of postponing indefinitely and 25 against. (Postponing something indefinitely effectively kills it for the remainder of this year's Business Meeting.) The rules were then suspended by a 2/3 vote to bring the question to an immediately vote, and it Failed on a vote by show of hands.
- F.13. Location, Location, Location: Both OTC and PI failed. The proposal was referred to a special committee (on a vote of 43-33) initially called the F.13 Committee, with members to be appointed by the Chair and a requirement that there be members from "affected countries," with the Chair getting to decide what that meant.
At this point the Chair concluded that the First Pass was failing to work as intended and declared it over, which took us back to the Business Passed On (ratification of proposals first passed last year in Chengdu. Items marked as Ratified take effect and become part of the Constitution at the final adjournment of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Items marked as Failed were not ratified and will not become part of the Constitution.
- E.1. Marks Authorization: Ratified
- E.2. Business Meeting Contingencies: Ratified
- E.3. Consistent Change: Ratified
- E.4. Convention Time Bracket: Ratified
- E.5. Bid Committee Contactability: Ratified
- E.6. Future Worldcon Selection: Ratified after a whole lot of parliamentary wrangling. The Chair ruled that neither Objection to Consideration nor Postpone Indefinitely can be applied to the ratification of a Constitutional amendment.
- E.7. Independent Films: Failed
- E.8. Eligibility Criteria for Non-English Work: Ratified
- E.9. Best Fancast Not Paying Compensation: Failed
- E.10. Language Requirement: Failed
- E.11. Convention Generalization: Ratified
- E.12. Establishment of ASFIC: Failed
- Mark Protection Committee Election: Donald Eastlake III, Linda Deneroff, and Olav Rokne elected to three year terms. (Randall Shephard was subsequently appointed by L.A.con IV as their representative to the MPC.)
This was a critical point in the meeting, because it meant that Site Selection, the ratification of business passed on, and the MPC elections had been considered and were complete. This meant that from this point forward, the Business Meeting could have
adjourned sine die without finishing the consideration of the remaining new business. Had that happened, anything that didn't get a final vote would "fall to the floor" (die).
Remember that any business that dies at the Business Meeting for any reason (OTC, PI, failed to get enough votes, or left unresolved upon final adjournment) can always be reintroduced at a future year's meeting. The Business Meeting cannot tie the hands of a future Business Meeting other than amending the Constitution, which then would require two years to amend and untie any such restriction.
In any event, we then continued into consideration of New Business that hadn't been already concluded in the First Pass.
- F.1. Missing In Action: Passed
- F.2. The Way We Were: Passed
- F.3. Required License Agreement: Passed
- F.4. MPC Procedures: Passed with an amendment that allows the MPC to remove both elected and appointed member of the MPC by a 2/3 vote, but also took out the word "only," suggesting that there were other ways to remove MPC members not specified in the Constitution. I am concerned about this, as it leaves the legislative issue ambiguous.
The Sunday meeting adjourned leaving parts of F.10 (which was divided into multiple sub-proposals) and F.14-F.20 to consider.
Once again, we did not overflow the room, and indeed, the attendance started to drop off as people whose hot-button issues were resolved in one way or another. Some folks would not be back because they would be leaving Sunday night or Monday morning, or because they were exhausted.
And speaking of exhausted, Lisa was very tired after recording a third very long day of Business Meetings, and she's not fond of award ceremonies, so she took the afternoon off and rested. I, however, had went to the effort of bringing my suit with me, so I escorted Cheryl Morgan to the Hugo Awards ceremony. We forgot to get a picture together, though.
After Cheryl and I had a quick dinner of fish and chips over in the "food trucks" section of Hall 4, she went back to her hotel and I to the Crowne Plaza. Lisa was taking it easy in our room, and had managed to scrounge a fan from the hotel so that the room wasn't sweltering. I changed into my suit and joined the queue to get into the Armadillo for the Hugo Awards ceremony. 19 years ago, I was the Events division manager, in my WSFS uniform, and would have been inside the building long before the doors open, fretting about details and preparing to give my "Captain's Speech" including the at-that-time required safety announcement. This time, I was just another member, holding a place in the queue for Cheryl when she walked over from the Crowne Plaza.
This was my view of the Hugo Awards ceremony. Despite the queue, we did get a seat on the ground floor.
The ceremony did have one major technical glitch, when a pre-recorded award presentation failed to materialize. Kudos to the presenter of the previous two awards who improvised her way through the next two awards. The convention elected to not try to include clips from the Dramatic Presentation finalists, a decision I think was correct and that I hope future Worldcons follow. Those clips lengthen the ceremony without significantly improving it.
After the ceremony, I went back up to my room and got my computer and then went with Cheryl to her hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn, because she had generously allowed me to come down to her hotel where the internet actually worked so that I could get the Hugo Awards website updated. I accidentally left my tie behind in her room when I took off my jacket and tie before getting to work, but she recovered them for me and got the back to me the next day.
It was at this point in the Worldcon when my lack of internet connectivity in my own hotel room overwhelmed me and I was unable to post Business Meeting summaries on the same day. It was very frustrating.
