kevin_standlee: Logo created for 2005 Worldcon and sometimes used for World Science Fiction Society business (WSFS Logo)
kevin_standlee ([personal profile] kevin_standlee) wrote 2025-03-16 05:58 pm (UTC)

WSFS Governance

WSFS itself does not have a board of directors, in the sense of a centralized governing body that gives orders to Worldcons on all things, a la the International Olympic Committee. What it does have is the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, which is responsible for the intellectual property (service marks and the central web sites: wsfs.org, worldcon.org, nasfic.org, and TheHugoAwards.org). For this purpose, we set up a nonprofit corporation (Worldcon Intellectual Property, or WIP) whose directors by definition are the members of the WSFS MPC.

The MPC consists of nine elected members (three sets of three, serving three-year terms) elected by the WSFS Business Meeting, and a variable number of appointed members. All seated Worldcons and NASFiCs appoint one member, as do the previous two Worldcons and NASFiCs.

The current members of the MPC is listed on the Mark Protection Committee page of wsfs.org. As of now, unless I've miscounted, there are 10 from the USA, 3 from Canada (one of whom is a non-voting appointee, Bruce Farr, who lives in California; there is a corporate requirement that WIP have at least one California resident), 2 from the UK (one of whom is resident in Belgium), and 1 from China.

WSFS/MPC/WIP do not have financial responsibility for individual Worldcons. Each Worldcon is independently organized and financially separately from each other. (This is similar to how each Olympic committee works. The IOC only licenses the rights and sets the rules; it doesn't assume financial responsibility for any given set of Games.) So the financial risk is entirely on each Worldcon committee.

Also, in most cases (China being a very notable exception), the largest number of attendees of most Worldcon, regardless of where they are held, have been from the USA. If I were running either of the next two Worldcons, I wouldn't be as worried as you are. Yes, this is going to significantly affect their non-US attendance, but they may well end up making it from domestic attendees, particularly Anaheim given the population of the area that's local to them. Remember that the 1984 Anaheim Worldcon was the largest Worldcon ever held (based on attendance, not total memberships) until Chengdu.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
(will be screened if not validated)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting