Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

As bad luck would have it, I had two simultaneous meetings on Saturday at 11 AM PDT. As I'm the Secretary of the SFSFC Board of Directors, I had to prioritize that.

( Corporate Kevin )

After the SFSFC meeting, I went over to the Montreal in 2027 Worldcon Bid Committee meeting, which was mostly over, but those people who wanted to talk after the actual meeting about various SMOFfish topics hung around for a while since they had their WSFS rules expert there. I find that there are many things about WSFS that people think are required but that are not, when you actually read the rules. Conversely, there are things that are required that some people, including some Worldcon committee management, do not in my opinion think they should have to do, and sometimes they simply won't do them because there's nobody out there who will compel them to do so. No, I'm not going to go into specifics.

I'm glad I went to the Wigwam for a big breakfast on Saturday morning. Between the emergency firewood unloading and two longish meetings, I was a bit tired and hungry when I got done with everything. Furthermore, Lisa wanted to go grocery shopping on Sunday early morning, so I should have gone to bed much earlier than I did. As it was, I only got three hours of sleep before the alarm awakened me just after midnight.

Lisa and I drove to WinCo Foods in Reno, leaving the house at about 1 AM and getting home around 3:45. A fairly routine trip, with (not surprisingly) no traffic to worry about and the only challenge being dodging forklifts, pallet jacks, and aisle full of staff stocking shelves.

Today, I got my Dell D7 laptop back from repairs. They replaced the following:

• Battery (cost extra because it's not a warranty item)


• Fan (which was the original issue)


• Heatsink (probably a good idea given how hot the machine was getting)


• Palmrest (including the touchpad, which had been pushed out of shape by the swollen battery)

After first testing that the computer would boot properly when not connected to anything including ground power, I cleaned up the area around where it sits on my desk (lots of vacuuming), reconnected everything, and started things up. Everything worked, aside from a few minor things that needed tweaking. There were a whole lot of updates to install on account of the machine having been offline for weeks. I moved my Quicken files back to my personal machine (that took quite a while). Then it was time to start working on the project backlog.

The 2024 Saturday WSFS Business Meeting uploaded to my account (not the official version created by the Business Meeting, but Lisa's recording) has had a strange glitch in it that caused the audio and video to get out of sync around 1h 17m. I launched Adobe Premiere and brought up the original file, which merges the nine original files. The glitch isn't in the original. I can't figure out why it happened in the first place. All I could do was generate a new "version 2" of the Saturday meeting, which took several hours. The source files total 25.7 GB. The compiled file is only 5.4 GB.

The compiled file doesn't have the glitch in it, so I uploaded it to my YouTube channel. As I write this, it says that it will be several hours before it finishes processing the uploaded file. Even with my decent upload speed (around 20 mbps), it takes a long time to upload these files, and large files like this require lots of processing time by YouTube. If you subscribe to my YouTube Channel, you can get notified when new files, including this Saturday Version 2 file, is live.

Tomorrow, we'll find out if Version 2 doesn't have the glitch. If it does not, then I can move on to the last of the editing jobs of the 2024 Business Meeting, which is combining the eight segments of the Monday Meeting into a single file, which again will be much smaller than the individual files off the camera. Once again, this won't happen quickly; however, I will post when the file is live on YouTube.

You can now see videos of all four WSFS Business Meeting made by Lisa Hayes (not official video shot by the convention) on our 2024 Worldcon Business Meeting Playlist.

As you will see, the final (Day 4, Monday) meeting consists of eight files while the other days are one long file each. For the first three days, I was able to combine the raw video out of the camera and compile it into a single file. This shrinks the file size and makes it easier to upload. However, my personal laptop has gone from having a complaining fan to refusing to boot at all, so it looks like it is hors de combat until I get home. That's the computer with Premiere Pro on it, so unless I happen to get to a machine with Premiere on it, I won't be able to do anything about this until next month.

The internet connectivity in the Crowne Plaza went from bad to worse, to the point where I could barely get any connection at all. Cheryl Morgan helped me out by letting me take the Monday files over to her hotel (which had fairly fast connections) and upload them. It took about five or six hours.

I'm sitting in the Crowne Plaza lobby where the connections are faster, albeit still not very good, to compose this entry. I'm sorry I wasn't able to write further reports about Glasgow 2024 due to the twin issues of connectivity and available computer equipment.

