The WSFS Business Meeting Agenda for Lone Star Con 3 is getting busier and busier. You can see the whole thing here. I’m going to focus on a few things briefly.
The motion that used to be called No Cheap Voting is now called No Representation Without Taxation. That might be intended to be a cheap dig at British fans, but aside from that it is a vast improvement.
A rather better formulation of the same idea is Keep Us Together which basically states that a WSFS Membership is a WSFS Membership and you should not create classes of membership that carry with them only some of those rights. It also explicitly acknowledges that Worldcons offer Admission as well and Membership, and that people who buy admission tickets are not WSFS Members (at least in part because they buy them too late to be able to exercise many of the rights of membership), which is a good thing.
There are motions to do with the rules about publications that essentially make electronic publications the norm. There’s some argument over whether protection needs to be provided for those who cannot, or do not wish, to receive electronic publications. This will save money, though it is not guaranteed to reduce the cost of a Supporting Membership because of the link to the Site Selection voting fee. Still, it is a step in the right direction.
There are a couple of motions to introduce new categories of Dramatic Presentation — one for fan works, one for very short works. I have no firm views on this, other than that we need to trial them, and not make them permanent categories from day one.
And finally there is a YA Hugo category motion, which makes me want to weep because it is so badly written. I have some sympathy with the basic idea, but I can’t see many people supporting a motion that says that an author who has written an adult book and a YA book in the same year can only be eligible in one of the categories. There are people (including Kevin) who are very willing to help people draft motions. I do wish more people would take advantage of that.
Is there time to edit? I know the deadline was last Wednesday, so is the agenda set as-is?
I’m fairly sure that amendments can be introduced from the floor of the meeting, but not until Saturday, and I’m fairly sure that a 16-ton Objection to Consideration will get dropped on that one on Friday.
The deadline for submission of new business to this year’s Business Meeting is the end of the day (23:59) tonight, Pacific Daylight Time. (The Secretary lives in Seattle.)
Amendments to proposals can be made from the floor of the Preliminary Business Meeting. Indeed, that’s part of what the PBM is for. However, the substantive proposal at the root of this year’s model of the YA Hugo has ticked off so many regular attendees of the Business Meeting that they may not be in the mood for perfecting amendments. Objection to Consideration is only order right after the motion comes up, and there’s a very good chance that this proposal will get squashed right after it is introduced without debate or discussion of any sort.
People who want a YA Hugo have not IMO adequately addressed the concerns expressed by the majority of the members of last year’s Business Meeting (who did give that proposal a fair hearing before rejecting it). There are numerous difficulties that come up when you start trying to divide a category by non-technical ways. (In this case, by sub-genre rather than length.) Just re-introducing the same proposal (or as in this case, a worse one) says that the advocates for the motion aren’t paying attention or worse, don’t care, and just want to keep hammering away until we get tired and let them have their way. This irritates people who have been trying to give them a fair shot at making a workable proposal.
You might consider introducing a resolution (not a constitutional amendment) to establish a Committee on Young Adult Hugos, with instructions to prepare a report to next year’s Business Meeting on the subject. Be prepared to be asked to Chair this committee and have names of people ready to be members of it. Be prepared to have opponents of the proposal on the committee. And yes, I’m willing to serve on it in order to keep the committee from producing a technically flawed motion.
This opportunity will self-destruct in twelve hours. Good luck.
I imagine that some people will object to Kevin’s characterization of YA as a “genre”, because there are lots of different ways in which “genre” can be defined. The point here is that some of the advocates of a YA Hugo appear to want one because they think it is unfair that people who write YA don’t have a category of their own. That’s not a winning argument, mainly because it will lead to demands for separate Hugos for any identifiable sub-group of fiction.
The arguments for a YA Hugo that stand a chance of success are those which tie the proposal to involving more young people in the Hugos, and in WSFS. I have discussed this before. The only real stumbling block that I can see is how you can effectively police a YA Supporting Membership.
I think Kevin’s suggestion of a Resolution to form a Committee is the best thing to do right now. There needs to be dialog between those who want a YA Hugo, and the Business Meeting regulars. And we need imaginative solutions, not just re-stating the same proposal each year.
(Sorry, specifically that was in reference to the YA category)
The author has revised the text so that it now properly says that the work, not the author, is not eligible in several categories.
I still don’t think this has a chance, but I wouldn’t be totally surprised if sufficiently many people who really want this actually showed up so that the OTC isn’t succesful. This seems to me to be an issue that quite strongly divides many of “the regulars” and many Worldcon attendees who don’t usually appear in the Business Meeting (and have no idea how things are run or how the Hugos actually work). I still don’t think it’s going to pass, but I would expect a lot of newbies in the BM (and I’m afraid the treatment they will get from some of the regulars will cause quite a bit of antipathy, which we’ll get to read about afterwards on the Internet).
Good to hear that it has been changed, though I still fear that this particular issue is one on which neither side wants to budge: the regulars don’t want the category, and the proponents of it don’t want to have to turn up to argue for it.
As to bad behavior, one of the good things about the BM being videoed is that we now know what gets said. It won’t catch everything, but it will be interesting (and occasionally deeply embarrassing).