[WorldCon] WSFS Main Business Meeting #1 Liveblog

You can find a copy of the agenda here.

Hugo Study Committee report here.

1009: Two minute warning. There is a new piece of business today: A3 Short Title: Update to Deadlines for Submission of Reports. Will change Rule 4.4 and 4.5 to come into line with A2 Deadline for Submission of New Business, which was passed yesterday.

1012: Here we go. First order of business is passing out ballots for the MPC election.

1012: PoI – what if you don’t have a pen? Borrow from your friend. Jesi Lipp: Pricking your finger and writing in blood is also acceptable. “No it’s not, I have to collect them!”

1013: Kent Bloom from the FOLLE Committee. They are currently looking for links for previous WorldCons that have disappeared from their radar. Mostly this is for really old WorldCon links. They would like to move to continue the committee as currently constituted. No object to the continuation.

1014: Tim one more thing about the Hugo Study Committee. No objection to the remit of the committee being extended as requested by Cliff Dunn.

1015: Petréa Mitchell: will there be info on how to sign up? – There will be a sign-up sheet later, and Cliff is the guy to talk to. (Or email, presumably, if you’re not here…)

1016: Standing rule change A3. Five minutes assigned for debate.

1017: Kate Secor for: The language changes here now tie everything to the deadline specifically in Rule 2.1 so it’ll make things neater.

1018: Ben Yalow against: For the most part, agree completely, but has one issue. WorldCon Annual Financial Reports are separate entities, and cannot be demanded by the business meeting like this. Yes, this was in the old 4.4 but he thought it was a mistake then too, so we might as well fix it now.

1019: Point of Order from Kevin Standlee: the member’s motion is outside of the scope of the original proposal.

1020: Tim says this is correct, so if Ben would like to draft it up and bring it in as a completely different proposal, he’ll put it on the agenda tomorrow.

1020: A3 passes not quite unanimously.

1020: Business passed on – motions for ratification from Helsinki.

1021: C1 What Our Marks Really Are – no one cares to speak for or against. Ratified.

1021: C2 The Reasonable Amendment – no one cares to speak for or against. Ratified.

1022: C3 Make Room! Make Room! – no one cares to speak for or against. Ratified.

1023: C4 Name That Award. Tim was on the committee, so he is recusing and handing over control to Jesi Lipp.

1024: Anna Blumstein, who served as chair of the YA committee. Tomorrow, we’ll present the first ever YA award. Currently the award does not have a name. They took a full year to solicit information, do research, and debate. She gives the reason why they chose Lodestar. “The stars have guided fantastic journeys in stories old and new.”

1025: No one speaks again. RATIFICATION OVERWHELMING! We have a Lodestar Award, everyone!

1026: Balloting now closed for the MPC. Tim asks for volunteers to count the votes, which are on the preferential system. Seth and Warren step up.

1027: Moving on to new constitutional amendments. First up is D1 Remote but Real.

1027: Kate Secor speaks as maker of the motion. Moves to send to committee, not to report back earlier than next year’s meeting. “I put this on the agenda so we could talk about it. I understand there are flaws, but I think a committee is the correct venue to have these conversations.”

1028: PRK against. Not hard against the committee, but thinks having some discussion in the meeting first would allow the committee some idea of the issues people might have.

1029: Still Ben Yalow says that in general, committees have to report back are pretty good at fixing technical things. However, for anything but technical things – and he believes the flaws in this are not technical – you really want a committee that has time to discuss. So a committee that will report back next year is very preferable than one for this year.

1030: Chris Hensley because this has specific technical aspects, hashing it out in the meeting would be unproductive. It’s better to let the committee hash things out and give us a report.

1031: Kevin Standlee with an inquiry – would it be right to assume that Kate Secor will be given the chair of the committee and have the discretion to hire or fire. The answer is yes.

1032: Motion to refer passes. Kate Secor will be in charge of the Remote but Real committee. Signups will be at the table at the end of the meeting.

1032: D2 Adding Series to the Series, which is a fix for an “oops.” No one speaking in favor or against.

1033: Quentin Matthews with a question – this is a technical fix, so why does it take two years to get into the constitution? Tim says this does not fall within the bounds of the secretary to correct because it does technically change the meaning of the constitution.

1034: D2 passes on to Dublin.

1034: D3 and D4 were postponed indefinitely, D5 was postponed definitely until tomorrow… we are almost done with the agenda for today. Wow. Anyway, ten minute break!