On Wednesday, Lisa heads off on her two-month Eurail pass trip (basing herself out of Munich), while I'll be in Wales for a few weeks riding trains, but mostly working remotely during the week as I'm nearly out of time off. Updates may be sporadic.

Backdated entry: While most people who are really interested will have seen the results elsewhere, I'm going to try and go through the results of the Sunday (Worldcon Day 4) Business Meeting for my own satisfaction. I'd also like to thank File 770 and Gray Anderson for their work, which allowed me to figure out where my notes sprung a leak.

I note that the Business Meeting Day 2 Video off of Lisa's camera that I posted appears to have gotten the audio and video out of sync. This is probably a mistake I made while combining the segments together in Adobe Premiere. Unfortunately, with my personal computer (with Premiere) dead and unlikely to be repaired until some time after I get back to Nevada and am able to ship it off to Dell for warranty repair, I'm not going to be able to fix it for a while. If you are a member of 2024 Glasgow, you should be able to watch the replay of the live stream on their site along with other recorded programming. I've been told that eventually we'll be able to upload the official recordings to the YouTube Worldcon Events channel, but I don't know when that will happen.

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 were taken by "serpentine" voting, and yes, there were provisions to count people who could not stand for a serpentine vote.

( Summary of Action Taken )

The Sunday meeting adjourned leaving parts of F.10 (which was divided into multiple sub-proposals) and F.14-F.20 to consider.

Once again, we did not overflow the room, and indeed, the attendance started to drop off as people whose hot-button issues were resolved in one way or another. Some folks would not be back because they would be leaving Sunday night or Monday morning, or because they were exhausted.

And speaking of exhausted, Lisa was very tired after recording a third very long day of Business Meetings, and she's not fond of award ceremonies, so she took the afternoon off and rested. I, however, had went to the effort of bringing my suit with me, so I escorted Cheryl Morgan to the Hugo Awards ceremony. We forgot to get a picture together, though.

( 19 Years Later )

After the ceremony, I went back up to my room and got my computer and then went with Cheryl to her hotel, the Hilton Garden Inn, because she had generously allowed me to come down to her hotel where the internet actually worked so that I could get the Hugo Awards website updated. I accidentally left my tie behind in her room when I took off my jacket and tie before getting to work, but she recovered them for me and got the back to me the next day.

It was at this point in the Worldcon when my lack of internet connectivity in my own hotel room overwhelmed me and I was unable to post Business Meeting summaries on the same day. It was very frustrating.

Bandwidth continues to be an issue. While I can get faster connections from the public areas of the hotel, I don't think I should be obliged to sit all night in the lobby rather than from my hotel room. Thus I have temporary discontinued cross-posting (which has to be done manually) to LiveJournal.

We started today's First Main Business Meeting on time at 10:00. Because we didn't get through the entire agenda at the Preliminary Business Meeting, we continued to grind through it, picking up where we left off.

A significant and unwanted development was that at least three Business Meeting attendees, including one member of the BM tech team and the BM Secretary, are down with COVID. Linda Deneroff is the Emergency Holographic Secretary after Alex Acks tested positive at lunchtime. More masks have appeared. Lisa and I took COVID tests after the meeting and are clear for now, but we'll test again after tomorrow's meeting.

Once again, consult the WSFS Agenda on the Glasgow 2024 website for the agenda items in the list below, where I'll list what happened to what we did consider. That link points at a PDF of the agenda. That means if you want to read the motions and the makers' statements, etc., you have to download the PDF.

Items with numbers earlier in this list were dealt with yesterday. See that post for details.

( Summary of Action Taken )

Having finally gotten through all of the resolutions, we could move on to constitutional amendments. For this, we proceeded through a special process called "First Pass" that allowed the meeting to do only a limited number things: Object to Consideration, Postpone Indefinitely, or refer to committee. This doesn't apply to constitutional amendments up for ratification passed on from last year. After First Pass, we'll go back through everything and set debate times, and then we can actually start full-blown debate including amendment. This may sound confusing, but it does look like it's having the desired result of clearing a lot of stuff off of the agenda.

Everything in Section E was skipped and we did not have enough time to set debate time limits. That should happen on Sunday.

In the following list, "no action taken" means that when we complete First Pass, we'll go back and set debate time limits, and then once Section E is done, we'll consider these Section F new constitutional amendments.

