Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

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.

I've been getting e-mails now talking about unspecified "rumors" about what happened at the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting. Well, the minutes aren't finished yet (lindadee has the unenviable task of writing them, which she has been doing, but it's going to be huge), but there's no secret about what happened at the Business Meetings this year. The entire meeting was recorded, and the recording were (mostly) posted to YouTube within 30 minutes or so of the completion of each segment of the meeting. You can watch the whole thing on the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting Playlist. Thanks to the 20-minute segment limit imposed by the camera for the low-resolution MP4 files, you don't even have to slog through all eleven-plus hours. You can take it in smaller pieces or jump straight to a segment if you know approximately where in the meeting something happened.

This set of videos is not secret. There is a link to it on Sasquan's WSFS Business Meeting page. There is a link to it in the article I submitted to Locus. It's been posted on Facebook repeatedly. Links are all over the place. What sort of cover-up posts to Twitter when they've published videos in public about their Secret Meeting?

Why people think that the meeting was Top Secret and that all of the results were Not for Mere Mortals' ears, I don't know, other than to assume that Making Stuff Up is much more fun than Boring Old Reality.

As I've been repeating endlessly (and as now noted on the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting web page), video recordings of the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting are available on YouTube on the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting playlist. If you so wish, you can watch all eleven hours (spread over 33 separate segments over four days) of the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting. With some exceptions that I'll discuss below, nearly every segment of the meeting was put online a relatively short time after the segment ended. For the most part, the meeting was on a "half-hour tape delay."

So why is it that nobody noticed until yesterday (or at least called to my attention) that the second segment of the meeting (the second twenty-minute segment) was missing?

( Why the Segments Were Mostly 20 Minutes Long )

With approximately 30-40 minutes between technical time outs but 20 minute segment limitations (about which we didn't actually know) on the MP4 files, we ended up setting ourselves up for confusion on the first day.

( How the Second Segment Disappeared )

Thanks to the team figuring out how the segments of the recording were coming off the camera, and thanks to the 20-minute segments being relatively quick to upload, we continued to run on roughly a 30-minute tape delay for the rest of the week. Every segment (except the last one, of course) was online before the meeting ended, with the final segment of each day being online soon thereafter.

Yesterday, lindadee asked why there was a gap between the first technical recess and the second video online. I went and looked. Sure enough, there was. Lisa brought me the raw MP4 files, and we realized that the first half of Thursday part 02 never got online. I uploaded it last night, labeled it Thursday Part 02a, relabeled the previously 02 as 02b, and reordered the playlist accordingly.

I'm merely surprised that nobody pointed out the missing 20 minutes before yesterday. Surely someone noticed the gap? Heck, I'm sort of surprised that Certain Paranoid Sociopaths didn't seize upon our honest mistake and declare that large amounts of Nefarious Things happened during the 20 minute gap.

The final day of Sasquan saw me spending even more time in Room 300B, site of the WSFS Business Meeting and the WSFS Mark Protection Committee Meeting held shortly after the BM finally adjourned.

( Thoughts on the Business Meeting )

Even though the WSFS Business Meeting was over, the Business of WSFS was not. The WSFS Mark Protection Committee couldn't hold its organizational meeting until after the Business Meeting had adjourned. at 2 PM, the members of the MPC convened in the same room for a relatively short meeting. I was re-elected Chairman, Linda Deneroff was re-elected Secretary, and newly-elected member Bruce Farr was elected Treasurer, replacing outgoing member and Treasurer Scott Dennis. Scott agreed to stay on as an appointed Assistant Treasurer for a transition period. After some more organizational discussion, we agreed to put off most of our discussion to the committee's e-mail list (once I get it reorganized with the new members added and the retiring members removed), and to consider meeting at SMOFCon in Fort Worth later this year.

At 2:45, I was finally done with WSFS business. We stowed our gear in the minvan, I changed my suit jacket and collared shirt and tie for a Sasquan polo shirt, and we made a bee-line for the Exhibit Hall, where I converted Lisa and my memberships to Worldcon 75 to attending. I then cashed the last of my "groats" (vouchers good for food from the concession stands) to get a couple of hamburgers for Lisa, bratwursts for me, and beverages for both of us, after which we headed to the Closing Ceremony.

( Feeling Heroic )

With the convention over, scott_sanford, Lisa, and I ended up going out to dinner at Hill's Restaurant again, after the group with which we'd originally gone to dinner grew so large that we wouldn't fit into a single table at the restaurant to which we'd drifted. We had yet another nice talk with the owner, and as we left, he presented Lisa with a jar of their nice custom spice mix, which I'll be happy to be able to use. He liked having our people here, and we enjoyed eating there.

