Meeting Day

[kevin_standlee]

As bad luck would have it, I had two simultaneous meetings on Saturday at 11 AM PDT. As I'm the Secretary of the SFSFC Board of Directors, I had to prioritize that.



Here I am in my SFSFC dress shirt, ready to get online and take minutes.

Although we were a little late getting started as a couple of members either spaced the meeting notice or had urgent things that held them up, we managed to get everything done by 1 PM, which is pretty good when you have four standing committees and one special committee that needs reporting.

I also was late in getting our previous minutes from November out to the board, so the approved minutes only went up on the SFSFC corporate site yesterday afternoon.

After the SFSFC meeting, I went over to the Montreal in 2027 Worldcon Bid Committee meeting, which was mostly over, but those people who wanted to talk after the actual meeting about various SMOFfish topics hung around for a while since they had their WSFS rules expert there. I find that there are many things about WSFS that people think are required but that are not, when you actually read the rules. Conversely, there are things that are required that some people, including some Worldcon committee management, do not in my opinion think they should have to do, and sometimes they simply won't do them because there's nobody out there who will compel them to do so. No, I'm not going to go into specifics.

I'm glad I went to the Wigwam for a big breakfast on Saturday morning. Between the emergency firewood unloading and two longish meetings, I was a bit tired and hungry when I got done with everything. Furthermore, Lisa wanted to go grocery shopping on Sunday early morning, so I should have gone to bed much earlier than I did. As it was, I only got three hours of sleep before the alarm awakened me just after midnight.

Lisa and I drove to WinCo Foods in Reno, leaving the house at about 1 AM and getting home around 3:45. A fairly routine trip, with (not surprisingly) no traffic to worry about and the only challenge being dodging forklifts, pallet jacks, and aisle full of staff stocking shelves.

Comments

[wild_patience]

I was just wondering what was the make up of the WSFS board, nationally speaking. At this point, having it be all US American would be a bad thing, in my opinion. I am expecting this WorldCon and the following both to poorly attended and lose money as it is becoming dangerous to come to the US. There have been too many stories of tourists, some from European countries, being detained by ICE or Homeland Security.

WSFS Governance

[kevin_standlee]

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.