( First Pass )

We ran out of time and adjourned at 15:00 after working on F.11. That leaves F.12 through F.20 pending First Pass.

Sunday's meeting will start with Site Selection business, which we expect to be expedited so we can get back to deliberating on business. Also, I received a notice that the Worldcon Chairs Photo Session will happen at 09:30 before the 10:00 Site Selection Business Meeting. We obviously still have to grind out nine more new Constitutional amendments and then set debate time limits before we can actually debate ratifications and then initial votes. That' why we're still scheduled to run from 10:00 to 15:00.

I am fairly confident that we can complete Site Selection and the twelve ratification items. Having booted a lot of motions to committees to report next year means we have a chance to consider at least some of the new Constitutional amendments. I'm not sure if we'll get through everything. However, once we get through Site Selection and Ratifications, we can adjourn sine die anytime thereafter. If we do so, or if we run completely out of time on Monday, anything not finally resolved "falls to the floor," i.e. it dies. Anything that dies the dead of end-of-session can be reintroduced as a new item next year.

I spend most of the rest of the day and most of the evening (except when I went to dinner) trying to figure out some way to get Lisa's Business Meeting videos uploaded. I gave it a shot in the SEC, where I was allowed to use the office in the "Boneyard" (where boxes and such are stored, and also where the Sign Shop is located. However, it took more than an hour to upload just the first of seven segments of the Friday meeting. I'm taking a shot and combining all of the files for each of the first two days into a single file per day in Adobe Premier and trying to compile it down to a size small enough to have a chance to actually upload in a reasonable amount of time. I know that people who weren't watching the meeting live are probably interested in seeing this, given that (as far as I can tell) the convention has not posted their own copies. If I can get the video uploaded, it will be on my personal YouTube channel as neither Lisa nor I are part of the official Business Meeting recording/tech team.

No photos today. Not because I took none, but because as of this evening they haven't all downloaded from my phone and because it takes too long to catalog them.

Today was the first day of Glasgow 2024, the 82nd Worldcon. While there was no Business Meeting, in terms of total number of program items that I wanted to attend or that I was obliged to attend ex officio, it was the busiest.

I slept in a little bit but didn't want to miss the included breakfast. Lisa skipped breakfast. When I came back up after breakfast, I put away my USD cash to make my wallet more manageable, and Lisa and I walked to Exhibition Centre Station. Lisa then went to ride trains in Glasgow using the five-day transit pass we bought for both of us. The convention arranged with the city for a £5 for five days unlimited travel pass to convention members. I continued on to Lidl to buy more groceries. The idea was that I had enough time to buy groceries, take them back and put them away in our room, then go to the first program item at 13:00

At Lidl, I picked out the groceries and headed for check out. As I was putting the goods on the cart, I realized that I had left my wallet on the desk in our hotel room! I took the groceries back and went back to the hotel. My wallet was indeed there. Unfortunately, but then there was no time to go back to Lidl, and instead, I had only a few minutes to get to the first panel.

Between the panels, I ran down to the Montreal in 2027 Worldcon Bid table. While I have no time to help at the table, I did have just enough time to go pay the first installment of my bid committee dues, and to pay it in GBP to provide funds for some of the expenses the bid will have here in Glasgow.

The 13:00 panel was Introduction to the WSFS Business Meeting. Here, Jesi Lipp and other officers of this year's Business Meeting discussed the process and answered questions about how the WSFS Business Meeting works. Unlike most of these panels, there appeared to be more people attending who had never attended a Business Meeting. I asked a few questions myself. Jesi has a difficult job ahead of them.

At 14:30, there wasn't exactly a panel, but the first WSFS Mark Protection Committee Meeting, chaired by Donald Eastlake III. (Despite what some people might think, when I resigned as MPC Chair, I did not resign as a member of the MPC.) This meeting is always open to the membership, but unlike most years, we had a lot more "guests" attending the meeting. We also had a Zoom call running so that MPC members who couldn't attend Glasgow 2024 could participate. The business was routine, and there were no fireworks. After the meeting, Don explained the history and development of the entity currently called the Mark Protection Committee: it was initially developed as the Board of Directors of WSFS, Inc. in a 1980 plan to incorporate WSFS that never proceeded past the initial stage. Despite the process having stalled, a subsequent attempt to repeal the resolution calling for the incorporation of WSFS also failed, so the incorporation lies in limbo.

