I wrote in 2022 that the election system used by WSFS should be changed. At present, the rules for electing the Mark Protection Committee, the body charged with ensuring that the intellectual property of WSFS is protected, are set out in Standing Rule 6.2:

Voting shall be by written preferential ballot with write-in votes allowed. Votes for write-in candidates who do not submit written consent to nomination to the Presiding Officer before the close of balloting shall be ignored. The ballot shall list each nominee’s name. The first seat filled shall be by normal preferential ballot procedures as defined in Section 6.4 of the WSFS Constitution. There shall be no run-off candidate. After a seat is filled, votes for the elected member shall be eliminated before conducting the next ballot. This procedure shall continue until all seats are filled. In the event of a first-place tie for any seat, the tie shall be broken unless all tied candidates can be elected simultaneously. Should there be any partial-term vacancies on the committee, the partial-term seat(s) shall be filled after the full-term seats have been filled.

I warned that this carries the risk that a single faction with roughly half of the total votes could win every single seat and squeeze out other viewpoints.

My warning has come dramatically true. One of the candidates for this year’s MPC elections endorsed two other candidates and asked his supporters to transfer their votes to them. That candidate got almost half of the votes for the first seat and was easily elected; the two candidates who he endorse then took the second and third of the three seats up for grabs, thanks to votes transferred from the first candidate. This vividly demonstrates the potential for the current system to be gamed by slates.

What happened this year

The counts were as follows – with the winning candidate labelled C1 and the two who he supported labelled as C2 and C3; the other candidates are labelled D4 to D9 and DX for the tenth one. I’m removing names here because I don’t want to get into personalities.

As you can see, C1 did very well on first preferences, but picked up only two transfers from the 14 votes that came from eliminated candidates. C2 and C3 were quite a long way behind in fourth and fifth place.

For the second round, C1’s votes were distributed to the next preference, and the results were very different. The first two columns here show the first preference votes from the first count, and then the number of votes gained from C1’s transfers.

Of C1’s 67 original votes, 41 followed C1’s advice to transfer to C2 and C3, putting them now first and second rather than fourth and fifth. Transfers from the other candidates coalesced around D4 – by the second last round, D4 had picked up 21 new votes, C2 had picked up 14 and C3 only 6. But C3’s votes were then transferred and broke to C2 by a ration of 3 to 1, electing C2 easily to the second seat. It should perhaps be added that as well as C1 having endorsed C2 and C3, they happen to live in the same city, so a strong rate of transfers could have been expected anyway.

For the third seat, I have broken out how many votes each candidate got in first preferences, then transfers from C1, then transfers from C2.

You’ll see that C3, who got only 6 votes in the first round, got a total of 48 transfers from C1 and C2 – which was just enough to get C3 elected ahead of D4. In the rounds of transfers up to the second last round, D4 picked up 17, C3 only 4. In the last round, D5 was eliminated and his votes were transferred; D5 and C3 (and C2) happen to live in the same city, so some of D5’s votes went to C3 as well.

But all in all, my 2022 prediction that a large enough minority would be able to take all of the seats in this electoral system has been proved by C1’s success in electing C2 and C3.

I note also that in the other election for a WSFS committee this year, where five seats were up for grabs, the same candidate came out as the loser in the first three rounds, and placed third in the last two rounds, with their support peaking at 49 votes out of 138. It’s quite likely that none of those 49 people voted for any of the five successful candidates. Of course, you can debate whether a particular committee is meant to have members who collectively represent the centre of gravity of the meeting’s views, or who represent the diversity of opinion present; but we should be clear that that choice is being made by the system we choose to use.

How this came about

We now reach the point where I should reveal a relevant point of information.

Candidate C1, who quite possibly brought C2 and C3 in on his coat-tails, was actually me.

I did not consult with Alan Bond (C2) and Chris Rose (C3) before suggesting that voters who supported me should transfer to them. I genuinely felt that their insights would be useful to have or to retain on the committee and, in an election where candidates may not be well known to voters, I thought it would be helpful to indicate who was closest to my own views. Neither Alan nor Chris endorsed me, or each other, and in fact I was the only candidate to express support for any of my competitors in that way. And of course lots of people voted for both of them, or for all three of us, without paying any attention to my recommendation

I think my own vote was helpfully inflated by a couple of factors. I made several successful interventions in the Business Meeting session the previous day. (Video here; I spoke nine times, the first time at 1:04:10 and the last at 3:33:45.) On the day that votes closed in the election, File 770 led its news roundup with a piece about that, and then linked to one of my blog posts a bit further down the same post; again, I did not communicate with Mike Glyer about that in any way. So there were no sneaky tricks here; it was entirely organic.

Obviously I’m very glad that Alan and Chris got elected, and I look forward to working with them and the rest of the committee. But I feel sorry for Bruce Farr (D4), who was only two votes short in the end. And the 58 people who voted for him are 42% of the total number of voters; it rather sucks that such a large chunk of the voter body ends up with zero seats out of three.

The solution

I was astonished when I first discovered how the MPC is elected. The runoff ballot in a succession of single-seat contests is appropriate enough for determine the winners and lower places of the Hugo Awards. It’s utterly inappropriate if you want to elect a diverse spread of people. (Maybe you don’t.)

In the real world, which is to say for all elections in both parts of Ireland and in Malta, and for the Australian Senate, and for municipal elections in Scotland, in New Zealand, in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and in Portland (Oregon), the single transferable vote is used and a candidate is elected if their vote exceeds the electoral quota, which is set to be a smidgeon above the number of valid votes cast, divided by one more than the number of seats.

If a candidate is elected, then their votes are transferred to other candidates at a smaller value, calculated as the ratio of transferable votes to the surplus over the quota, usually rounded to two or three decimal places. In the 2025 MPC election, with 138 votes in total for three seats, the quota would be just over 34.5 – let’s take it to three decimal places and say 34.501. We can actually get a pretty good sense of how such an election would have worked out, using the votes actually cast this year. (The voter experience of the current system would not have changed; you still rank as many candidates, in order, as you want to.)

I got 67 first preferences, which is 32.499 votes over the quota. 64 of my votes had second preferences (see the first column of my breakdown of the second seat count, above). They would all be given a new value of 64 ÷ 32.499 = 0.507. So the first two counts would have looked like this:

The number of non-transferable votes recorded is an accounting artifact – it represents the value that gets lost in rounding to three decimal places. If we had gone for two decimal places, the quota would have been 34.51 and the value of the transferred votes would have been 0.50, which I don’t think would have changed the projected outcome much.