( The Final Party )

My WSFS Work is still not done. Bruce Farr, Linda Deneroff, and I have to go over to US Bank on Monday and sign new signature cards for the WSFS MPC (Worldcon Intellectual Property, our legal entity) bank account. There's no other chance to do so; it's the only time the three of us are going to be in the same place and with a US Bank branch nearby. Fortunately, Noon isn't the 8:30 AM that our Business Meeting calls have been for, so I'm going to shortly lie down and sleep for many hours without a care, since we don't check out until Tuesday.

We got the Site Selection Business Meeting done. Lisa managed to get the Worldcon Chairs Photo Session recorded on video and in still photos, but we've not had enough time to post them.

After the meeting, Lisa and I got lunch at Hill's Restaurant again, and had another nice talk with the owner.

We went back to the convention center, and Lisa and I went separate ways because I had to go over to the Historic Davenport (for the first time since the night before the convention) for a meeting of the CanSMOF (Montreal Worldcon) non-profit corporation.

( Poutine a la Spokane: Extra Smoky Flavour )

The buses between the convention center and the Historic Davenport were very convenient. There was one at the curb as I came out of the hotel, so I hopped on and rode back to the Doubletree. I then spent the next couple of hours formatting Hugo Award announcements and preparing for Saturday night's Hugo Awards Ceremony.

( Now it can be told: The Hugo Awards web site Easter Egg )

The ceremony coverage went very well. I was thrown for a loop by not picking up a copy of the ceremony program in advance, so I didn't realize that they were taking up the categories in a non-traditional order.

As you may have heard by now, No Award won in five of the sixteen categories, principally the ones that were exclusively dominated by the so-called "puppy" candidates. The votes weren't even close. It would appear that most of the people voting this year didn't care for a lot of of this year's finalists.

After the ceremony I was booked to appear on the post-ceremony show, but by the time I got over to the show, they were off the air. The Ceremony lasted longer than planned, and that cut the post-show coverage short due to time constraints on the Convention Center facilities.

I sat down at a table and got the Hugo Awards results online. Unfortunately, because I rushed, I originally posted the 2015 results under the title 2014, and that affected the URL for the announcement. I can't really change it because it's already been widely distributed, although I did fix the title when I got back to the hotel room and signed back in, by which time there were several people who had pointed out the mistake.

That's a fair day's work. But we have one more day of Worldcon to go, including a still-crowded WSFS Business Meeting agenda.

We were up at 6 AM today, ordered room service (thanks to the keep-Kevin's-blood-sugar-stable donations!), and got down to the Business Meeting room around 8:45 AM. Lisa, working with Sasquan's tech team, were able to get the recording platform (which is actually the head table of room 300A) sufficiently tightened down to where she could actually record from it. Scott and Chris worked on the Business Meeting videos, and we actually had enough bandwidth to get the first three segments uploaded before the meeting ended.

Everyone on the Business Meeting team, from the head table to the Sergeants-at-Arms to the Video Team, did a great job. I do not see how things could have done any better than they did.

( Our day: Business Meeting and Match Game, with a couple of meals in between )

There were so many things I wanted to get done today that I did not get done. I've taken photos that I don't have time to post. But I must get some sleep now, as we have to be up again in only six hours to start over. Fortunately, we only have a Business Meeting tomorrow and not a game show, although I think I'm part of Montreal's ballot-counting team tomorrow night.

Membership figures as of late tonight: 4,394 warm bodies (individual people attending) and 11,149 total memberships (including supporting). That makes Sasquan officially the largest Worldcon (in terms of total memberships, not attendees) of all time, breaking the record from last year that Loncon 3 set of 10,800.

Today was the only day of Worldcon where we did not have to be up early, so we could take our time getting up and also go down and eat in the coffee shop. (We'll order room service the other days to save time.)

Programming started at Noon, and I was in one of those panels, the Introduction to the WSFS Business Meeting. There was a really good turnout, mostly of people who had never attended the Business Meeting and of them mostly first-time Worldcon attendees. We showed the Business Meeting Basics video and answered as many questions about the process as we could in our 45 minute time slot.

