I am so very sorry that this is so late. It has been one hell of a day today and I only just got time to sit down and write this summary. Tomorrow might be a late as well depending on how things work out. Anyway, here is the summary of today’s liveblog.
NOTE: I will be referring to all amendments by their working titles. If you want to know the substance of these, refer to the WSFS agenda linked to from this page. Or I have my quick and dirty readings of them here, with some helpful clarifications provided by people in the comments.
Today got rather fractious on a lot of fronts. I’m going to just stick with the cut and dry summary. If you want deets, go read the liveblog.
- The most wonderful time of the year — site selection!
- WorldCon 2018 will be in San Jose! website
- NASFiC 2017 will be in San Juan! website
- Both cons will have paper publications available at no extra cost, but which will require an opt-in. And both will be going with the room party model rather than the fan village model. For more details, please see the websites.
- Mark Protection Committee special report: “Hugo Award” has now finished being registered in the EU.
- Nominee Diversity up first. After a lot of wrangling that I cannot summarize without shaking out a mountain of salt, the amended language from the committee assigned yesterday was accepted. Nominee Diversity is then ratified and will be in the constitution.
- Two Years Are Good Enough passes and will be up for ratification in Helsinki.
- There was a lot of very excellent debate on the YA Award, I think. (Starts around 1144 on the liveblog.) The ayes have it, and the YA Award will be up for ratification at Helsinki. It should be noted that there are certain portions of the award (including the fact that it currently has a blank instead of a name) that will need to be amended in Helsinki. Depending upon if the chair rules that to be a minor or major change, it might take another two years for ratification rather than one year. The YA Award committee will be considering over the intervening year until Helsinki matters like the naming and will report there.
- Three Stage Voting was sent to committee, to be reported back tomorrow, after amended language was proposed for it that was too complicated to be fully considered by the meeting at the time.
- The three items for Retrospective Improvements were next.
- Item #3 passed and will be sent on to Helsinki — this amendment will add a note to the Retrospective Hugos to make it explicit that they were retrospective when awarded.
- Item #1 passed and will be sent on to Helsinki — this amendment is mostly to clean up the language of the Retrospective Hugos and allow for them to be awarded for the WWII years.
- Item #2 FAILED. This would have added a category Retrospective Hugo, which would have effectively empowered future WorldCons to overrule the No Award giving in a category by running a new set of nominees. The committee of the whole found this very objectionable.
- Universal Suffrage passes and will be sent on to Helsinki for ratification.
- Non-transferability of Voting Rights was taken up despite an attempt to adjourn the meeting because we were almost out of time. I had to leave before directly observing how this one went, but I was told that the amendment failed after a extremely abbreviated debate.
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