At 16:00 was the Opening Ceremonies. Unlike the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow, where I ran Events, this year's Opening Ceremony was in the SEC Armadillo auditorium, which was a much better venue than using one of the exhibit halls like we did back then. Just before the ceremony, Randall Shephard gave me my Past Worldcon Chair ribbon. I consider that to be the highest "ranking" ribbon I'm likely to ever have, so I always wait until I have it before adding more ribbons.

Esther MacCallum-Stewart formally opened the convention using the Gavel of WSFS. Then she introduced and interviewed the Guests of Honor and the Special Guests, and invited the Hugo Award base designer to unveil the design. I hope that Glasgow gives me the photos and video presentation and the text of the designer's speech so that I and put it online on TheHugoAwards.org. There were also Special Committee Awards and other Awards (presided over by Events Division Head Vincent Docherty), and the ceremony ended with the sad scroll of those people who we lost in the last year.

The Opening Ceremony ended just before the Dealer's Room closed at 18:00. I arrived at the Wizard's Tower Press table just as the hall was closing. Cheryl closed the table and gave my my Dealer ribbon. We then walked next door to Hall 4 and got dinner from one of the "food trucks" in the hall. After that, we went next door to the Civic Reception sponsored by the City of Glasgow and circulated in the hall chatting withg various people. Now this is one of my favorite parts of the convention, but I still hadn't done the grocery shopping, so I made my farewells for the night and went back to the Crowne Plaza.

Lisa had come back from her travels and was asleep. I got my tote back and extra Lidl bag we had bought on our first trip and returned to the grocery store. Unfortunately, some of the things Lisa and I wanted were sold out. They were sold out of Coke and Diet Coke, for example. I got what I could, started to leave, and then dropped the tote bag. The milk I'd bought shattered, spilling more than two liters of milk over everything. The staff told me not to fret as it happens all the time. I fished the rest of my groceries out, set them aside, then went back and got another jug of milk.

I took the groceries back to the hotel, rinsed them out and put them away, then got everything out of my well-work World Fantasy Convention 2009 San Jose tote back, rinsed the spilled mil, and hung it up to dry.

Because of the Business Meeting, which I plan to attend, I have my alarm set for 6:30 AM to give Lisa and me enough time to get our morning clean-up finished, have breakfast, and walk over to the Village Hotel. I hope to be there shortly after 9 AM for the 10 AM meeting. And if I want to have enough sleep, I need to turn in pretty soon.

14,400 steps today, which is less than the 21,000 yesterday.

I am aware that there are discussions of how so "fix" WSFS and Worldcon going on in multiple places. I also suspect that this year's Business Meeting is going to be yet another lesson in The Perfect Being the Enemy of the Good Enough.

The Popular Ratification proposal I submitted is not perfect. It does not solve all problems. There may turn out to be unforeseen issues that we need to address in the future. But I think it's better than standing still trying to figure out the One True Perfect Solution.

While I'd originally planned on submitting Version 2 of Popular Ratification today, I've been persuaded by a couple of people that there is a potential problem that is worth adding more words to the proposal to handle: what happens if Constitutional amendments conflict with each other.

Although it's bad practice, the Business Meeting has been known to give first passage to proposals that conflict with each other, kicking the final decision on which version to adopt to the second year's Meeting. The resolution I propose is that if conflicting amendments pass the Business Meeting, only the one that gets the most votes in favor is ratified.

While thinking of that, I realized that while it's highly unlikely, it is possible for multiple amendments to tie for the most number of votes in favor. Rather than deadlock the ratification process entirely, I threw the final decision back to the Business Meeting of the Worldcon conducting the ratification election. The second-year meeting, if faced with a tie at the Site Selection Business Meeting, could pick from among the conflicting proposals, but could not reject them and could not amend them. This is similar to how the Site Selection Business Meeting also can decide the results of Site Selection if None of the Above or no eligible bid wins, and you could consider it as the meeting having "reserve powers" to be exercised when all of the ordinary processes fail.

I think we'll need to keep the discussion open for another week. If you are one of the people who agreed to co-sponsor the amendment and want to withdraw your sponsorship, let me know.