We can actually go a bit further in our alternate timeline. The data is incomplete, and I am assuming that the one vote that transferred to me went on to transfer to Alan Bond, but we can be fairly sure that after the bottom three candidates had been eliminated (which would have been done one by one in real life), the numbers would have looked something like this:

Again we can’t break them down individually, but from the numbers we have, we can be fairly sure that the votes from candidates D6 and D7 would have transferred something like this:

So, in a big turnaround from the real life situation, candidate D4 secures the second of the three seats, just creeping over the quota by 0.062 of a vote, with the last seat to be decided between C2 and D5 by C3’s transfers. In the real life election for the second seat, C3’s transfers broke in favor of C2 by a ratio of three to one; we don’t know how many of those were C3’s 6 first preferences and how many were the 23 transferred votes from C1, but it’s clear that C2, who was already 8 votes ahead of D5, would have been the greater beneficiary and would have won the final seat.

Obviously this outcome would have suited my personal agenda less, but I think it would have been a more representative result than the one we had in real life. It also would take a shorter time, because most of the votes would only be counted once.

How to get there

If we went to a multi-member transferable vote system, there are a few technical decisions we’d need to make. One of them is that we shouldn’t transfer surpluses, the operation that has the most work attached, unless the total of the surplus could potentially affect the outcome. In the worked example above, D4 has a surplus of only 0.062 of a vote, which is not enough to save C3 from elimination. WSFS already differs from standard practice by eliminating losing candidates one at a time, even if the lowest-placed candidate’s votes couldn’t possibly make up the difference between the second and third lowest, but I don’t think we have to do that for surpluses too. (If we had taken the value at two rather than three decimal places, D4 would not have reached the quota before the final round.)

The other technical point is, which surplus votes do you actually transfer in later rounds? In Ireland the practice is to just transfer the last votes that came in, which in the worked example above would mean only looking at the votes that D4 got from D6 (probably 2 full value votes and 2 worth 0.507; in total, D4 has 30 full-value votes and 9 at a value of 0.507). There are two reasons for this: in theory, the people who voted for D4 at an earlier stage have already got full value for their votes, and it’s the ones whose votes arrived last who create the surplus; and in practice, it makes the count much easier and more efficient. I understand, however, that the Australians do it differently and redistribute all of the votes that a winning candidate has ever received.

I have seen it argued that since the election method for the Mark Protection Committee is set out in the Standing Rules, it requires only a majority vote at a single Business Meeting to change it. I suspect that rather than go for a change immediately, a suitable intermediate step would be to create a working group next year to report in 2027, which could look at other alternatives too (though I think they’ll end up here once they have looked at the alternatives). This isn’t something that you should try and suspend standing orders for, in order to sneak it through at the last moment. (Very few things are.)

Also worth noting: less than 10% of the votes were cast for women, and all the candidates (as far as I know) identify as white. (The other committee had less than 16% of first preferences cast for men, though a man won the fifth seat.) I don’t know what we can do about that, but I do identify it as a problem. Probably for another day, though.

So, the WSFS Business Meeting makes some decisions that I disagree with, and some that are stupid; and there is a mechanism to reverse a decision taken at an earlier session at a later stage called a Motion to Reconsider. This was used last year, for instance, when it turned out that one of the supposedly obscure films that had been granted an eligibility extension by the Business Meeting had actually only missed being on the 2025 ballot by a single vote, so had therefore lost fair and square.

We have another situation this year. The background is that a couple of years ago, the previous terminology of “supporting membership” and “attending membership” for Worldcons was changed to “WSFS membership” and “attending supplement”, to make it clear that you are buying two things, the right to participate in the Hugos and other WSFS business, and the right to attend.

A lot of people grumbled that this made things less clear rather than more, and that things should be put back as they were. A constitutional amendment was passed in Glasgow and ratified at the first of this year’s sessions, as item E.2 of the agenda, to do exactly that:

Replace WSFS Membership with Supporting Membership wherever it appears in the Constitution, and to replace Attending Supplement with Attending Membership, including all similar variations of the words (e.g., WSFS Memberships, WSFS members, attending supplement) to their grammatically correct replacements.

That looks simple enough. I confess that I voted for E.2 on the evening because the proposers put their case better than the opponents.

There has been a bit of a backlash in the circles that care about this sort of thing, arguing that the new change doesn’t make things better. (And the one guy who thinks he has the perfect solution and we should just wiggle the rules to allow it to be implemented.) I was frankly confused and not very excited by these discussions. But then Andrew January pointed out that Section 3.11.1 of the Constitution, which already referred to WSFS members before the first change, will now be affected by E.2. And that will be disastrous, because Section 3.11.1 says:

Final Award voting shall be by balloting in advance of the Worldcon. Postal mail shall always be acceptable. Only WSFS members may vote. Final Award ballots shall include name, signature, address, and membership-number spaces to be filled in by the voter.

Under E.2, that phrase “WSFS members” will become “Supporting Members”, and the third sentence of 3.11.1 will read:

Only Supporting Members may vote.

The Business Meeting has accidentally disenfranchised WSFS members attending WorldCon, whether physically or virtually, of the right to vote in the Hugos!!!!!

This is obviously unacceptable, and it’s equally obviously the effect of the plain words of E.2.

People have been fiddling around with various alternatives, but I think that there is only one option – tomorrow’s session of the Business Meeting must vote to reconsider E.2 and then repeal it.

Unfortunately I can’t attend myself, as I will be on the road at the relevant time tomorrow. But I do hope that others will be able to put this right.

Edited to add: The motion to reconsider was passed 99-29, and the ratification of E.2 was then reversed 31-108.

The second session of the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting starts in 24 hours’ time, at 9 am PST, and will discuss (in Executive Session) the report of the Investigation Committee into the 2023 Hugos, of which I was a member, and various other rules changes and proposed new constitutional amendments. The first session was held on 3 July. You can find File 770‘s write-up here. I think it was a success. You can watch it here.

