Where the Worldcon Members Are

[kevin_standlee]

A misunderstanding of how Nippon 2007 organizes its membership databases (there are two of them) led to some people concluding that there were only a handful of Japanese members. This is not true, and I was just this morning sent a map of the membership breakdown by country (and state or prefecture in some cases) by Peggy Rae Sapienza, the convention's North American agent, with permission to redistribute to anyone who might be interested.



While I think that anything you post in an unlocked LJ entry is fair game anyway, do feel free to point people to this post if you think they would be interested. In particularly, point people here if you see them claiming that Nippon 2007 had no Japanese Hugo nominees because it has no Japanese members.

Comments

Question

[futuriana.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as to whether there are any numbers on this, do conventions taking place in a particular area normally raise the amount of nominees for that area the same year or the following year?

That is; for a UK convention are there usually more UK nominees during that convention or the next year when the convention is held elsewhere but there are a lot of eligible-to-nominate members who attended the UK convention?

I was assuming the later, since not that many people nominate anyway and I would guess at-the-door memberships are higher for locals than non-locals.

Re: Question

[cmdrsuzdal.livejournal.com]

Bah, that was me-logged into the wront acct :P

Re: Question

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge, nobody has done a statistical study of Worldcon membership figures and distribution of nominees.

There are some common assumptions that holding a Worldcon in country X is apt to lead to more nominees from country X -- it's obviously not working this year! I have some small hope that the Japanese attending Nippon 2007 will see the Hugo Awards for the first time and will understand that they can have an impact on this and will thus use their right to nominate next year. But it's a small hope. I fear the Hugo Award may be perceived as an American award (or at best, an English-language-only award) for which Japanese works are ineligible.

There are only around 500 people nominating. I think (but have no way of proving) that a significant proportion of those 500 are long-term voters who join and vote every year. Most of them are probably Americans.

While nominations are normally biased toward American works, there are other reasons than nationalism to explain it. That is, I don't think there are many Americans who look at their ballot and say, "I shouldn't nominate work X because it's British" or something like that. However, with most of the electorate being in the USA, there's a strong bias against nominating things that the Americans are unlikely to have seen. That's why we adopted the blanket-eligibility-extension rule a few years ago.

The blanket rule must be renewed annually. It was not renewed in 2005, but was renewed in 2006, so this year, works receiving first US publication got a fresh year of eligibility if they'd been previously published elsewhere.

I think language and country of publication were the biggest barrier here. Few works are going to make the ballot unless a lot of Americans notice and like them.

I think nationality might actually have more of an affect on the final ballot, as the voters in the host country are more apt to vote for works which they've seen. Here the eligibility-extension rule works highly in favor of the non-US works, incidentally. But nominations require Americans to see the works and nominate them.

Re: Question

[cmdrsuzdal.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't worry overmuch about nationalist voting on principle, I just assume that fandom has regional tendencies... so for instance it wouldn't surprise me if there was a slightly higher amount of CA/BArea nominees this year after LACon.

Numbers

[(Anonymous)]

Nice as the graphic is, I have no objection to being spoon-fed the actual number of Japanese members. I guess it's over 500 going by the number of black and darn-near-black prefectures in the map of Japan.

--Mike Glyer

Re: Numbers

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

When I went to http://www.nippon2007.org/jpn/participant/participant_info.shtml and typed JAPAN in the search field (the rest of the page is in Japanese, which I can't read), I got 807 members (some of whom are supporting). I would think that establishes a sort of floor value.

Re: Numbers

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

The difficulty, of course, is if you just look at the information on Nippon 2007's web site, it doesn't look like there are *any* members from Japan. Very confusing.

The name-by-name breakdown at http://www.nippon2007.us/members6.php is the problem...as is this explicit statistical breakdown: http://www.nippon2007.us/member_stats.html

So, if you look at the site as it sits and don't click on the link for the map, only two memberships are listed for Japan: both to a woman with a very un-Japanese name.

Re: Numbers

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's because those members and numbers are in the "western" database.

According to what Peggy Rae Sapienza (Nippon 2007's North American agent, as you know) told me, N2007 is maintaining two separate (and unjoined) membership databases. One is for "westerners" and one is for "non-westerners." The "western" members will register by last name/first name as is traditional at most western SF conventions. The "non-western" members will register by membership number, as is traditional at Japanese SF conventions. This split also facilitates printing names in different scripts.

It appears that the figures at nippon2007.us are drawing only from the "western" database, which is why the only member from Japan is a westerner living in Japan.

I don't make the decisions about these things. I'm just reporting what I've been told. I suppose it's possible, at least that nobody realized that anyone would be asking for combined figures of this sort.

[flick.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you were referring to someone else, but I was just musing aloud and thinking that it couldn't be right, rather than implying some kind of conspiracy [g].

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Nah, I wasn't thinking of you, although (thinking in your general vicinity), I admit to having made fun of the Cabal's apparent assumption that Americans would never vote for a British fanzine.

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

looking at those number distributions, if it remains anything close to that for final attending memberships will at least make a huge laugh out of the worries the programming would all be in Japanese.

And I am somewhat ammused by the big hole in the American northern Rockies States. NOBODY in those states? Giggle.

[avt-tor.livejournal.com]

Who said there wouldn't be English programming?

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

no one. Repeat. no one.

However, there were enough people asking the question at bid meetings that it became enough of a joke that Montreal could pick up on it during at least on Business Meeting in L.A. I was further picking up on that joke.

Japanese member stats

[darth-gofer.livejournal.com]

I've also posted this to the main community. The Japanese membership database shows

742 Attending
132 Supporting
33 Other (Guest, etc, probably attending)

I understand we can expect more last minute and door members than Worldcons normally get because the Japanese often don't know until late whether they can get the day off.

The stats on the .us site are from the .us database, and include the non-public members who do not appear in the listing. I'll try in the future to toss in the Japanese stats as I get them, but that isn't a regular occurrence

Re: Japanese member stats

[darth-gofer.livejournal.com]

Toss another 10 into 'Other', making the total 917.