Today’s WSFS Business Meeting ended up being a fairly quiet event, as far as I can see from Twitter and from Rachel Acks’ live blog. That’s because a lot of the controversial business was dealt with yesterday. Here are some highlights.

The motion to make electronic publications opt-out rather than opt-in and will go to London for ratification. This is good, because it will help keep the price of Supporting Memberships down.

The various motions about whether you can have one set of WSFS voting rights without another were debated, but were eventually referred to a committee to try to sort out some sensible language. That should be interesting, because the people who are strongly against splitting up rights tend to also be the people who are strongly against the concept of WSFS membership (as opposed to membership of individual Worldcons). I may have to write about that in more detail later. Anyway, the good thing is, as Tero noted on Twitter, that the knee-jerk idea that we must take action in a hurry just in case something bad happens has been voted down.

The WSFS Accountability Act, which seeks to improve accountability for Worldcon surpluses, has been passed with much simplified language and goes to London for ratification.

The Fan Artist motion was passed, but that’s misleading because it was amended so heavily in the process that it does none of the things that the original proposers really wanted. As I suspected, people complained about having to compare apples to oranges. There were also suggestions that some of the activities that were to be included are already covered by other categories. All that we have left are clarifications that art displayed at conventions does qualify (even though that’s not really “public”), and that the art must be non-professional (whatever that means). I suspect this may end up being known as the anti-Randall Munroe amendment.

The amendments to change the voting requirements for eligibility extensions from a 3/4 majority to a 2/3 majority passed fairly easily, mainly because every other requirement for a super-majority is the Constitution is set at 2/3. Vincent Docherty’s suggestion to make the main Eligibility Extension for non-US publications permanent was much more hotly debated. As I said yesterday, I would be happy to keep making the case for it each year but, despite opposition from many of the big guns in US SMOFdom, Vincent won the debate by 49-32, so that also goes forward to London for ratification.

At the end of the meeting a new piece of business was introduced. This would remove the regional restrictions on membership of the Mark Protection Committee. I am somewhat suspicious about this. The MPC is the only permanent committee that WSFS has that has any power. It was, if you remember, the committee that had me flung off the Hugo Award Marketing Committee (the HAMC is subservient to the MPC). I have a sneaking suspicion that certain people are trying to change the rules of elections to the MPC so that it will be easier to take it over. Of course I could be wrong. I shall see what Kevin has to say. In any case, it too will be up for ratification in London, so if it is a problem it can be dealt with then.

All in all it was a pretty good day. Well done fandom.

Kevin has posted his own thoughts about the Preliminary Business meeting here.

He has also posted video of the whole of the meeting here. Most of the debate on the YA Hugo is in Part I. I’m interested to see who the five people who vociferously opposed the Eligibility Extension were.

I also suggest that you read this post by the person responsible for moving the YA Hugo motion. You’ll probably see lots of posts over the next few days complaining about how Evil SMOFs used trickery and cheating to kill off the YA Hugo. Given the way things have gone this year, it would not surprise me to see Kevin fingered as the ringleader of those Evil SMOFs.

Obviously I wasn’t there, so I have to rely mainly on other people’s reports of what went on, but I do know Don Eastlake fairly well. He’s by no means a boring conservative. Indeed, as far as I know he is the only person ever to have chaired the Business Meeting and won Best In Show at the Worldcon Masquerade. But, as Kevin notes, he does tend to run the meeting more quickly, with less explanation, than Kevin does. That makes him popular with the regulars, who tend to think that Kevin wastes their time, but it makes things harder for newbies.

What effectively happened here was a primitive form of representative democracy. Kevin, as someone who is well versed in how the BM works, acted on behalf of Aiglet and others to help them get what they wanted out of the meeting.

WSFS is very proud of being a participatory democracy rather than a representative democracy, and given the way that modern national politics work I can see why people have little trust in their elected representatives. But equally, the larger a community becomes, and the more sophisticated its governing processes, the harder it becomes for ordinary people to play a full part in the decision-making process. Consequently, other forms of democracy become necessary.