I spoke three times, at 1:19:50, 1:41:30 and 2:26:35; the vote went my way on the first two items that I spoke on, and the third, which I opposed, was referred to a committee, which is not a bad hit rate. (At least by my standards.)

I felt that it gained a great deal by being online and asynchronous with the convention. The most obvious gain was in numbers – 160 or so participants were present, which is more than normally show up for the in-person business meeting at WorldCon. The crucial vote on whether the meeting itself was in order and quorate under the rules was passed by 102 to 46. That was the highest participation in a vote all evening; the lowest was on C2 where 114 voted (though all other votes had over 120 participants).

By contrast, in Glasgow the two elections held at the 2024 Business Meeting attracted 89 and 88 votes, and the four counted votes ranged from 55 to 88 participants. In Chicago in 2022, the election for the Mark Protection Committee attracted 90 votes, and the serpentine counts ranged from 55 to 91. The highest counted vote in Chengdu in 2023 was 32, and the second highest 21, though my personal impression was that there were a lot more people than that in the room (despite complaints about its location). So the 3 July session had a lot more participants than the two previous Business Meetings combined.

One of the arguments that was made in favour of the online meeting was that it would boost participation from those who are unable to attend the in-person meetings due to other commitments, notably, running the actual convention. I think on pure numbers, the online Business Meeting proved its case on 3 July. I am not so sure if we brought in new speakers; there were indeed some new voices, but there were plenty of old ones (including my own), and in particular I’d like to hear more from the actual Worldcon runners. Perhaps tomorrow’s agenda will be more fruitful in that regard.

(The highest number of counted votes at a Business Meeting that I can quickly find was the vote to introduce E Pluribus Hugo in 2015, in the urgency of the Puppy crisis, where there were 186 in favour and 62 against, a total of 248 and a margin of exactly three to one. I hope we won’t see such dire circumstances again. Of course in many cases, votes at an in-person meeting are decided by a show of hands, and the fact that we take a 30-60 second interval to count votes in the on-line meeting does slow things down; but it also ensures that everyone’s vote is counted.)

The online aspect doesn’t take out all of the tedium – we really did not need to spend 25 minutes debating which bits of C.2 needed to be passed, and the fact that the meeting’s lowest participation vote came at the end of that is probably significant, but the great thing about watching in front of your computer is that you can go and get yourself a drink or a snack while waiting for that bit to be over.

There is much discussion about the way forward. Some object that this year’s meeting is not being held according to the rules, though that argument is surely over now, especially since future Business Meetings will presumably accept the decisions made this year. A nightmare proposal is that there could be a hybrid meeting. I am firmly opposed to that; I think you either have to go one way or the other. Counting votes cast both virtually and in person, and managing debate between online and in-person participants, will be brutal. We’ll see what happens in the remaining three on-line meetings this year, but I’m hopeful that the fully virtual process will successfully prove that it can (and perhaps even should) be done this way in future.

Meanwhile my own personal guide to the agenda remains available for consultation here:

I have compiled all of my posts about this year’s WSFS Business Meeting into a single Google Document (embedded below, direct link here). I hope it will be useful. For the moment I am leaving comments on; we’ll see how that works.

Needless to say, it represents only my own views, and where I am one of the co-sponsors of one of the agenda items, I speak only for myself here.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I have only five (5) items left to write about from this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. One of them is a proposal for a new Hugo category, which I will deal with tomorrow. The other four are fiddly proposals which I’ll deal with here.

F16 (on page 46 of the agenda) simply prevents committees from lapsing on the event that a Business meeting is not quorate. It seems to me a rather unlikely scenario, but I suppose it may as well be covered. Will vote in favour if necessary.

F17 (pages 47-48) changes the deadlines around when a newly seated WorldCon can allow bid voters to convert their voting rights into attending memberships at a discount. This is basically about preventing a 2021 mistake that didn’t in the end actually happen, and the wording proposed, on my reading, would actually prevent a seated WorldCon from allowing voters to convert to memberships at the convention where the voting took place. This seems to me a good example of a change that isn’t really needed, fixing a contingency that has never happened, isn’t well thought out and is not a good use of Business Meeting time.

F18 (pages 48-49) is more complicated playing with deadlines, poorly explained. The proposers complain that if a committee fails to report, the relevant business is delayed for another year; but several of them have circumvented precisely this scenario this year, by proposing resolution F20. I would prefer to see tighter management of the relevant committees, and I don’t see this one as being a good use of Business Meeting time.

F19 (pages 49-50) addresses the question of reopening certain deadlines (for Site Selection bids and for the submission of Business Meeting items) by requiring that year’s WorldCon to announce the deadline dates at the previous year’s WorldCon, mindful of the contingency that the dates of the convention may change (as they did in 2021 and 2023). This would have prevented the Winnipeg bid in 2021. While I can see that this is a potential problem, I am not convinced that this is the solution. Voting against.

Just Best Poem to go… I may assemble all of these into a single document.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

There are several items of business relating to the conduct of Site Selection votes for future Worldcons on this year’s WSFS Business Meeting agenda. I have already dealt with four of them, E5 which would put extra people into the site selection counting process, D7 (page 23) which tidies up the wording of Sub-section 4.4.2, F1 (page 31) which further tidies up Sub-section 4.4.2, and F10 which requires bidding committees to agree on software solutions.

There are another four proposed constitutional amendments on this topic. The first of these is F14 (page 44), and it is co-signed by me and a bunch of other people who have been involved with Site Selection ballot design. Very simply, it abolishes the requirement for site selection voters to provide their postal addresses or other Personally Identifying Information when voting. This extra information gathering is unnecessary, possibly illegal in some jurisdictions, and in others may expose voters’ privacy. Please vote for it.

The next is F15 (pages 45-46), which proposes that only votes cast remotely at least 15 days in advance, or in person at the selecting convention, should be counted for site selection purposes. It would be a huge change to the process of site selection voting. This is ostensibly to prevent a recurrence of the events of the 2021 vote, which however the proposers say that they do not want to relitigate.

I think it’s not unreasonable to remind ourselves of what actually happened in 2021. The Chinese translation of the Site Selection ballot produced by DisCon III was not clearly worded in terms of what information was required for the ‘address’ field, and it was also not clear at the time that the Constitution required voters to actually fill it in for the votes to be valid. There was a flood of last-minute emailed ballots from China, for Chengdu. The Site Selection administrators reported that 1591 of the ballots received from China lacked a street address, but otherwise valid. This number was more than enough to make the difference between the Chengdu bid and its only competitor.

