Hugo Weekend

[kevin_standlee]

I haven't said much here today because I've been busy chasing Hugo Award coverage, including doing my part with maintenance of the Hugo Awards web site. The live announcement of the results yesterday afternoon went very well, and I am really happy with the interest in them. This seems to be a pretty strong ballot, and the new record number of ballots cast is a good sign too. I am also happy to see far fewer initial kvetches than I expected. I was prepared for a bunch of complaints along the lines of "this proves the awards are too populist," possibly from the same people who complained that there were too few voters to be representative in the past.

We've been saying for some time now that the first step toward increasing the turnout on the Hugo Awards is to get the people who are already eligible to vote. This year may have seen a small step in that direction. We could still do much better. There are more than 5000 people eligible to vote, so while 864 is good, there's a ways to go, and we'll keep it up.

I hope that this year's live Hugo Announcement Ceremony is something that future Worldcons decide to repeat, including cooperating with line online coverage so that fans from around the world can participate in the excitement.

Comments

[yourbob.livejournal.com]

Might be interesting, just as an intellectual excercise to compare Hugo noms/votes with other things like "real" elections, Nebula voting, Oscar voting, whatever. It may, of course, already have been done.