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 “cheapâ€. Then they’d start arguing that $40 is “cheapâ€, 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 communityâ€. 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 communityâ€. 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.
Well, I actually agree with Colin, but I also think that’s a good thing.
Unrelated, and possibly distracting to the actual conversation, I’ve wondered something for a while now: if the Hugos spun off as their own thing, completely separate of WorldCon, would they survive? TO me, those folks who are buying Supporting memberships and not really caring at all about the WorldCon are proving to me that they would.
Chris
Posit a Hugo Awards not administered by the Worldcon and run by WSFS. Who would run it? Who would make the rules? Who would pay for it? And would you really have enough interest just by itself to get a couple thousand people to come to a Hugo Awards ceremony? And if so, who would pay for that?
I don’t believe the aggregate sense of the group is that people who are supporting members are not part of the community. Someone out there *may* hold such an opinion, but I think that’s more an outlier position. I think the line that’s being argued over is whether it’s acceptable to the group to slice down the membership options so thin as to create and sell something that we *don’t* consider to be joining the community. As I noted before, I believe a situation of offering some option to participate in Hugo voting only without becoming a supporting member caters to the thought that somehow the Hugos are separable from the Worldcon community and you don’t have to *really* join the rest of us. I find that line of thought *actively* damaging to my “sense of community”. I don’t say this to mean that I think this is any kind of “we need to keep the wrong people out” sort of deal…while I hold that opinion, I *also* believe that it is *good* to reduce the cost of remote participation (through supporting memberships) and grow the community.
A supporting membership, with it’s access to the publications and information from the event and articles on history is a decent way to join the community. I, for one, don’t want to see that process damaged by allowing situations where it can be sidestepped. It is, for me, the minimum requirement to join the community and earn your franchise. I don’t think it should cost $60 as it did this year, I am happier that it’s $40 for the next couple years at least, I will be even more happier if we can get it a bit lower (my personal ideal is somewhere at or just north of $25). For me, $25 would seem to be not free, but still relatively cheap voting and I think that would be a situation where everyone wins. More people are able to join in, grow the community and connect with lots of folks who have cared about this event for decades that they’re likely to find they share a lot of interests with.
Sounds good to me. But you need a motion that makes it clear that’s what you want, not one that is apparently all about cost.
I’d rather see more value for supporting membership than reducing cost to just allow Hugo voting by more people.
Put the masquerade, Hugos, GOH interviews, other selected panels and stuff online live (and recorded) for those supporting members. Put ’em behind a paywall/password/whatever.
That will foster the community, and possibly increase supporting membership.
As someone highly interested but poor, I don’t join Worldcons that I can’t attend because the only value I get is Hugo voting and some newsletters that done matter to me as I can’t attend. Give me more value, make me feel like a participant – I’ll be among the first to join every year.
Maybe then change it from supporting member to electronic member, or some other name that does not say “all we want is your money” as blatantly.
That all sounds good to me.
Speaking as a potential vendor for this year’s show, might I make an alternative suggestion? It’s great to talk about encouraging community, but let’s see the other reasons why so many potential WorldCon attendees don’t actually show up. The cost of the membership is a big one, but so is the time of year when it’s held.
To put it in perspective, while WorldCon’s standard date on Labor Day Weekend made perfect sense in, oh, 1954, the combination of cost and schedule is a big factor that keeps a lot of people from attending in the States. When given the option, a lot of students and teachers would attend, as was demonstrated by the Reno WorldCon a couple of years ago, if it weren’t held the first weekend after the start of classes, when getting away for that weekend is nearly impossible. For those who might try, the attendance cost of WorldCon compared to, say, Dragon*Con and Anime Fest on the same weekend is a huge factor, as is the perceived return on value. The fact that $200 goes a lot further at Dragon*Con this year than at LoneStarCon explains why the former is the talked-about event for most of fandom and not the latter. (Right after the San Antonio crew won the bid, I ran into the guy who was the vendor’s room director at the time, and asked him about whether or not the San Antonio show was planning to change the date a la Reno. When I pointed out that I knew a lot of people who would go to both if given the opportunity, he literally sneered at me “Well, that only affects maybe 250 people at most.” Yeah, and that’s why Dragon*Con this year will have 22,250 people attending and LoneStarCon will be lucky to get 1000.)
Now, it’s really easy to assume that a lot of the policies and attitudes involving WorldCon regulars, especially this year, are deliberately intended to keep out anyone who isn’t sufficiently ideologically pure. It’s easy to assume that such stunts as requiring all vendors to have a fully paid-up attending membership before being allowed to be reviewed by a jury for inclusion is a particularly sleazy way to boost attendance numbers and keep any new blood from outselling the same petrified booksellers who are at every last WorldCon. That, however, assumes that Riddell’s Law (“Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy”) doesn’t apply this time. I honestly think that these twerps think they’re doing the right thing, and that they’ll continue to cry about the fickleness of fans as the attendance numbers keep dropping, because it can’t be their fault. That doesn’t mean that I nor anyone else has any interest in subsidizing their follies: when I’m asked if I’m going to be in San Antonio two weekends from now, I just say “If I wanted to waste a perfectly good weekend on listening to a herd of reactionary white seventysomethings impotently whining about how the universe changed without their express written permission, I’d go to a family reunion.”