The losing side in the 2021 vote then took an emergency resolution to the Business Meeting (see the minutes of the meeting, pages 31-34) which requested that the Business Meeting rule that votes where the address and other fields were not filled in correctly should not be counted for Chengdu. In my view, this was a very bad abuse of process. The Business Meeting simply does not have jurisdiction over the conduct of Site Selection votes, let alone a vote that is still taking place. Under Subsection 1.6 of the Constitution, that’s clearly a matter reserved for the seated Worldcon. The resolution should have been ruled out of order by the Chair as ultra vires.

In any case, as a matter of equity, if the Chinese version of the form was not clear, that was not the fault of the voters, who should not have been penalised for filling in the ballot form officially supplied by the convention.

However, the last-minute resolution was accepted under the Chair’s discretion; the Chair, having ruled that the resolution was in order, then stepped down from the chair and spoke in favor of it from the floor of the meeting. That seems highly irregular to me. No effort was made to inform the representatives of the Chengdu bid that the Business Meeting was about to try and invalidate most of their votes, on foot of a proposal from their main opposition. That also seems highly irregular to me.

The resolution was passed by 47 votes to 30, but I am glad to say that the WorldCon chair ignored it, rightly ruling that the bid that had got the most votes, ie Chengdu, should be declared the winner. This affair was not a high point of the Business Meeting’s conduct. Weasel words that the vote was purely advisory do not help; if the proposers had not intended it to have any effect, they would hardly have proposed it.

Several of those involved with this affair, including the then Chair of the Business Meeting and the 2021 Site Selection administrator, are proposers of F15. They now tell us that a number of ballots for the winning Chengdu bid “consisted of sequential blocks of ballots with what appeared to be consecutively assigned email addresses, that is, the “username” part of the email address before the “@”, or a subfield thereof, appeared to count up through sequential digits/letters.” It is implied that this information was made public at the time of the 2021 vote, but I have checked the record (minutes of the meeting, pages 63-65) and it was not; this is new information.

It is also implied that these alleged defects applied to all of the controversial votes. This is not the case; I scrutinized them myself as part of the process of integrating the 2022 Hugo nominating electors, and while some of the votes probably did fit this description, many certainly did not. (I did not analyze the data systematically at the time, and no longer have access to it.) The only defect alleged at the time was that the disputed votes lacked a street address.

I know as well as anyone that there have been attempts to cheat on Hugo voting in the past. I can see that the Site Selection process basically allows anyone with enough money to throw at the vote to win. The argument of F15 is that by shifting the deadline back two weeks, administrators will have the chance to toss out clearly fraudulent votes. But personally, I don’t think that someone who is determined to buy themselves a Worldcon is going to be deterred by an earlier deadline.

I think that F15 is fighting the wrong battle (and also, frankly, that the wrong people are proposing it). It would be better to start with an agreed concept of ballot fraud, which we do not have, and take the conversation about necessary steps forward from there. That may well involve adjustments to deadlines and procedures. The whole Site Selection process is anyway based on the needs of an earlier age and probably needs bigger reforms. But essentially this amendment is an effort to keep WorldCons as they have historically been, and to prevent new voices from getting into the system, and that is a recipe for stagnation and death.

In case it was not already clear, I will support any moves to kick this to a committee, and will vote against it if it comes to the plenary.

Finally for now, F20 (pages 50-53) revives a resolution that was kicked to a committee last year, which would restrict Worldcon locations to venues which are positively rated by various internationally published indices of good behaviour. The Committee appointed to examine this issue in 2024 failed to meet or produce a formal report, but its chair has summarized the ideas expressed by members in correspondence on pages 71 and 72 of the agenda. This is a very thoughtful piece of work, and I recommend reading it. In particular, the non-report asks:

Is it true that the Hugo Awards cannot be administered fairly in a country that exceeds an objective threshold of authoritarianism? Could the 2023 Hugo Awards have been properly administered by a different person?

Sites currently undergoing armed conflict still rank as acceptable according to the previously proposed indices. So does the US, which at least some members of the Worldcon community would not deem an acceptable bidding location at this time. Metrics are not real time, and any mechanism is subject to situational change between bid qualification and the time of the vote or convention.

These are good questions and good points. I’m very dubious anyway about hardwiring anything in the WSFS Constitution to external bodies, particularly at a moment when some of the best known human rights organisations are under attack and may not survive (though I really hope that they do). I would also very much regret formally restricting WorldCon to developed and mature democracies, which would be the effect of this change. I’ll be voting against.

Both of these last two resolutions are basically intended to ensure that WorldCon never goes to China again. I am not at all sure that China wants WorldCon again, given the reputational backfire from last time. If you want WorldCon to be restricted to a narrow group of countries, that’s your privilege; but don’t expect me to respect you for having that opinion.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I’m devoting an entire post to F13 (pages 41-43 of the agenda), the question of abolishing the NASFiC, the annual convention held under WSFS auspices when WorldCon is outside North America. I hope it is clear that I am something of a WSFS minimalist, in that I think WSFS should not be regulating more than strictly necessary. I also think it looks very weird that North America alone should get special geographical treatment in the form of an extra validated convention in compensation if WorldCon is elsewhere.

I saw a proposal a few years ago for WSFS to set up approved conventions for each continent, though I don’t think this was ever formally put to a Business Meeting; and another proposal for an Asian Science Fiction Convention under WSFS auspices was approved in Chengdu but then failed ratification in Glasgow. I am all in favour of everywhere having their own regional convention, as Europe has done for years; I just don’t see why WSFS needs to be involved, or what value WSFS accreditation would add.

Having said that, I am glad that this proposal is going forward at a US WorldCon, in Seattle, and would be ratified next year in the US again, in Los Angeles. I think the optics of non-North American WorldCons voting to take away the NASFiC are not good.

Voting in favour.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I should have written about the Software Committee and its recommendations earlier in this sequence of posts about the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda. But better late than never.

The Committee was set up in the wake of the 2023 Hugos fiasco, because some of those most closely involved with it blamed their own software for some of the problems with that year’s Hugos. Commentators who enjoy back-seat software design felt compelled to propose new systems of monitoring which would supposedly prevent the same problems from arising again.

