Another backdated entry: Again, most of the interested people will have seen it already, but here's my take on the final session of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Once again, thanks to File 770, Kate Secor, and Gray Anderson. Because of the way we jumped around in the agenda, there were places where my notes lead to dead ends.

If you want to know what the text of any of the matters mentioned here are, you need to download the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda. This post will not restate the text of anything that is already in the Agenda. If no vote tally is shown, it means the vote was by uncounted show of hands. Counted votes (there were none today) were taken by "serpentine" voting, and yes, there were provisions to count people who could not stand for a serpentine vote.

( The Final Meeting )

With all matters dealt with, the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting gave chair Jesi Lipp a standing ovation for their work in steering the meeting through a minefield. The meeting then adjourned in memory of Deb Geisler at 13:25, ninety minutes before we would have run out of time and been forced to adjourn.

It was with great relief that we filed out of the room. Prior to the first meeting, Seth Breidbart was speculating on how far through the agenda we would have gotten. I'm glad he didn't actually set an over/under and take bets on it, as I would have taken the under and lost. I really did not think we could manage to complete that agenda, and I expected us to hit a crisis by overflowing the room, but neither happened. Possibly putting the meeting across the river (thus requiring a 400 or so meter walk each way) put people off, as did the requirement to attend if you wanted to participate and vote.

While personally I think they should have used the Forth Room in the Armadillo (where we held the Business Meetings in 2005), I also personally liked the Village because it had a Starbucks in the lobby, which meant I could get the white chocolate mocha Frappucinos and IMO better lunch sandwiches that the wraps that the hotel was selling us.

Had I known that the meetings were going to be in the Village, I would have been very tempted to book in to that hotel. It would have meant far less walking, and in retrospect the internet would have been vastly better. OTOH, I'm an IHG platinum level member, which means I earned nearly 64,000 IHG points just on the stay alone, not counting the 5x USD spent bonus I will get from the IHG credit card, which hasn't yet posted to my account. That's going to prove to be very useful, possibly very soon.

( Closeout )

Thank goodness I wasn't planning on leaving until Wednesday and thus didn't have to pack. I fell into bed and may have been asleep before my head hit my pillow.

Late this morning my time, the Hugo Award finalists were announced. I got the announcement posted and the 2024 Hugo Awards page updated on TheHugoAwards.org and the information posted to the various social media that the WSFS Marketing Committee maintains. I guess I didn't make any mistakes this time, because nobody started screaming.

If there are errors, I do want to know about them so that I can fix them.

For those who might not have seen it elsewhere, here is Cheryl Morgan's Public Statement re the Hugos.

I can't say anything else, lest someone accuse me of revealing Sekrit Information About the Hugo Awards.

Something that I think most people have forgotten is that Worldcons happen in the real world and are subject to real-world conditions. Among other things, Worldcons have to obey the laws of the place in which they are held, no matter what their governing documents say.

An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing.

When it comes to local law, this could end up applying anywhere. Here's an example I can use because as far as I know, there are no Worldcon bids for Florida at this time. Imagine a Worldcon held in Florida. It would be subject to US and Florida law (and any smaller government subdivision). Given legislation passed by Florida, it would not surprise me if such a hypothetical Florida Worldcon's Hugo Administration Subcommittee would disqualify any work with LGBTQ+ content, any work with an LGBTQ+ author, or any LGBTQ+ individual, because the state has declared them all illegal under things like their "Don't Say Gay or Trans" laws and related legislation.

This does not seem that farfetched to me, and Florida isn't the only place where I could see it happening.

The 2023 Hugo Award finalists were released on July 6. I learned of this about the same time that everyone else did, when announcements starting posting. I had no advance information about this. Unfortunately, it showed up in my mailbox when I did not have time to format and post the information to the Hugo Awards website. Fortunately, Cheryl Morgan did have the time and was able to get the information posted, both the updated 2023 Hugo Awards page with the detailed finalist information and the post on the front page announcing the release and pointing people to the 2023 page.