1041: Cliff has set up the email address hugo.study.committee at gmail.com, so contact him there if you are not at this business meeting but are interested in being on the Hugo Study Committee.

1050: Back in session. Tellers for MPC election give report. First round was Don, second round Judy, third round Steven.

1051: Ballots will be destroyed after the meeting.

1051: Two items of business remaining. D6 Comic Books and Graphic Stories.

1052: He remains Andrew Adams. This was an item that came up from one of the comics authors who was part of the Hugo Study Committee. The description of graphic story felt disrespectful to writers and artists in that genre because those in it refer to it as comics. We are aligning this to be more respectful to eligible artists, which was the intent in the first place.

1053: Elliot Mitchell against feels the constitution should avoid the comedy reading of “comic.”

1054: Cliff Dunn says this is the reason we have “comic book” instead of “comic,” to avoid that confusion.

1054: D6 passes on to Dublin next year.

1055: D7 Notability Still Matters, which is to tidy up some things around EPH.

1055: Dave McCarty (Hugo Administrator). When we adopted EPH, we changed the reporting to say we would basically report the 16 top items. Previously we could omit long tail nominations with only single digits, but EPH took that choice away. He prefers to not report the low numbers. This would bring the EPH reporting requirements back into line with how things were done previously.

1057: Kate Secor against: as we see the field get wider, the tail is going to get longer. Our field is awesome and it’s getting bigger, and we should be celebrating that even though the votes are more dispersed.

1057: Andrew Adams for: the optional wording in the amendments works with Kate’s concern. We should trust our administrators to know what the difference is between noise in the machine and information that should be given out.

1058: Jill van Acker got to see the sausage making from last year. Disagree with the amendment because we are at the point in participation where the 5% isn’t an issue any more. If someone makes it to the end of the ten rounds, they’re not going to be at the end of the tail any more. This is an important part of our history, about the things we found important enough to nominate.

1100: Don Eastlake moves to strike out 5% and replace with 4%. He feels 5% is a little too harsh and 4% would be better.

1100: No speech against, we amend it to 4%. Back to the main motion.

1101: Cliff Dunn: aside from the fan categories, the single nomination artifact is mostly in the retro Hugos. It is valuable to have the last handful of rounds so we can see how the distributions took place since it’s a runoff system. Also, the 5% rule got removed by the 5% Solution originally, not the EPH amendment.

1102: Ben Yalow says it’s not just the fan Hugos, it shows up in the retros. For retros, we had John Campbell with 75 nominations. The number two had 8 nominations.

1103: Martin Pyne moves to amend to remove 4% and replace with “fewer than ten ballots.” Since the problem is with single digit ballots.

1104: Debate time is extended by another two minutes on each side, because we’ve run out.

1105: Perrianne Lurie says that ten is an arbitrary number. Percentage of the total number of ballots makes more sense because it hinges on how many actual ballots there are.

1106: Elspeth thinks that using ten ballots does give a better idea of how many nominations there actually wee. A percentage can be any number. Saying ten ballots clarifies that we are not excluding the bottom percentage.

1107: Points of Information Gary Blog wants point of information from Dave McCarty. How often on the final ballot are there works that got ten nominations or fewer?

1107: Kevin Standlee with Point of Order – that’s technically debate. You can’t just ask a question and not have it count toward your time.

1108: Don Eastlake points out that this is still at the option of the administrator. The administrator is not required to omit these from reports.

1108: Joshua Kronengold says that as the long tail gets longer and the numbers involved get larger. The things were ignoring also gets bigger. Having a specific number rather than percentage means we cannot ignore the people in the long tail who are still making double digit numbers. And we’re talking about people with only a handful of votes. Ten, like ten fingers, is all our hands can hold.

1109: Dave McCarty says if you pore through the history, the participation varies by year and by category. A hard number does not serve this variation well. Asking this as an administrator who has always reported more than what is required. But believes we need to trust the administrators to decide where to draw the line.

1111: Amendment fails. It’s still 4% and not 10 ballots.

1111: Time to vote on the main motion. Overwhelming number of ayes. D7 will go to Dublin for ratification.

1111: D5 and the further standing rule amendment from Ben Yalow remain for tomorrow. …are we almost done for the day?

1112: Kate Secor clarifies that D5 is not until 11 tomorrow. Yep.

1113: We stand adjourned!