There is no right answer to how WSFS should be governed. Democracy is a messy business, and no system will suit everyone. However, I do think we need to think carefully about how best to involve more people in decision-making. In the meantime we’ll be reliant on people like Kevin voluntarily helping newcomers through the process.

Today at Worldcon the Preliminary Business Meeting took place. This is the one that sorts out the agenda for the main meeting tomorrow. It is important because of a procedure called Objection to Consideration (OTC) through which motions deemed frivolous or a waste of time can be removed from the agenda entirely. Some resolutions, including the Hugo Award Eligibility Extension, can also be discussed as they do not involve actual amendments to the WSFS Constitution.

Kevin kept up a tweet stream throughout, but that’s hard to follow so I recommend this live blog of the meeting by Rachel Acks. She’s clearly partial, but she has most of the salient issues covered very clearly. Here are the highlights.

The motion to remove some of the fan categories had a 16 ton OTC dropped upon it, as I rather suspected it would. It was silly and a bit spiteful.

The same fate befell the “Very Short Form Dramatic Presentation” proposal. I suspect this is mainly because people expected it to become dominated by trailers for the same films that end up in Long Form.

A new motion, that I hadn’t seem come in, to expand Fan Artist to cover more types of art, will get debate time. My initial impression is that anything that can improve interest in this category is good, though I’m sure people will complain about having to compare apples to oranges.

The Hugo Award Eligibility Extension was passed almost unanimously. I’m very pleased about this because it means that WSFS has finally accepted that the Extension is about works from all over the world, not a special sop to UK-published works. It also acknowledges that, thanks to population sizes, the majority of voters will probably be US-based every year for a while yet.

There was a daft proposal to add an Eligibility Extension to the Retro Hugos. London is running 1939 Retros, so an extension would have included works published outside of the US prior to 1939 1938, and published in the US in 1939 1938. Given that the purpose of the extension to is allow US voters time to read the works, and that they will have had 75 years to do so, I fail to understand what different more time would make.

Then again, the intention became obvious with the next motion. You see, The Hobbit was published in the UK in 1938 1937. An extension would have allowed it to be included in the 1939 Retro Hugos. A special plea to have it included anyway was also rejected. If we are going to have Retro Hugos (which I am increasingly thinking was a Very Bad Idea) then can we at least keep to the works published in the year in question and not add works from other years just because they are very popular?

There were also a whole bunch of suggestions for making eligibility extensions easier, including one that would make the main one a permanent feature rather than having to be voted on every year. Given that is passes almost unanimously every year, I can see people not wanting to waste time on it, but equally I’m happy to argue for it every year if necessary.

And now for the one contentious part of the meeting: the YA Hugo.

At the start of the meeting the proposer of that motion asked to withdraw it. I think that was a sensible move, because the motion as it stood would have failed, and would have further soured people on the whole idea of a YA Hugo. Unfortunately you can’t withdraw a motion once it has been submitted without unanimous consent, and someone insisted on having a debate. I don’t know whether that was an overly enthusiastic supporter, or someone trying to stir up trouble, but the effect was trouble all the same.

Because the motion had to be debated, and because the mover wanted it removed, the only thing to do was to raise an OTC. Given that the maker of the motion didn’t want it debated, and it was unpopular anyway, it didn’t surprise me that the OTC passed. But of course Twitter was then full of people complaining about how the Evil SMOFs had stomped on the YA Hugo yet again, and ignoring the context of what had gone on in the meeting.

Towards the end of the meeting, as Rachel explains, Kevin moved to create a committee to study the issue of the YA Hugo and report back next year. This is a very promising development, because it provides a venue for the supporters of the motion and sympathetic BM regulars to get together and thrash out something that has a chance of getting passed. Kevin and I have both volunteered to be on the committee. It will need some work, and compromise on both sides, but I’m hopeful that we can come up with something that is going to get young people involved in the Hugos.

If you are interested in being involved in the YA Hugo Committee, let me know and I will pass your name on to the appropriate people. Ideally you need to do so tomorrow, though I suspect that there will be means of adding people later.