As is usual about this time of the year, I've also been answering questions from people who don't understand that TheHugoAwards.org does not run the Hugo Awards. We just report the results and act as the long-term information archive. While each Worldcon runs their own Hugo Awards independently of all others, individual Worldcons are ephemeral. Their web sites usually vanish after their conventions are over, sometimes frighteningly quickly. Worldcons have been known to delete their YouTube channels, taking away recordings of their Hugo Award ceremonies. (Ever since that first happened, I have downloaded videos of Hugo Award ceremonies to my personal machine whenever they post, so that if necessary and permitted, we can post them to the Worldcon Events YouTube channel, which is operated by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, not any individual Worldcon.) As usual, when we explain how the system works to people who may have heard of the Awards but not looked closely at how they work, folks are mystified that there is not a Central Authority that runs everything.

Almost nobody would ever have deliberately set up the World Science Fiction Convention or the Hugo Awards the way they are organized. Except to people who have grown up within the system, how we do things tends to look insane. Even "insiders" like publishers and authors, including past Hugo Award finalists and winners, are surprised every year at how chaotic and counter-intuitive WSFS works. Any sane system, they assume, would have a Board of Directors and a single entity that ran everything. Recreating the entire system every year makes no sense to them. But Worldcon wasn't created in its current form all at once. It was created a little bit at a time, and the people who take the most interest in its rules are highly dubious of central authorities.

The good part about the current system is that it's so decentralized that there is no single point of failure that would bring down the entire system. Nobody can "take over" the Hugo Awards. The bad part is that you can take down any individual year's Awards. Somehow, we've managed to hold things together year by year, but only by some at times heroic efforts by individuals who care deeply about the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards. It's not a large group of people, either.

There was a significant glitch a few days ago when a list of Hugo Award finalists was published and then relatively quickly un-published as inaccurate; according to what I read (I have no inside information about it), this was due to technical mistakes during testing. I am sympathetic to this. Many years ago, when LiveJournal was a hotbed of fannish activity, those of us running the Hugo Awards website had an account there. There was a cross-posting add-in to WordPress (which runs the Hugo Awards site) that would post news items from the website to LJ. One particular year, we had the embargoed finalist data. (Because each year's administrators are different, they have different attitudes toward embargoed news.) We set up the post for the finalists to be published at the time when the embargo was to lift. What we did not know was that there was a bug in the WP-to-LJ add-in that cross-posted the finalist entry immediately instead of waiting until the make-public time happened. We did not notice this because of other things we were doing until people started screaming at us and "calling shenanigans." That year's administrator was furious, and showed how fannish they were by immediately assuming malice and a desire to "scoop" the actual Worldcon. They wouldn't listen and as far as I can tell never believed that this was a technical issue of which we were unaware until it bit us. Personally, I'm just glad that it wasn't the final results!

Because of what happened to us back then, we're leery of doing things that might accidentally break embargoes. Hugo Administrators do talk to each other, and it was some years before anyone was willing to trust us again. I'm very nervous about setting up finalist/winner information on the website in advance, lest I accidentally hit publish instead of preview. Consequently, it's not uncommon for many other sites to have the information online long before the "official" Hugo Awards website does. I suspect people are puzzled when Locus or File 770 or Whatever or Tor or anyone else has the information up before the Hugo Awards site does, but that's the reason. We would rather be safe and and as accurate as possible rather than be fast.

The 2022 Hugo Awards Finalists were announced today. That made it a busy day for me. I was responsible for getting the announcement and the 2022 Hugo Awards page on the Hugo Awards website updated, and also for making appropriate Tweets on thehugoawards. Also, I amplified the announcements from Chicon 8 on the Hugo Awards' Facebook page. Then there came dealing with emails regarding all of the same, and working with the other people who make the Hugo Awards mechanisms work about which you probably never hear.

Not too bad for someone who is The Worst Person in WSFS ever and who Must Never Be Trusted. I wonder if those people who think that of me know that I'm also one of those people that provide them with the information about WSFS and the Hugo Awards when they're looking for it.

Fortunately for me, I was able to squeeze an hour away from work from 8-9 AM this morning, which I spent formatting the 2021 Hugo Awards Finalists Announcement and adding the finalists to the 2021 Hugo Awards page. This always makes me nervous because while I did have an embargoed copy of the finalists, I wasn't supposed to post them before 11:30 AM EDT. I'm always afraid that I'm going to accidentally hit the publish button while I'm trying to format these things. Also, I do try to format things more or less the way we did the previous year (something most people don't have to worry about as they're not the long-term archive site), and that doesn't generally match the formatting of what we get, and besides, we're generally converting something like a Word document into HTML by cutting and pasting and then adding the various formatting, including trying to watch out for characters for which we should substitute an HTML equivalent like ä.

