That was an interesting morning. Mostly it went fairly well, in that SMOFdom managed to restrain itself from doing too much that was hideously embarrassing, though some of them did try very hard.

Most of the committee reports went through on the nod, which was something of a relief for Kevin and myself. The only real fuss was over an internal dispute about the committee charged with maintaining the historical records of WSFS. Earlier this year someone had got it into his head that Forrest Ackerman’s famous first ever Hugo Award was not a proper Hugo. Kevin and I got told to change the official Hugo Awards web site, which we had to do. There followed a huge fuss and eventually Forry’s Hugo got restored. Various motions were proposed to try to prevent this sort of thing happening again without proper oversight, but in the end the BM voted not to do anything official. Hopefully a shot across the committee’s bows will be all that is needed to prevent this sort of thing happening again.

SMOFdom was clearly riled up about James Bacon’s motions on promoting Worldcon and youth memberships. It has to be said that some of James’s ideas were not very well thought out, and Worldcons hate being bound to do specific things by the BM, but equally the ideas deserved to be discussed. We ended up with a couple of fairly innocuous resolutions that expressed intent without requiring anyone to do anything, and that should have been good except that it was pretty obvious from what was being said that a lot of the old guard had no intention of taking any notice of the resolutions.

The women in the Hugos motion got kicked out by a fairly massive majority. I gather from other people that the reaction on the SMOFs list was exceptionally childish, and of course none of those people are prepared to say anything in public. As I said before, I really didn’t expect the motion to pass, but the adamant refusal to even discuss the issues sends a really bad message to the rest of the fannish world.