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

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.