I think we got it mostly right this year, and I thank Cheryl Morgan for going in and cleaning up formatting in places where I'd made a mistake and also fixing some of the small corrections that were sent out shortly after DisCon III first issued the announcements.

We did get a question shortly after the results were posted asking why DC3's slides and graphics used their own Hugo award trophy cartoon instead of the actual official Hugo Award logo. The answer is, "We don't know." The logo is freely available for download from the Hugo Awards web site and you don't need permission to use it to describe the Hugo Awards, and even if you did, Worldcon committees are obviously licensed to use WSFS's service marks. You'd have to ask DC3 about their design decisions.

This morning I found that CoNZealand had sent me new and better photos of the 2020 Hugo Award trophies, so once I logged off from my half-day of Day Jobbery, I updated the 2020 Hugo Award Trophy page. This took longer than I thought it would. My idea to take a nap prior to the panel at 2 PM PDT (Question Time for Discon III) that I wanted to attend evaporated, but at least I had time to get some lunch.

At 3 PM it was time for what was for me The Big Event: the official announcement of the 2022 Worldcon Site Selection, about which there has been much internet drama over the past week, with Open Letters complaining about the WSFS Board of Directors, me getting quoted in the Guardian, and being accused of all sorts of things of which I'm pretty sure that I'm the exact opposite, but it would take too long to go into it all here, so I won't.

To the surprise of virtually nobody, Chicago won the bid to host the 2022 Worldcon, with 90% of the vote. The bid from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia got about 6% of the vote, while the remainder went to None of the Above and an assortment of write-in bids. You can see the longer form announcement, including a link to the details, at the Worldcon web site. The newly-seated 80th Worldcon will be called Chicon 8.

An advantage of a virtual Worldcon is that I'm at my home office, with my full-size keyboard on my desk, not pecking away on my laptop perched precariously actually on my lap as I try to update the Worldcon website. While the newly-seated Worldcon made its presentation, I was updating Worldcon.org with the new Worldcon information. Thanks to Alan Stewart, the site selection administrator, who sent me a copy of the detailed results, I was able to get almost everything updated before the announcement panel ended.

While I was working on making the changes, I got an e-mail from the Chair of the JeddiCon bid informing me that Jeddah was rebidding for 2026. I was already in the process of removing 2022 bidders, so it was easy enough to create a new entry for them by moving their old one while pulling the Chicago in 2022 bid off the site. As I noted elsewhere, people who are unhappy with the Saudi bid now have several years to organize other bids or support other bids, and have no excuse for claiming that they were unaware that this bid existed. Frankly, I don't think they had any excuse anyway. None of this information is secret if you pay any reasonable amount of attention to Worldcon. It's only people (including many people who attend Worldcons) who never pay attention to future Worldcon sites until just a few days before the vote (if that) who are taken by surprise and who get angry that They Were Not Told.

Anyway, I did get everything updated, the results Tweeted and posted to Facebook, and even had time to get some dinner and go out for a walk with Lisa before the party block (starting at 8 PM PDT) started. Lisa and I hung out in the Chicon 8 party until nearly 10 PM, which is very late for me, because I still have to be up at 4:30 AM for work.

It's funny, but there's one part of this virtual convention that's just like an in-person Worldcon for me. Thanks to my commitments to keep the WSFS web sites maintained, I've attended little programming and I still haven't seen the exhibits.

Tomorrow is Hugo Day, and also (if it's set up so that we can see it) the WSFS Business Meeting. The Business Meeting is set for 3 PM PDT (10 AM Saturday in New Zealand) and is supposed to be pro forma, but I'm enough of a WSFS geek to want to see it anyway. Besides, I haven't missed a single Business Meeting since 1989 and I'm going through withdrawal.

The Hugo Awards are scheduled for 4 PM PDT (11 AM Saturday in New Zealand) and will be broadcast live (no CoNZealand membership required) over The Fantasy Network. TheHugoAwards.org will not be doing our customary live coverage, but we'll be tweeting the results as each category is announced, and we'll have the full results including the detailed breakdowns of nominations and placements as soon as we can after the ceremony ends. I will be very busy.