Those were the main highlights from today. The video of the meeting should be online in a day or so. I was also pleased to hear Kevin note that there was a very big turnout. The more people get involved, the better the BM will be able to reflect the wishes of fandom at large, rather than just the few people willing to go to meetings.

There has been a lot of debate around this year’s Business Meeting motions since I wrote about them last week. Kevin tells me that elsewhere it is being said that anyone who is against the “No Cheap Voting” motion must be in favor of free voting. They’ll probably carry on doing that no matter what I say. If you are interested, Seanan McGuire has a lot to say about why some sort of cost to participate is necessary, and she’s right.

There has also been a lot of discussion about the economics of membership, and possible changes to the WSFS Constitution that might allow us to lower the cost of a Supporting Membership. These are good discussions to have, and I hope we can get the cost down further. However, such discussions are irrelevant to the “No Cheap Voting” proposal. It doesn’t talk about what the price should be; it simply seeks to establish, as a matter of principle, that lack of wealth should be a barrier to participation. If it passes, I fully expect people to argue that, regardless of the economics, the price of a Supporting Membership can never be reduced below the roughly $40 that London is charging, because that would make it “cheap”. Then they’d start arguing that $40 is “cheap”, and begin asking bids if they will increase the cost of a Supporting Membership in line with the will of the Business Meeting.

A much more relevant issue is that is the concept of a “sense of community”. People are saying that they want Hugo voters to feel that they belong to the World Science Fiction Society, and that somehow paying a lot of money for the privilege will give them this sense of belonging. I’d like to look at that idea in more detail.

I accept the fact that there are people who think that the only “true” members of WSFS are the people who go to Worldcon every year, and actually help create the event. They have clearly invested far more than just money in the event. Some would like to restrict voting in the Hugos to that group (and indeed participation in the Business Meeting is still restricted to that group). For them, a Supporting Membership is simply a means of allowing people who would otherwise be regulars to keep up their participation in those few years when actually attending is impossible for some reason. It is a valid position to hold, but one I disagree with. Once the convention grew beyond the size that all of the people who attended could reasonably be involved in staging it, I believe that position became untenable.

The problem with the “sense of community” argument is that someone who pays $200 to attend when Worldcon is local to them, but never attends when it isn’t, is somehow deemed “part of the community” for that year and deserving of a vote, whereas someone who pays far less every year but never attends is somehow “not part of the community”. I think that this is thoroughly muddle-headed.

Someone who only ever interacts with Worldcon as a paying member when it is local to them, and who never takes part as other than an audience member, does not generally feel part of WSFS. Many of them don’t even bother to vote in the Hugos. They see Worldcon as a foreign event that costs a stupid amount to attend, but which they go to because of the big names they’ll get to see. Once the con is over, they have no interest in it until next time it is local.

The people who really feel part of Worldcon, and of WSFS, are the people who will go to Worldcon when it is local, and will buy a Supporting Membership in years when it isn’t so that they can carry on being part of the excitement. That’s the sort of community I want to foster. It may well be that someone who lives in, say, Japan or Australia can only afford to attend Worldcon one year in ten when the convention comes to their part of the world. That’s inevitable with an international event.

Colin Harris said yesterday in a comment that there is a feeling amongst Worldcon regulars that the Hugos are becoming dominated by people who are only interested in the Hugos, and have no interest in Worldcon. Presumably that’s because the proportion of voters who have supporting memberships rather than attending memberships is going up. Maybe some of those people genuinely don’t care about Worldcon, but it is my contention that most of them do. Most of them would love to attend regularly, they just can’t afford to. They are amongst that group of people who will attend on that one year in ten when Worldcon is local to them, but will buy Supporting Memberships the rest of the time.

Furthermore, I maintain that if those people are buying Supporting Memberships whenever Worldcon isn’t local, then they are far more likely to volunteer to help stage it when it does come back. And indeed they are more likely to become part of a bid to bring it back. That’s what community building is all about.

So how can we foster this sense of belonging? How can we encourage people to become part of WSFS every year? Well, a cheap Voting Membership is a possible tactic. It has been suggested, but hasn’t been tried. Personally I would prefer to have Worldcon find other things that it can offer to Supporting Members that would encourage more people to think that $40 was a reasonable price, but I appreciate that can be difficult to achieve.