Having myself looked into the events of 2023 at some depth, it’s crystal clear to me that the problem was the people operating the software, rather than the software itself. Also, any reform proposals need to take into account the fact that Hugo software is designed to fit the convention registration software (which is the priority for each convention, and usually rewritten afresh), rather than vice versa.

The Software Committee’s report is admirably brief (page 69). It ignores some of the sillier ideas that were being thrown around last year, and makes two recommendations for constitutional change.

F9 (page 39) mandates that all bespoke software used for the Hugos should be mandated to be open source. I am a bit twitchy about this, mainly because I don’t like the WSFS Constitution including references to external bodies. But I trust the proposers and will probably support it.

F10 (pages 39-40) requires the agreement of bidding committees to the use of site selection software. Frankly, the problems that I have witnessed around site selection have been much more to do with bidding committees throwing their weight around, and it seems to me that this would probably make that situation worse. So I remain to be convinced.

There are some more proposals to do with site selection, which I will get to soon.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I’ve covered all the C. D and E items of the Business Meeting agenda so far, but that still leaves fifteen of the proposed new constitutional amendments to talk about. I’ll take four of them here.

F1 (page 31) is a clarifying amendment that is itself a bit unclear. The word change proposed is to refine the definition of an “active” Worldcon bid, but the explanation provided talks only about “valid bids”, a term that is used nowhere in the constitution. Assuming that “active” is intended, I suppose it makes sense.

F2 (also page 31) makes it clear that Hugo administrators must act within the constitution, citing claims on social media that this is not the case. I did not see any such claims, so I am surprised that the proposers felt we needed to spend time on this, but since it has been proposed, I hope that it can go through quickly.

F3, F4, F5 and F6 are all proposed by me and Tammy Coxen, and everyone should vote for them, but you can read about them here.

F7 (pages 36-37) spells out a proposed charter of rights for WSFS members. I’m not sure that this is needed and would prefer to see it referred to a committee if we discuss it at all.

F8 (page 38) proposes that any work released after 17 December should count as being released in the following year for Hugo eligibility purposes, provided it doesn’t make the immediately following long list. Two cases where this rule could have made a difference are given. One is a film released over the 1937/38 Christmas holiday, which as far as I know is several years before the Hugos were a thing and therefore hardly relevant.

The other case given is one which I remember well from being on that year’s Hugo subcommittee, where unfortunately the writer had vigorously promoted their own work on social media, not realising that it had been released in late December of the wrong year, too early to be eligible. I regret the upset caused to that writer, but I don’t think it is worth changing the rules over that one case.

This proposal is a solution that will be burdensome to implement, for a problem that barely exists. It creates more work for administrators and will lead to more mistakes being made, with inevitable damage to the reputation of the Hugos. Oppose.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Section E of the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda has nine items of Business Passed On, all of them constitutional amendments which were passed in Glasgow and require ratification at the Seattle Worldcon Business Meeting. I have already written about six of them. My views on the other three, in short:

E1 (page 26) has to do with the technicalities of transferring memberships. The proposer in Glasgow explained,

As the Seattle in 2025 people were working conversion of voters to members in their database, we noticed there were “guest of” memberships or people had purchased two WSFS memberships with the intention of giving one to someone else, and there was no reason not to give refunds to these members when there was a mistake, and did so on a case-by-case basis. This amendment simply says that until such time as a vote is taking place—whether it be Hugo Award-related or site selection, that these changes may be made.

This seems sensible and uncontroversial and I hope it can be passed quickly.

E2 (also page 26) reverses the recent change to the terminology of WSFS Membership and Attending Supplement from the old terminology of Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships. It is supported by one of the proposers of the previous change who now thinks it was a mistake. I don’t really understand the arguments, but I too found the old system easier, so I will support this one also.

E6 (page 28) changes the criteria for Best Editor, Long Form from having edited four relevant works in the year of eligibility to having published four relevant works in one’s entire career, including at least one in the year of eligibility. It was approved without debate in Glasgow.

Personally, Best Editor, Long Form is the second category that I would abolish If I Ruled The Hugos (Best Series would be first for the chop) so I feel that the amendment is answering the wrong question. I don’t think Hugo voters are in a position to discern the extent to which a good book has been shaped by a good editor. There does not need to be a Hugo for everything.

It also seems to me that the main justification given, which is that the two Editor categories ought to match each other, doesn’t hold water. Why should they? Editing books and editing short fiction are two completely different activities. When the Long Form category was first proposed, the people proposing it knew perfectly well that they were demanding more of finalists in this category than in the Short Form category.

However I take the point that the current wording restricts the pool of candidates to those who work for the largest publishing houses, so I guess I will accept the change, especially if it can be dealt with as quickly as it was in Glasgow.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

There are twelve resolutions on the agenda for this year’s Business Meeting (of a total of 48 items to be voted on). I’ve already dealt with seven of them, so here goes with the other five.

D1, D2 and D3 (on pages 20 and 21) are all pleas for extended eligibility for films released before 2025 which allegedly had only limited release in 2025. I used to incline to instinctive generosity here, but last year the Business Meeting allowed extended eligibility (and then withdrew it) for a film that had missed being on the final ballot by a single vote. So I am looking more critically at these proposals now.

All three proposed cases are of shows that, according to the proposers, were released to streaming networks only in 2025, having been made earlier. However IMDB does not support the statements made in the resolutions.

For D1, IMDB states that the episodes of the second season of Pantheon were available in the United States as well as Australia from October 2023. In that case I don’t see how it qualifies for an eligibility extension.

For D2, the film The End was reviewed by Variety on 31 August 2024, by The Hollywood Reporter on 1 September 2024, by the New York Times on 5 December 2024 and on Roger Ebert’s site on 6 December 2024. So the case that nobody knew about it before 2025 is not really made out.

For D3, IMDB states that the film Rani, Rani, Rani was released in the USA on 28 May 2024, so I don’t see how it qualifies for an eligibility extension.

More broadly, I think we should consider whether eligibility extensions are still relevant in the age of streaming. It’s really rare for something to get on the ballot as the result of an eligibility extension anyway, and it’s one more bit of hassle for the Hugo administrators to deal with.

