The agenda for this year’s WSFS Business Meeting, to take place next month at Worldcon in Glasgow, has been published. It is probably the longest on record. It has been an immense amount of work for the dedicated Business Meeting team to pull together, especially considering the problems that a couple of proposed resolutions raised with regards to local law.
Often I publish my own commentary on the entire order of business once it is available. I may yet do so this year, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I should emphasise that I’m not really involved with the organisation and administration of the Business Meeting, despite my other roles, apart from lubricating its links with other parts of the convention; inside the room, I am just one more voter.
If I am in the room, I will probably vote against even starting to discuss any new business which is not directly related to sorting out the deficiencies in the system made apparent in Chengdu. I say this with some regret. There are a couple of things that I would have liked to propose myself in a quieter year: changing the ridiculous Mark Protection Committee election system, for instance. Or sorting out the Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist categories, which has long been a bugbear of mine. But this year needs to be a reckoning for what went wrong and for the damage done to the Hugos and to the community.
To be really specific about a couple of things: there are two separate proposals regarding the Retro Hugos, one to abolish them entirely, one shifting them to a ten-yearly timetable. I don’t especially like the Retro Hugos myself, and will advise against and vote against running them in any Worldcon that I may be involved with in future. But whatever else may have been problematic with Chengdu, the Retro Hugos were not part of the problem, and this debate should be deferred to a less busy and fraught year.
The same goes for the proposal to institute a popular vote of WSFS members on constitutional amendments. Again, the cumbersome mode of WSFS constitutional amendment is a problem for WSFS and Worldcons, but was not part of what went wrong at Chengdu, so it can wait. My preferred option would be to kick the ‘popular ratification’ question to a specific subcommittee tasked with putting together a proposal for next year’s Business Meeting in Seattle. I’d be happy to serve on such a subcommittee.
There is a more specific reason to defer discussion of this idea, which is that we at Glasgow 2024 are actually trying it out this year, as a consultative process, in the couple of weeks between the close of Hugo voting (today) and the opening of the convention. Our experiment and the currently proposed amendment differ from each other on a number of points (notably, the time frame of the ballot, but there are other issues too). I am sure that there will be important learnings from this year’s experiment, and I am equally sure that we will not have time to write them up in detail in time for this year’s Business Meeting to consider; and hashing out the details should be bumped to a committee.
I don’t think that every single one of the Chengdu-related resolutions and constitutional amendments is good or needed. (One that I feel is not needed, for instance – the creation of yet more standing committees to oversee the software and the administration.) But I do think that they need to be the focus of the Business Meeting this year. The one that I feel most strongly about is the Standing Orders change proposed by Jesi Lipp, to repeal Rule 7.9 which prohibits virtual participation in the Business Meeting. Rule 7.9 was sneaked through last year in my absence on the first day of the Chengdu Business Meeting, and my attempt to reverse it on the following day failed by 6 votes to 4. (I regret losing my temper during that debate.) The Business Meeting needs to move with the times and open up to all of our membership.
Finally on a totally different point – obviously as well as cleaning up after Chengdu, the Business Meeting still also needs to look at eligibility extensions for films that were not widely distributed in 2023, and in general I am inclined to generosity in these cases; but I don’t think this generosity applies to either The Boy and the Heron or Godzilla Minus One, both of which had theatrical releases in the USA in early December 2023 and should therefore have had a fair chance at the nominations stage. I will vote against eligibility extensions for them, if I am in the room.