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):
- To work with the 2026 Hugo Administrator to document their processes and best practices formally into one document.
- To draft changes to the WSFS constitution that better enshrine the Administrator’s duties and relationships.
- 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