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]

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?