What certainly won’t foster a sense of community, except amongst some of those who are already members, is passing motions that appear to be specifically designed to make that community seem elitist. The question is, what sort of community do you want: one where you dig in, protect what is yours, and don’t let anyone else join; or one that is open and welcoming to as many like-minded people as possible?

If Worldcon is to be a truly international event, and especially in a time when international travel is becoming more difficult rather than less so, I think it is inevitable that people who want to support Worldcon will outnumber those who can actually attend. Let’s welcome those people, find more ways to get them involved, and build a bigger sense of community.

The agenda for this year’s WSFS Business Meeting has been published, and with it the usual collection of new business for consideration.

There has been quite a lot of discussion elsewhere already about the proposal to scrap three (but oddly not all) of the fan categories in the Hugos. I don’t think I need to add to that. You only have to read the commentary on the motion to see that it is the work of someone with a bee in his bonnet. The logic of it has been thoroughly dissected elsewhere. I guess it would be amusing to see it actually get debated, because some people would end up saying some very weird things on the record, but I’m expecting this to suffer Objection To Consideration at the Friday meeting. It you can spare the time to drop by on Friday to make sure it doesn’t get any further, please do so.

A rather more serious piece of business is the one called “No Cheap Voting”. Here is the text, to save you clicking through to read it.

4.1.1 Short Title: No Cheap Voting

Moved, to add a new subsection following existing section 1.5.7:

Section 1.5.X: No membership that includes any WSFS voting right may be sold by a Worldcon for less than that Worldcon’s supporting membership rate when it was initially selected.

Commentary: These voting rights are a perquisite of Worldcon membership. Anything including the same for less is distorted by definition.

The title of the motion, and the use of the word “distorted” should be enough to tell you that this too is the work of people who are angry about the way the world is going, and want to roll things back. But what is it all about?

Well, for a long time people have been complaining that voting in the Hugo Awards is too expensive. I agreed with them, and so did many other people. As a result, some steps have been taking to reduce the cost.

The main issue here is that voting in the Hugos is a right that one obtains by becoming a member of Worldcon. For a long time conservatives have tried to claim that being a “member” means actually attending the convention, but voting at the convention hasn’t been required for ages. Worldcons have long sold “supporting memberships” that allow people who can’t afford to attend to still participate in the event.

However, supporting memberships are still fairly expensive. For the current Worldcon in San Antonio they cost $60. London, to my horror, is not currently advertising a rate for supporting memberships. I very much hope that this is an error in their website, and not policy.

There are various reasons for the high price. Partly you get things other than the voting rights for a supporting membership, such as the program book and progress reports, which cost money to produce. And partly supporting memberships are tied into the site selection process. You have to buy at least a supporting membership to vote in site selection, and Worldcons have become dependent on the revenue from site selection to provide the initial cash flow that they need on becoming seated. Some progress was made last year, but supporting memberships can’t get too much cheaper without causing financial hardship to Worldcons, unless some other means of obtaining an initial cash injection is found.

Without cheaper supporting memberships, it might seem that Hugo voting cannot get any cheaper, but that’s not the case. There is nothing in the WSFS Constitution that would prevent a Worldcon from adopting a new class of membership: a Voting Membership. It would carry with it no rights other than voting in the Hugos, and would therefore be pure profit for the Worldcon. If it was priced suitably, it could result in a significant additional source of income, as well as increasing participation in Hugo voting.

The purpose of this new motion is to prevent Worldcons from ever creating this sort of membership.

That is, its purpose is to prevent the “Wrong Sort of Fan” from participating in the Hugos: young people, poor people, people from countries where $60 is a huge amount of money, and so on.

The commentary on the motion is a piece of ridiculous sophistry. A membership is a membership. There is no reason why creating a new type of membership would be a “distortion”, unless you have the sort of mindset that holds that allowing people who are poorer than you to vote is a “distortion”.

This motion is an attempt by people who already have voting privileges to prevent those privileges from being extended to others. It also cuts Worldcons off from a potentially very lucrative source of income. I want to see it voted down.