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.