It looks like we may have some good news on the wi-fi front. As per this discussion on the A4 LiveJournal, it appears that you can get an 8-hour/250Mb wi-fi account at the convention center for just $A20. If that is indeed the case you can expect me to have my iPad running every day of the con, and there will be live Hugo coverage of some sort.
Also we have a bunch of people who have allowed their feeds to be syndicated through ConReporter.com. Of course we could always do with more. I’m pretty confident that we will have live coverage of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards (thanks Errol!).
In the meantime, the agenda for the WSFS Business Meeting has been published. Kevin has a precis here. There are a number of interesting pieces of business in store.
Probably the most important is the motion removing the connection between the site selection fee and the initial membership rate of new Worldcons. The way things currently are, this rule causes Supporting Memberships to be much higher than they should be to cover costs, and keeps initial membership fees much lower than Worldcons would like (forcing them to escalate rates rapidly later on). Passing this motion (and ratifying it in Reno) will do a lot to enable future Worldcons to encourage participation.
Kevin’s electronic voting motion should go through easily, though there will doubtless be a few fuddy duddies who insist that everything must be done on paper.
Allowing the WSFS Constitution to be distributed electronically rather than on paper makes a lot of sense, though lots of people already get their progress reports electronically. It would be a lot better, of course, if we could revamp the WSFS website the way Kevin and I did for the Hugos, but I’ve been forbidden to touch it and no one else is doing anything.
The surprise motion is the one that would allow members of the following year’s Worldcon to nominate in the Hugos as well as members of the previous and current Worldcon. This seems a bit odd to me. The reason why the previous year’s members get nominating rights is because many of them join up too late to be able to nominate (but not too late for the final ballot) in their own year. To allow members of the following year’s convention to nominate seems reasonable, but to allow them to nominate and not allow them to vote in the final ballot is very strange.
The reason for the motion I put forward (the one allowing the WSFS Constitution to be distributed electronically rather than on paper) is because, as currently written, the constitution specifically states this must be printed (as opposed to published), meaning the last few Worldcons that distributed electronic publications were actually breaking the letter of the law, if not its spirit. The intent of the motion is to have the Constitution reflect the current reality of convention publications that everyone seems happy with (choose between paper or electronic pubs).
Ah, very sensible. Thanks.
“To allow members of the following year’s convention to nominate seems reasonable, but to allow them to nominate and not allow them to vote in the final ballot is very strange.”
Perhaps the reasoning is that once people have involved themselves to nominate, that will help tempt them into joining the next year’s Worldcon to vote?