I think I'm going to be glad that due to the time difference, there's no Worldcon on Sunday my time, as I'm going to need a lot of sleep, even without being there in person.

Today was the Second Main WSFS Business Meeting, including Worldcon Site Selection. The unopposed DC in 2021 bid won handily. We took a 30-minute break for the Worldcon Chairs' Photo after Site Selection business with dire threats of what would happen to me if we ran overtime. I was very pleased that everyone chipped in, volunteered, didn't act dumb, and in 25 minutes managed to complete everything and be ready to go.

We then returned to order and started going through the remaining items on the agenda. I think it's possible if that we'd had an extra hour, we might have finished everything, including two extra items that were allowed into consideration, but in the end, there were two items left over, and we'll need to have a (I hope brief) Monday Business Meeting.

One of the extra items was the consideration of a new standing rule, and that led to me reaching a new WSFS "career goal." Chairperson Jesi Lipp recused themselves from this item, and put me in the Chair. I presided over the consideration of the rule, and that means that I now have been the presiding officer of the WSFS Business Meeting in six countries: Scotland, USA, Canada, Japan, Finland, and now Ireland. To my knowledge, nobody else has chaired in more than two countries.

After the meeting, Lisa and I went back to the hotel, had lunch at Beshoff's Fish & Chips again, and then, because I simply didn't have time to go walking around to get to the place where I can get fast internet, we took a taxi from the hotel to the Convention Centre Dublin, dropped her off there, then I went off and communed with computers uploading the nine segments of today's meeting.

I'd changed into my business suit at the hotel because I knew I'd have to go straight to the CCD for the Hugo Award coverage. I got there a little later than I wanted, but with enough time to get set up. Cheryl was already there, and Susan de Guardiola had been by our little tech nest earlier to drop her things while she went to the Hugo Finalists Reception to take photos.

( Welcome to the Hugo Awards 2019 )

Unlike Thursday night's Retro-Hugo coverage, which was like pulling teeth due to the poor internet, we had a usable connection thanks to Rick Kovalcik who provided us with a little bit more bandwidth. It was enough so that we could to the live blog, with me doing the main "play by play" with the help of Susan de Guardiola, who also posted photos from the reception, while Cheryl Morgan moderated and participated in the separate web chat.

There were over 540 people watching our coverage at peak. Again, ours was not the live video stream, which was separate and was provided by Dublin 2019.

After we signed off from this year's coverage and cleared out of our booth, Cheryl and I made our way out of the CCD and due to the late hour, took a taxi back to her flat so that we could jointly work on the changes to the Hugo Awards web site. Cheryl wrote the announcement for the web site while I updated the static 2019 page. There's still work we have to do, but it was after 1 AM and both of us needed sleep, so I said good night and started walking back to my hotel.

It's not an awfully long walk to my hotel, but my feet are falling off after multiple days of 20K steps, and I found a taxi looking for a fare and spent six euros to get me back to bed sooner.

There's more about which I could write, but with a Monday business meeting, I am only going to get three hours of sleep tonight.

It was a very busy day today on the first day of Worldcon 76, and I just don't have time enough or energy enough to write about it all, not if I want to get sleep tonight.

( In Search of Ribbons )

After delivering ribbons, it was off to the WSFS Mark Protection Committee meeting at 2 PM. I then managed to sneak in a few minutes to grab some lunch from the concession stand, then head back to the hotel room where I changed into my WSFS captain's uniform.

( It's Official )

After the Opening Ceremonies, there was only a brief break before the Red Carpet rolled out prior to the 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards. There people walked the Red Carpet and got their photos taken. If you'd like to see the photos, start here and work your way through my Flickr photostream.

On the spur of the moment, I elected to live-tweet the Retro-Hugo results on the Hugo Awards Twitter feed, and I'm glad I did. The results are posted at The Hugo Awards site. I took some trophy photos that I hope we'll have posted real soon now.

( The Happy Trophy Designer )

No parties for me tonight. After saying good night to Kevin and Andy, I headed back to the hotel room in order to get the Retro-Hugo results posted and today's photos online.

It was a bit frantic at times today running back and forth making sure everything in WSFS was where it belonged, but it looks like everything worked out. Tomorrow we move on to the Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting. I've had a look in Room 230 where the meeting will be held. There are still some loose ends that I hope we can get tied off before the meeting starts at 10 AM Friday.