I have dealt with the next three resolutions already, which takes us to D7 (on page 23), a minor clarification of the rule about accepting site selection ballots. (The word “amendment” has crept into the text here and in the related F1, but I think is not itself meant to be part of the amendment.) I struggle to see the difference in meaning but I guess I would vote in favour to get to out of the way.

Since I’ve already covered the last four resolutions, I’ll finish for today with D8 (on pages 23 and 24), which is a resolution disapproving of the use of generative AI and encouraging future Worldcons to integrate statements on the ethical use of technology into their codes of conduct. This is of course in the wake of the use of AI by Seattle this year and its disastrous handling both internally and externally, which prompted my own resignation from their committee.

Politically I am completely aligned with the resolution. However I don’t relish the WSFS Business Meeting becoming a debating society for the issues of the day. I prefer it to concentrate on improving the rules, which is what it is there for (along with financial accountability for past Worldcons, and announcing the ballot for future Worldcons). So I am not completely convinced that I will vote for this.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Having vented about the stuff I feel most strongly about on the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting agenda, here are my thoughts on the five proposed changes to Standing Orders.

My first thought is that there are too many. There are a total of 48 issues for voting on this year’s agenda, which I understand is a record, and none of these five changes is of such overwhelming urgency that they needed to be on the agenda this year. I hope that they can all be addressed expeditiously without absorbing too much time or energy. It’s unfortunate that they go first in the agenda, and need to be got out of the way before we get to the interesting stuff.

C1 gives the Business Meeting staff ten days rather than seven to prepare the agenda for publication. This is obviously sensible. If WSFS members continue to generate material at the current rate, even ten days may not be enough. Support.

C2 tightens up the rules on reports from committees, a clear example of something that is basically a good idea but didn’t really need to be raised right now. Support in order to get it out of the way.

C3 amends the rules on the Motion to Reconsider, which currently can only be raised by someone who was in the room and voted on the winning side of the vote whose reconsideration is being proposed. I think the wording of C3 is poor. It says:

5.13. Reconsideration. For the purpose of the motion to Reconsider, all those not present for the original vote are considered to have voted on the prevailing side.

It would be better to say that the Motion to Reconsider cannot be proposed by someone who was on the losing side first time round. Counting those who were not present as having voted in favour, even theoretically and for limited purposes, is a falsification and a rewriting of history. I’ve been a victim of this arcane bit of the rules myself in the past, and would like to see them changed, but I don’t like this solution as currently written.

C4 requires committees to include the proposers of the relevant material. It’s a huge flaw that Roberts does not already require this. Support in order to get it out of the way.

C5, as previously discussed, requires a two-thirds vote to set up an investigation committee, and I am among the proposers. Support.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

The Mark Protection Committee is the most public-facing of the WSFS standing committees. It was also the only body so far to officially censure Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and Raistlin Chen for their involvement with the 2023 Hugos debacle. It has a responsibility to protect the marks of the Hugos, Worldcon, etc. In normal times this should be pleasantly technical and unexciting, but unfortunately times have not been normal of late. You will find its report on pages 56-61 of the 2025 Business Meeting agenda.

I have been a member of the Mark Protection Committee for the last three years, elected by the Business Meeting in Chicago in 2022. The election system is peculiar, but nonetheless I would like to put myself forward again this year, and I hope that people will vote for me.

The MPC has collectively got three resolutions on the Agenda this year, all of them carried over from last year as they are constitutional amendments passed by Glasgow and requiring ratification in Seattle.

The first, E3 (on page 26), requires Worldcon bids to agree to the most recent WSFS Mark Licensing Agreement (which itself is still being drafted). I obviously supported this when it was first proposed by the committee, of which I was a member, and I support it now; it will give clarity about the extent to which a Worldcon can and cannot play around with WSFS intellectual property.

The second, E4 (on page 27), brings the rules about the running of the MPC into alignment with actual practice. It also allows the MPC to remove its own members by a two-thirds vote – to our surprise when the 2023 controversy broke, we discovered that we did not have the power to do more than censure members other than going through the lengthy trial procedure in Roberts’ Rules of Order. I support this one too.

I am less sure about the third, E5 (on pages 27 and 28) on including representatives of the Business Meeting on Hugo and site selection committees, who would then report back to the Business Meeting on the propriety of the conduct of the Hugo and site selection votes. I supported it last year before the Hugo Administration Process Committee was set up, but it now seems to me that that committee is providing a more holistic view and set of solutions. On Site Selection, I am no longer convinced that this problem (if it is a problem) is the one that most urgently needs to be solved.

I do like the first paragraph of E5, which ends the fiction that a Worldcon Committee could theoretically decide to administer the Hugos themselves rather than appoint a subcommittee to do it, and at present my feeling is that I’d like to split E5 and pass the first paragraph but not the rest. However if it cannot be split, I’d vote against it as a whole.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

Two very quick points here.

First, it is a very good thing that the Business Meeting is being held online this year. It is about time that it moved into the twenty-first century rather than pretend to be a nineteenth-century style deliberative assembly. People who know more about the rules than I do have looked at them, and deemed that it can be done this way, and I am glad. Please let’s have a good turnout at the first session of the virtual meeting on 4 July.

Second, the agenda for this year’s meeting includes a 25-page report from the Business Meeting Study Group (pages 83-107 of the agenda) which is clearly a serious piece of work, and which I won’t summarise here. It provides ample justification for passing resolution D4 (on pages 21 and 22 of the agenda) to find better alternatives for Worldcon procedures. I’ll vote in favour.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

A proposal to abolish the Retro Hugos was passed by the 2024 Business Meeting and has landed on this year’s agenda as item E7 (page 29), requiring ratification. It was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month and was narrowly rejected, by 167 votes to 164.

Another proposal is on the agenda for this year’s Business Meeting as item F21 (pages 53-54), in case that E7 fails ratification, to allow Worldcons to present Retro Hugos in a multiple of ten years after a gap in the Hugo sequence. The “missing years” are 1940, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952 and (it is argued, though not convincingly) 1957. So we could polish them all off between 2027 and 2032.