You have my sympathy, sir. There are still plenty of people involved in Worldcon who do it no favors.
If I’m not fighting your corner harder, it is because Worldcon dealers’ rooms are generally over-subscribed. That is, there are normally more people wanting to be dealers at Worldcon than there are room for. That makes it hard to make the folks who run dealers’ rooms work hard at attracting new dealers.
People might ask why Worldcon doesn’t just rent more space and put more dealers in it, but a convention dealers’ room has to be an economic proposition for the dealers. There is no point in having more dealers unless you have more members, because otherwise you’ll probably spread the same amount of money over more vendors, so everyone makes less money.
What Worldcon needs is more attendees, preferably more people who are going only to shop. Then it can have more dealers. And you do that by having a cheap on-the-day admission ticket to the exhibit halls.
Oh, I don’t disagree with your assessments at all, especially in most years. This year, though, apparently they’ve had a real problem with getting enough vendors in the first place. I can’t see why, especially due to the problems with attendees you’ve already related. (Yeah, sure, I want to blow about $1500 in memberships, booth fees, truck rental, hotel accomodations, and food to sit, bored out of my mind, because the few attendees are terrified of entering the dealer’s room and spending any money whatsoever. And with the few who’d enter, if I wanted to spend my weekend listening to Cory Doctorow lookalikes demonstrate over and over that they’re the first people on the planet to look at a converted iMac terrarium case and smirk “That’s the first good use for a Mac, hur hur hur,” I could do that here in Dallas.)
Along that line, that’s a side-subject that makes me wonder about the future of many conventions, and not just WorldCon. I repeatedly hear from people planning to attend one convention or another that they’re glad the dealer’s room is on one end or another of the hotel, so “this way I won’t spend so much.” Likewise, they aren’t out spending much of anything: I haven’t seen such a problem with people coming out to conventions and then hanging out in the bar the entire weekend, because they won’t justify buying so much as a one-day pass, in twenty years. And yet, at the same time, they cry and wail when the convention shuts down due to the law of diminishing returns. That’s another reason why I’m firmly in favor of doing one’s best to attract new blood to these shows: they at least understand that the party can’t continue to run for free. As for the old crowd, well, I’m reminded of an old comment about why so many Las Vegas residents loathed the long-dead Comdex tech show from the late Nineties: “they all show up with one shirt and one $20 bill, and they don’t change either for the entire show.”
I have a publishing company and an e-book store. You don’t have to tell me. 🙁
Sorry for the belated reply. I wrote this and couldn’t submit it, and it sat in a window unsubmitted for a week 🙁
As I’ve said less well in Seanan’s thread, the current benefits of a supporting membership have a direct cost value of greater than $200. I simply cannot imagine exactly what the complaint is: the voter receives greater than $200 in “the best” (for Hugo nominators value of “best”) fiction for the low price of $40. The right to nominate and vote had more than $40 of value to me even when I was sleeping in my car level poor, although I could see others having a different point of view.
Now that there is a direct monetary value behind it (so long as the publishers continue to support it) I am calling Fooey on anyone who says this number should go lower. The only reason for it to go lower is to allow someone to game the system by having more of their friends come over it vote. Even if their desire wasn’t to game the system, it would be at best a “Not Interested” membership — which WSFS members would receive no value in supporting.
I think you have nailed a key point in your post: we don’t need a cheap voting membership. I cannot think of anyone who benefits from (only) a cheaper price. What we do want to encourage is more personal connection with WSFS, more desire to be a supporting member of Worldcon even when one cannot afford the trip. There are a couple of ways of doing this that come to mind:
1. More online presence / benefits that is locked around a member’s id that last for an entire year.
2. Incorporate NASFIC or similar into WSFS entirely, such that a membership would provide value at that convention? Or perhaps shared voting rights?
3. Stop having WSFS be only about the business meeting. Use the name in association with more positive things. Or perhaps put momentum around the Worldcon name, which is probably easier anyway 🙂
There’s probably more I’m not thinking of. But you nailed it above: let’s put value in the membership, rather than provide a “not interested” membership.
Thanks Jo, I think we are broadly in agreement here. The only point I would make is that you can’t ascribe a value to the Voter Packet based solely on the sale price of the contents. The contents of the Packet only have value to prospective members if they actually want those contents. Obviously we expect that prospective members will be SF&F readers for whom a lot of the Packet will have value, but there are probably very few people who would have paid for all of those books, any many who already own a good proportion of them.
“The contents of the Packet only have value to prospective members if they actually want those contents. ”
Yes. And also haven’t already bought the ones they are interested in (which I suppose quite a few have, since the works got nominated).
…and of course assuming the publishers keep providing them, but also for the works to be valuable, keep providing them in a reader-friendly format (unlike this year – I don’t count password-protected pdfs to have any monetary value).