[WorldCon] WSFS Preliminary Business Meeting Summary 3

As usual for the Preliminary Business Meeting, today we were setting the agenda for the next three days of meetings, particularly agreeing upon debate times for the various items. Here is a link to the agenda, and my own thoughts on the new proposed amendments.

Highlights:

• Big thank you here to Zalia and Corina for covering the first hour of the meeting for me. Love you guys.
• Happy birthday to Kevin Standlee!
• Standing rule changes:
  • No Candidate Regions (A.1), Debate Time Streamlining (A.3), and Butt Out (A.5) pass.
  • Electronic Documents Are a Thing (A.4) fails.
  • No Vanishing Business (A.2) is referred to committee, to be reported back on Friday.
• Resolutions:
  • Kimo no Na wa (B.1) has its Hugo eligibility extended by a year.
  • Artist Eligibility (B.2) is sent to a committee. (More on this committee in a minute.)
  • Convention Publications to Be Delivered to Members (B.3) is replaced with the B.3.1 version, which is then adopted.
• All constitutional amendments from the 2016 business meeting are assigned debate times and will be considered in the coming days. Also, there are motions to suspend both EPH and 5 and 6 up for debate. Please note that this is baked in to our adopting of both of those amendments last year; we required ourselves to reconsider them yearly to assess if they are working as intended. Both EPH and 5 and 6 have been postponed definitely to the Saturday business meeting, so they can be debated in light of this year’s Hugo results.
• New constitutional amendments:
  • What Our Marks Really Are (D.1), The Reasonable Amendment (D.2), Make Room! Make Room! (D.3), Name That Award (D.4) have debate time set and will be considered at the main business meeting.
  • Requiring Electronic Payments (D.6) is postponed indefinitely at the request of its originator to allow better consideration of its implications.
  • The Division of the Hugo Award Best Novel Category (D.6), A Reorganization of the Best Related Category (D.7), and Best Dramatic Presentation Reorganization (D.8) are all referred to committee, to be reported back on before anything else is to be done with them.
• SO ABOUT THAT COMMITTEE. A Hugo Award Study Committee was created to consider the best artist issues, and then had its mandated expanded by the meeting to consider all Hugo categories – but only categories, NOT anything to do with nominating or voting. This is the committee that D.6-8 were referred to. They will be making recommendations for the 2018 business meeting.
  • Committee members: Vincent Docherty will be chairman. Other appointed members: Nicholas Whyte, Chris Barkley, Kevin Standlee, Kate Secor, Michael Lee, Catherine Duval, John Hurts conditionally if he is prepared to cooperate with the committee’s requirements.
• Mark Protection Committee nominations were made without incident.
• And this is where we ran out of time for the day. Other items normally seen to on Preliminary Meeting day will have to just get done tomorrow because people got very exercised about the Publications resolution.

All right, going to take a look at these new proposed amendments.

Previous Posts:

• Preliminary Business Meeting: Liveblog