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