Having thought over the two versions of Popular Ratification that I've drafted, I am more inclined to submit Version 2. If anyone prefers Version 1, you now have the language that you can use if you want to propose an amendment by substitution. Alternatively, if you want to move the voting deadline to earlier, you can move amendments to the proposal at the Glasgow Business Meeting.

I have added commentary to Version 2, with the intention of it being submitted as the makers' argument and thus part of the legislative record. The marginal comments within the document are not part of what will be submitted, but were there to help people reading the proposal understand what was going on. Yes, it can take a lot of words to explain something, with the explanation being longer than the wording of the legislation itself. That's how laws and constitutions work. "Plain language" often isn't that plain, despite what some people think.

I've seen more complicated suggestions, like having the members of Worldcons N and N+1 votes separately and both of them having to ratify the proposal. I can see the attraction, but the more bells and whistles you add to changes, the less likely they are to pass, in my opinion. But hey, anyone who wants to make amendments can do so, and all you have to do is convince a majority of the people in the room at the 2024 Business Meeting to vote for it initially.

If any of you who have previously volunteered to co-sponsor this proposal (you have to be a WSFS member of the 2024 Worldcon, attending or not, and you don't have to attend the Business Meeting to co-sponsor a proposal), contact me with your name as it appears in Glasgow's records. I don't necessarily know the names of the people behind the DW/LJ handles commenting here.

I have drawn up a draft of the Popular Ratification proposal that I discussed in an entry from a couple of days ago. It replaces existing WSFS Constitution Section 6.6 and 6.7 with an admittedly more complicated and longer wording, but that's because it is trying to cover a lot of the things that I'm pretty sure people will ask.

This is in a Google Document, but the link below is supposed to allow anyone to view and comment on the proposal, even without a Google account:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18S065_QfqSKnZW4TstXFh47ntSto0hjwYV652ezUK6U/edit?usp=sharing

As I was drawing it up, I decided that I did need to make things start sooner and the voting period last longer, because it needs to be accessible to people who don't have computers and internet connections. I know it is a horrifying thought, but not ever Worldcon member has a computer and an internet connection. Worldcons need to provide for contacting their members who don't have email addresses.

The deadlines in this proposal are working backwards from 30 days before the first Business Meeting (BM) of the Worldcon, because that is the deadline for submitting new business. If we're going to have a ratification process that allows members of the Worldcon in the ratifying year to propose new things based on the ratification vote, I think we have to give people at least 30 days to do so. Thus we get the following:

BM-120 Days: Ratification voting opens. (The Administering Worldcon can open ratification voting sooner if they want to do so.)

BM-90 Days: Ratification voting closes.

BM-60 Days: Administering Worldcon must announce results of ratification voting by this date. They can announce results sooner if they want to do so.

BM-30 Days: Deadline for submitting new proposals to the Business Meeting. This is existing WSFS Constitution Section 5.1.6 and is not part of the Popular Ratification proposal.

(Incidentally, when I first started attending Worldcon in 1984, the deadline for submitting business was 18 hours before the Business Meeting, not 30 days. The way you found out what had been submitted for consideration by the BM was to show up at the Preliminary Business Meeting.)

This proposal is not perfect. There are no perfect proposals. If we try to make things perfect, we will get nothing at all. So we need to think of things that will work and that might conceivably get two consecutive WSFS Business Meetings to vote to approve them. It's going to be a difficult sell no matter what, because we're asking the Business Meeting to give up some of its authority in exchange for improving the legitimacy of our governance process by letting the rest of the members have a voice in the process.

Addressing the people who have said it's bad to allow the members of the Worldcon where proposals get first passage, I have two things:

1. Only a few hundred people at most attend the Business Meeting. There are literally thousands of members of WSFS who aren't at the meeting, so what's wrong with allowing them to vote?

2. While it might be "tidier" to limit ratification voting to only members of the following Worldcon, for the reasons I explained above about the timing of proposals for the Business Meeting, we have to cut off voting far enough in advance to give members a reasonable chance to submit new proposals at the second year's meeting. If we postpone the end of ratification voting to 30 days out or even through the end of Site Selection voting, it will not be possible to react to the results until the third year. That proved to be a killer for the last version of Popular Ratification, considering that we do appear to have a significant number of people who think that the current system takes too long as it is. That last group wants changes to be made immediately, and to be retroactive years into the past, so telling them to make the time even longer it's going to wash.

I've posted this as a Google Doc because it should be relatively easy to change if we identify things that need revising.