I think that has helped to clarify my own thinking. The absorption of volunteer time and bandwidth, and of money, by the Retro Hugos is not a good use of resources, at a moment when the demands on Worldcon volunteers in general and Hugo administrators in particular are increasing. So if I’m in the room when it happens, I’ll vote in favour of E7, and if that is rejected, against F21 which would leave the cycle at a 25-year pace.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

One of the constitutional amendments passed last year was a proposal to clarify the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories in the Hugo Awards. I believe that I actually wrote most of it, but I no longer agree with it. I have come to realise that I mistakenly accepted the logic proposed by some of the louder voices on the unmissed Hugo Awards Study Committee, arguing that we should define all genre-related activity as either Fan or Pro, and then define the awards accordingly. In fact Pro Art and Fan Art have been historically very different things, and what we should be talking about is how to change the definitions of both to reflect how the production and consumption of art has changed over the years.

This proposal was put to a consultative vote of WSFS members last month, and rejected by 160 votes to 124 – three or four times the numbers that one would historically expect to be in the room for an in-person business meeting.

It is now on the Business Meeting agenda for ratification as item E9 (page 30). It should be rejected. Unfortunately the discussion will be on 25 July, when I will be unable to attend.

There is a new proposal to clarify the art categories on the Business Meeting agenda as item F22. I find it an improvement on the status quo, but I would like to hear the views of the artist community. I don’t like the fact that it proposes renaming the ‘Best Professional Artist’ award to ‘Best Artist in the Field of Professional Illustration’, which is simply too verbose, and I regret that it has missed the opportunity to require Best Fan Artist finalists to supply the same proof of eligibility as Best Professional Artist finalists, which is the one bit of E9 that I still stand behind.

(Presumably the ratification of E9 could be split, to allow the last paragraph through and kill the rest.)

F22 is capable of amendment to improve it in the debate, but that will presumably be on the day that I cannot attend the meeting. It would be no great tragedy if E9 and F22 are rejected and we have another go in another year.

Update: one of the proposers of F22 was subsequently so rude and offensive in an online discussion of the topic that I no longer feel inclined to offer their proposal the benefit of the doubt, and would vote against if I were present (which I probably won’t be).

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

The public-facing report of the WSFS Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards can be found on pages 65-68 of the 2025 Business Meeting Agenda. I was a member of the Committee and therefore I endorse the report and also the way in which it has been handled. I want to flag up a few points arising from it.

The most important point is that hundreds of votes for dozens of nominees, mostly Chinese, were discounted without explanation at an early stage of the 2023 Hugo process. The “Validation Spreadsheet”, one of the documents provided to Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford by Diane Lacey, is clearly the output of a run of the EPH algorithm (which is used to determine the finalists from the nomination votes) using a very different set of votes to those which are the basis of the officially reported statistics.

This is not news. Abigail Nussbaum spotted it almost as soon as the Sanford / Barkley report was published in February 2023 (even though Sanford and Barkley themselves largely missed it), and Chinese blogger Zionius went into the numbers in detail. But most attention in Western discourse centred on the later exclusions which had become public knowledge when the statistics were published in January, because they included some individuals who are well-known names in the West. The 22-29 nominees excluded at an earlier stage have largely been ignored.

It has been suggested that the initial exclusion of many votes was conducted by the 2023 Administrators to counter the effects of a slate. Slates, however, are not against the rules, and in any case my analysis of the works on the alleged slate and the works that were excluded by the disqualification of votes after the original EPH count of the “Validation Spreadsheet” is that there is not a huge amount of overlap between that list and the “first 29”. (I am in disagreement with Zionius on this point.)

Of the six potential finalists in 2023 whose exclusion without explanation became public in January 2024, one appears in fact to have been correctly excluded under the rules – “Color the World” by Mu Ming (Congyun Gu). It’s my personal belief that “Fongong Temple Pagoda” (尽化塔) by Hai Ya was then excluded by mistake; its English language publication date would have made it eligible, but administrators may not have been aware of that. It’s pretty clear that the other four were wrongly excluded from the ballot for other reasons.

There’s a lot more to write about this, but I think I’ll save that analysis for another occasion. Operationally, it means that the resolution passed last year to declare the “January Six” retrospectively as Hugo finalists is fundamentally flawed. One of the six, as it turns out, was correctly excluded from the 2023 ballot, though without adequate explanation. As matters stand, we’re about to declare that “Color the World” was “really” a finalist even though it should not have qualified.

But there are also another 29 nominees whose exclusion from the ballot appears to have been arbitrary and against the rules. They all deserve apologies, and they all deserve the same consideration as the “January Six”. Even if you believe that retrospectively declaring anyone to have been a Hugo finalist is desirable or possible, we just don’t have enough information to know whether all of the “first 29” would have made the ballot absent the irregular disqualification of their votes.

So the Investigation Committee has proposed in resolution D9 (page 24 of the agenda) that the following note should be attached to the official Hugo record maintained by the Formulation of Long Lists Committee: “Approximately 30 nominees were excluded from the final ballot of the 2023 Hugo Awards for reasons other than the nominating procedures prescribed in the WSFS Constitution.” It’s not clear if the number is 34 (a maximum) or 27 (a minimum), but “approximately 30” is enough to demonstrate the severity of the problem.

Speaking for myself: the proposed constitutional change E8 (page 28 of the agenda), passed in Glasgow last year and awaiting ratification in the virtual Seattle meeting this year, to allow the Business Meeting to declare unsuccessful finalists to have the status of finalists retrospectively, is a bad idea, and purports to give the Business Meeting the power to rewrite history. The 2023 Hugo process was bad and hurt many people. We have to accept that mistakes were made and that the damage can’t be undone by passing counterfactual resolutions. The ratification of E8 should be rejected.

Edited to add: I myself spoke at last year’s Business Meeting (see page 35 of the Minutes) in favour of apologising to the “January Six”. In fact, had I (and others) done the research, we would have quickly found that Chinese fans had already established that “Color the World” was correctly excluded, though without the explanation that it was due.

The Investigation Committee also proposes the following resolutions:

• C5 (page 19), that in future such committees should require a two-thirds vote to set up, and I agree with this (obviously since I signed off on it as a member of the Committee). It was a tough process and should not be entered into lightly.
• D10 (page 24), that a new committee should be set up to write a Whistleblower’s Charter, which I agree with and I hope can be merged with D6, which would create an committee to write a code of ethics.
• D11 (page 25), recommending that Worldcon Chairs should not be members of their respective Hugo administration subcommittees, which I thoroughly agree with.
• D12 (also page 25), which will be discussed when we reach the relevant part of the Business Meeting.

