Worldcon Business Meeting mutterings

[petrea_mitchell]

Putting my personal reactions to the items proposed for this year's Worldcon Business Meeting here, so that I can keep them out of the newsletter.

ASFiC: Exciting! Definitely do something like this! Except I think Eurocon would be a much better model than NASFiC.

I get that the proposers are probably reasoning that if North America gets a special privilege, Asia should get it too. But I also expect this will reinvigorate the movement to remove NASFiC from WSFS entirely, and I'll be surprised if we don't see an item trying to achieve that at next year's Worldcon.

Rules updates to allow for the possibility of no valid Business Meeting in a given year: Entirely prudent given recent events.

Date restrictions: Part of what is allowing Worldcon to survive in extraordinary times is the extraordinary flexibility it is given by the lack of prescriptive rules like this. Would vote against if I were there.

Removing additional eligibility tied to when things are published in the US: I agree that as the US dominates Worldcon less, maybe we do not need a rule specifically about the US. But I think there needs to be some kind of blanket mechanism for dealing with works that are disadvantaged by not being available to large swathes of Worldcon members. I don't have a firm idea for what that should look like, though.

Bilingual debate: The principle is fine but I'd like to have some data on what the costs and logistics would be like.

Adding even more Hugo categories: Aggggh noooo also can we remove Best Series already.

Comments

[kevin_standlee]

Part of what is allowing Worldcon to survive in extraordinary times is the extraordinary flexibility it is given by the lack of prescriptive rules like this. Would vote against if I were there

So if Chengdu (for example) announced that they were postponing their "2023" Worldcon until October 2024, you would have no objection to that? Seriously, how much flexibility do you want to give a Worldcon committee? How long can a Worldcon delay their convention before you pull the plug on them?

Remember that some of the operations of Worldcons are interlinked. If you delay a Worldcon long enough, you screw up the follow year's Worldcon. And if you hold it too early in they year, you wreck the Hugo Award calendar and give the members no time to read anything.

[petrea_mitchell]

How I feel about it would depend on the exact circumstances. If the last few years have taught me anything, it's that I can't possibly predict how wild those circumstances might be.

[kevin_standlee]

Well, my opinion is that no Worldcon committee has the right to do things that damage another Worldcon committee. And deciding that if you won a Worldcon bid, you have the right to hold a Worldcon anytime you like, even if you delay it for years and scramble up all of the downstream Worldcons. At the absolute minimum, if you bid for a Worldcon for year N, you have to hold it during year N. Not N-1, not N+1 and not sometime "when we get around to it." Surely you don't think CoNZealand could have just said, "Well, we won't hold the our convention in 2020. We'll just wait and hold it a few years later," do you?

[elf]

(I'm looking for new Worldcon updates and found this.)

The Worldcon date restriction proposal - someone mentioned on Facebook:

F.1 "Convention Time Bracket" was amended to replace “preferably between 1 August and 30 September” with “shall consult with the following Worldcon if held after 30 September” and passed as amended

So it's not "there is a hard restriction" but "if you hold it late enough in the year to disrupt the next Worldcon's plans, you have to discuss it with them," which sounds fine to me.

The bilingual debate one also seems fine - if the concom wants to allow it, they have to provide resources for it. (It also passed.) I'm not surprised it lacks details; the tech for that kind of thing is changing fast, and there's no point in codifying what kind of translation services or equipment are required, only to have them be obsolete in five years.

The biggest hassle I can see with that one, is that it could play havoc with the time limits. When you're only allowed 4 minutes to discuss a topic, translation time really cuts into that.

About the new Hugo proposals: Best Young Author and Best Game did not pass (...we got Best Game or Interactive Work, though, from last year, which was ratified. We suspect the authors of the new "best game" proposal were not aware there was a best-game option already in process.)

The "best indie film" awards were bumped to the next day, and I haven't been able to find results of the meeting - but I expect them not to pass. Aside from the issue of "do we actually need more Hugos/these Hugos," they're very badly written; they don't define "major studio."