Business Meeting News

Yesterday’s WSFS Business Meeting was fairly short and mostly unexciting, which is the way the Friday meeting is supposed to be. Today, however, is likely to be more interesting.

The motion to decouple the site selection voting fee and the initial supporting membership cost will probably be controversial because it will raise membership costs for regular attendees and lower them for people who only attend Worldcon infrequently.

The motion to allow electronic voting on site selection also looks like being controversial. Some prospective bidders are a little worried about safeguards, which is entirely reasonable, but I think their concerns can be taken care of. I suspect that some of the other people who are opposed to the idea would really like to make participation in site selection as difficult as possible.

The elections to the Mark Protection Committee are contested this year, which is unusual. This is undoubtedly because Kevin has made his re-election effectively a referendum on the work we have done for the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee. If we lose the vote, that committee may cease to exist as of today (and we’ll be barred from updating the official Hugo Awards web site).

For those of you following along from last year, the committee investigating the rules for the semiprozine Hugo has not come up with any firm recommendations. Somehow or other I got left off the mailing list, but Neil Clarke tells me that he and David Hartwell have participated in the discussions so I’m much less worried than I was yesterday. I suspect that the main problem is that the committee is made of of people with very different objectives, and neither side is willing to budge.