I hope that they all pass.

I’m not promising to do one of these posts every day, but it’s not all that long until the Preliminary Business Meeting on 4 July, so there will be more soon.

Edited to add: actually I did do a post on this every day for the next two weeks.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

The 2025 Business Meeting agenda is out, and gosh, it’s even bigger than last year, with 48 rule changes, resolutions and constitutional amendments to consider. I hold up my own hand here; I’m a named co-signatory on five of them, and was a member of committees proposing another eight. It’s too much, and we need to collectively start thinking, “Does this amendment really matter?”

My own four proposed clarifying amendments are now items F3-F6 on the agenda (pages 32-36), with the “Clarifying Best Series” proposal edited a bit to reflect Business Meeting style, but with no change to the content. I think I’ll try and comment on the rest of the business bit by bit, as there are some parts that I care more about than others.

One of the parts that I care about most is the report of the Hugo Administration Process Committee, which you’ll find on pages 72-82; you will deduce that it’s a pretty comprehensive piece of work. I agree with most of it and endorse the conclusions, but I have to start by pointing out some mistakes of fact in the text – small details, but important to me, and obviously I did not explain them clearly enough in my public statements or when I spoke to the committee.

The biggest issue is that the Hugo Subcommittee, which is a formal body which takes decisions and executes tasks on behalf of the Hugo administrator, can be different from the Research Team which checks the eligibility of nominees. The Report confuses the two (pp 73-74). I certainly found it much more convenient to have an arms’ length research team who presented the results of their findings to the Subcommittee, who then make the actual decision. I guess that not every Administrator does it that way, but I did, every year that I was involved. I should add that Locus always do a final pass of the ballot before it is published, which is very welcome.

More subjectively, and less important, I think that the existing rules in the Constitution are actually pretty clear about procedures which the Report describes as ambiguous or having serious gaps in public knowledge. What happened in 2023 was not the result of creative interpretation of the rules; it was systematic and conscious breach of the rules (and also of existing well-established practice, but mainly of the rules) by people who should have known better.

Edited to add: A smaller point – it is suggested in the footnote on page 76 that if the Administrators cannot contact potential finalists to notify them and get their acceptance, they are deemed to have declined. Actually the opposite is the case; I think Subsection 3.10.1 is fairly clear that the nomination stands unless Administrators are informed that it has been declined.

Having said all that, I largely agree with the Report’s conclusions.

Third-party administration or audit of the Hugos: This was a magic bullet invoked by a number of commentators when the 2023 scandal broke at the start of last year. But I have not seen any sensible proposal of how this could be done within the existing financial, time and legal constraints. The Report agrees.

Ethics: The Report acknowledges that the structure of WSFS makes it difficult to hardwire transparency into the process, but nonetheless recommends 1) the creation of a code of ethics (by another committee, natch) and 2) a constitutional obligation on the Hugo administrator to report on eligibility rulings, including disqualifications and categorization changes. These made it into the agenda as items D6 (page 22) and F11 (page 40) respectively, and I certainly endorse them both.

Continuation: The Committee asks for another year to address the following questions (D5, page 22):

1. To work with the 2026 Hugo Administrator to document their processes and best practices formally into one document.
2. To draft changes to the WSFS constitution that better enshrine the Administrator’s duties and relationships.
3. To work on developing a poll of WSFS membership regarding the relationship between the Hugo Awards and Worldcon.

I’m totally in favour of the first two points. On the third, I think that Worldcon is still learning how best to manage membership polls, and a more qualitative approach may be more appropriate in this case, but I’m certainly willing to trust the Committee for another year to think about it.

2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22

This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.

I always approach amendments to the WSFS Constitution with some trepidation. The Business Meeting does not always make things better, and it is not always sensitive to the lived experience of Hugo Administrators or con-running volunteers. But Tammy Coxen and I, as Hugo Administrators for 2017, 2019, 2020, 2024, 2025 (for a time) and 2026, hope to make things easier for our successors by clarifying the rules and bringing them fully into line with current practice, as proposed below. All new business is somewhat burdensome on the Business Meeting agenda, not to mention on the poor volunteers running it, but hopefully these four items should be uncontroversial and can be dealt with speedily.

So, the numbers are out from this year’s WSFS Consultative Votes. 343 Seattle Worldcon members voted in total.

In the vote to amend the constitution so as to eliminate the Retro Hugo Awards:

Yes: 164
No: 167
Total: 331

In the vote to amend the Hugo Award categories for Best Fan and Professional Artist:

Yes: 124
No: 160
Total: 284

This is less than the 1260 who participated last year, but still two or three times more participants than the peak attendance at the average Business Meeting session.

It’s not surprising that the participation was a bit lower this time. Most WSFS Constitutional amendments are not in themselves interesting and are in themselves technical. Films attract more Hugo voters than the art categories or the Retro Hugos, so turnout was inevitably higher for a proposal on the former than for proposals on the latter. These votes are consultative and were always intended as such.

Also, this year’s timing was experimental. Last year we held the vote for ten days immediately before the convention, the point at which interest in WSFS is perhaps most intense. Turnout was gratifyingly high. But we were aware that some proponents of the consultative vote favour a longer, earlier voting period. So we tried that this year, and got a lower turnout. I’m no longer on the team that made the vote happen, but I consider it to have been a successful effort, with lessons learned.

I doubt that I will be personally involved in future exercises, but my advice to organisers would be to go for a 10-day voting period, rather than a whole month, and link it to one of the Business Meeting sessions, probably the first, having the vote conclude a few days before so that the results can be announced there. I would also be very wary of making the constitutional specifications around the timing too rigid.

I think also that a different Worldcon could devote a few more resources to publicising the vote. I counted all of one social media post about it from Seattle, on the day it closed. (I did a post of my own the previous day, as did David Levine.) It was also the last of several items in a newsletter to all members on 23 May, where it was not mentioned in the opening paragraph. I feel that more publicity would have made a difference. I am sadly familiar with some of the reasons why it didn’t happen that way this time.

It comes down to this though. Is it more legitimate for important decisions to be made by the couple of dozen people for whom it is convenient to meet in a room at a given time? Or by several hundred people in an online up or down vote? I am impressed by those who are very confident that they already know the answer. In my view, it’s still a work in progress.

Also: one more point.