( Remembering Bobbie and Opening Sasquan Officially )

I wanted to get out to First Night, but I had to get over to the room where the Business Meeting will be where Lisa was working with Tech. She discovered to our dismay that the platform from which we'd expected to film is simply too wobbly. Every step you take on the stage at the back of the room would jar the cameras terribly. Lisa will have to improvise something else tomorrow morning when we get into the room at 9 AM in its actual configuration. (Because the air wall between 300AB is in place tonight for dances but is supposed to be down tomorrow morning, we won't know for sure what things will be like until we get there in the morning.

I also discovered to my dismay that my mi-fi unit doesn't have sufficient cell phone connectivity to work in that room. This may negatively impact our ability to get WSFS Business Meeting segments uploaded in a timely manner tomorrow. We'll see what we can do, but we're a prisoner of bandwidth limitations on the various networks available to us. Moreover, I'm now worried that I won't be able to get a signal from the Hugo Awards ceremony, which is critical because the convention center's free wi-fi network does not extend into the INB Theatre. I hope to get that tested sometime tomorrow.

( Red Sky at Night )

There were few surprises from the WSFS Mark Protection Committee meeting, as we'd dealt with most business by e-mail in advance and our report is already online with the other WSFS papers. I did learn that there will be people who are not happy with the proposed Agenda that spreads business out over the final four days of Worldcon, including postponing the two Hugo-nominating-related proposals until Sunday, and that there will be an attempt by them to impose very short debate time limits in order to "power through" the business on Friday only. So that suggests to me that tomorrow's Preliminary Business Meeting will be even more action-packed, in a parliamentary sense, than I expected.

( Hugo Award Trophy )

I called it an early night. We have a long day tomorrow for which I have the alarm set for 6 AM, so it's no parties for me tonight. The sacrifices we make for our fandom.

The last time that WSFS held a final-day Business Meeting was 1992, and that was only because at the time NASFIC elections were "snap" and had to be held the same year as the Worldcon election that caused a NASFiC to be necessary. In 1992, Glasgow won the 1995 Worldcon (we selected sites three years in advance back then) and a one-day NASFIC election was held (I administered it; it was pretty wild) in which Atlanta won a bid to host NASFIC as part of the 1995 Dragon*Con. This year, we have deliberately scheduled a meeting on the last day of the convention (Sunday) because at least two items of proposed new business are heavily dependent upon knowing the results of this year's Hugo Awards before members can make an informed decision.

( Decreasing Amount of Tedious Detail )

It's going to be a very busy five days.

The agenda for the Friday/Saturday/Sunday WSFS Business Meetings depend on how the Thursday Preliminary Business Meeting behaves.

( Yet More Tedious Detail )

My time projections say that we will not be able to complete all of the New Business (unless some of the items are PI'd by the Preliminary Meeting). We'll do as many of them as we can, aiming to adjourn no later than 12:45. Any unfinished items roll over to the Saturday Site Selection Meeting.

Worldcons and NASFiCs with "reportable surplus funds" are required to report annually to the WSFS Business Meeting. The reportable amount is not every bit of money those groups have from any source. It only covers the money they received from running their WSFS event. Once they have spent everything that they took in running their event, their reporting responsibility ends. It's quite common for groups to have income from sources other than their event, and furthermore any interest income after their event is over is not reportable.

All WSFS events with reportable surpluses have made their required reports to WSFS. The WSFS conventions financial reports are now on the Sasquan web site in the Business Meeting/Committee Reports section.

Of particular interest is that the Millennium Philcon (2001) has finally managed to dispose of the remainder of its surplus. They had just short of $46,000 reportable, and elected to "round up" (using the non-reportable funds) a pair of grants to Sasquan (2015) and MidAmericon II (2016), $23,000 each.

Groups have different fiscal years and reporting periods. WSFS does not regulate this. Thus the various financial reports have different closing dates. This means that while MilPhil shows that they have completed their WSFS reporting requirements by issuing those $23,000 grants, the money was obviously paid after both those groups closed their current reporting periods, and therefore they won't show the income until their next reports, which will be to the 2016 Worldcon.

I know this all sounds boring, but I want everyone to understand that neither the "rounding up" of MilPhil's reportable surplus nor the fact that you see money going out one place but not coming in where the first report says it should be is not the sign of anything nefarious going on. Anyone who reads more into this than simply "different reporting periods" is just looking for trouble.

Although Worldcon are required to submit financial reports to the Business Meeting, there is no requirement that anyone from those Worldcons attend the meeting to submit to questions. Furthermore, with the large amount of business on the agenda this year, I'm not really in the mood to spend a lot of meeting time discussing these financial reports. Direct your questions about the reports to the individual committees, who by rule now have to include contact information in their reports.