Convention Reporter

Sunday’s Business Meeting received the results of the Site Selection voting. The newly-elected Chicon 7 committee, led by Dave McCarty, gave their initial presentation, announcing their guests and answering questions. After that, Patty Wells, chair of next year’s Worldcon, gave a short presentation and answered questions about Renovation. Bids for future years also made short statements: San Antonio in 2013, London in 2014, a newly-announced “exploratory committee” for Seattle in 2015, Kansas City, Missouri in 2016, Japan in 2017 (although the organizers are not firmly committing to a particular year yet), and finally the newly-announced New Zealand in 2020.

No additional substantive business happened at the meeting. The meeting received a report from the Worldcon Website Working Group (referred to the Mark Protection Committee), and the Business Meeting Chairman appointed members to various WSFS committees to serve for this following year. The meeting adjourned sine die (that is, for the final time at this Worldcon) just before 11 AM.

There will be no WSFS Business Meeting on Monday. The WSFS Mark Protection Committee will meet in the room and time scheduled for the Monday Business Meeting. (216, 10 AM) There are so few MPC members present at the convention that it is proving difficult to get a quorum of the 15-member Mark Protection Committee physically present in the same room at the same time, especially as many of the members of the MPC have responsibilities working on parts of the convention.

Medium-resolution video recordings of the Business Meetings will be available at whenever Vimeo finishes processing them. (The preliminary and main meeting recordings are currently showing as available as of this morning.) There are also UStream video recordings (of variable quality) of all three meetings.

The Main WSFS Business Meeting was on Saturday morning at Aussiecon 4. Approximately 50 people attended.

All six proposed constitutional amendment on the agenda received first passage (some in amended form) and will be forwarded to next year’s Worldcon, Renovation, for ratification.

The proposal to decouple the site selection voting fee from the initial attending membership price was replaced with a proposal to increase the amount that newly-seated Worldcons can charge to convert voting memberships to attending membership from the existing 2 times the voting fee to 4 times the voting fee.

The proposal to clarify the status of electronic voting on the Hugo Award and Site Selection was modified to permit e-voting on Site Selection only if the administering Worldcon and all bids on the ballot agree on the procedure.

The proposal to permit electronic distribution of rules was modified to require paper distribution on site, to require that any electronic distribution of publications by “opt-in” (members must positively agree to receive publications electronically), and that such distribution must be “push” (the Worldcon must contact its members, not simply post PRs on its web site without informing the members that they have done so.

The proposal to extend Hugo Award nominating eligibility to the members of the subsequent (as well as current and past) Worldcon passed without any changes.

The technical amendments to clarify certain cross-references regarding run-off voting and to include the Hugo Award logo and rocket designs in the list of service marks passed without any changes.

Kevin Standlee, Ben Yalow, and Tim Illingworth were elected to three-year terms on the WSFS Mark Protection Committee.

Sunday’s Business Meeting (1000 Room 216) will start with the announcement of the 2012 Worldcon Site Selection, followed by Question Time for Renovation and for bids for subsequent years. There will also be a report from the Worldcon Web Site Working Group. No substantive debate is expected at Sunday’s meeting.

Worldcon Chairs Photo

The traditional photo opportunity for past, present, and future Worldcon chairs will be at the conclusion of the Sunday Business Meeting, but no earlier than 1100, in Room 216.

WSFS Mark Protection Committee Meeting

The WSFS Mark Protection Committee, which manages the service marks and other intellectual property of WSFS, will meet on Sunday in Room 216 following the Business Meeting and the Worldcon Chairs Photo Session, but no earlier than 1115. This meeting is open to all WSFS members. The committee will elect officers for the coming year and will consider proposals submitted to it by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee.

This report on the Preliminary Meeting appeared in this Friday afternoon’s Aussiecon 4 newsletter.

The Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting on Friday morning sent the four proposed substantive WSFS Constitutional Amendments on to Saturday’s Main Business Meeting; one of the four proposals was sent to a special committee that will prepare a revised version for consideration on Saturday. The meeting also received nominations for the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. For the first time in several years, there are more nominees than there are open seats on the MPC, and therefore there will be a contested election. Elections will take place at the beginning of the Main Meeting on Saturday.

The four substantive proposals coming up on Saturday are:

• Repeal the initial price cap on Worldcon memberships for site selection voters. This is potentially controversial, but did not generate any discussion at the Preliminary Meeting.
• Explicitly authorize Worldcons to conduct Hugo Award and Site Selection elections electronically: This has some controversy attached to it, and there will probably be a proposal to exclude Site Selection voting from this proposal, thus requiring that Site Selection continue to be conducted exclusively on paper ballots.
• Permit Worldcons to distribute their rules electronically: This was sent to a special committee for refinement, and a revised version will be put before Saturday’s meeting that clarifies whether e-publications are “opt-in” or “opt-out” and softening the requirements for publishing paper copies of the rules in advance of the convention.
• Allow members of the following (as well as the current and previous) Worldcons to nominate for the Hugo Awards: There was a chairman’s ruling on this that clarified that even if you’re a member of all three of these conventions, you only get one ballot.

There will also be two technical amendments clarifying some cross-references in the voting rules and adding the Hugo Award Logo and Trophy Rocket Design to the list of WSFS’s service marks.

The Business Meeting voted unanimously to renew the resolution extending Hugo Award eligibility for works originally published outside the USA and first published in the USA this year.

The Committee on the Semiprozine Hugo submitted a report that has no proposals for changes to the Constitution this year; the committee was continued for another year.

Other WSFS committees reported as listed in the Agenda document available on the Aussiecon 4 web site in the WSFS section; all of these committees were continued for another year. If you want to serve on a WSFS committee, contact Kent Bloom, Chairman of the Business Meeting.

The meeting also received financial reports from past and seated Worldcons.

Saturday morning’s Business Meeting will be at 1000 in Room 216. After the elections to the Mark Protection Committee, the meeting will take up first the technical and then the substantive constitutional amendments in the order they were proposed.

A low-resolution video recording of the PBM is available on Vimeo.

A warm welcome to Rene Sears on our Dragon*Con team. Also welcome back John Scalzi (though please note that he’s Twitter only, he’s still on vacation from Whatever).

The hastag for Dragon*Con appears to be #dragoncon and we have a tracker up for that now.

Wi-fi in the convention center at Melbourne was excellent yesterday so we anticipate no problems bringing you the Australian Awards ceremony tonight. News on the Hugo Awards coverage will follow once we have confirmed the timings.

The good news from Wellington is that we have succeeded in tethering a couple of laptops to iPhones so Errol Cavit and I will be hosting live coverage of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards tonight. Coverage should begin here at around 8:00pm Wellington time. There is apparently a cocktail reception at 7:00pm. We nobly promise to still be sober at 8:00.

If you want to follow the action from one of the UK’s largest comics events, John Reppion and Leah Moore have sent up a CoverItLive event that will draw in reports from many of the attendees. There will be tweeting, blogging and audio coverage from such luminaries as Paul Cornell, Tony Lee, Dave & Barry from Geek Syndicate, and our own Cheryl Morgan.

Thanks to a malfunctioning computer I was unable to blog properly from the final two days of Eastercon. Here’s a belated report on those days.

Sunday was filled mainly with panic as I needed working hardware and good Internet access for the various program items I was reporting live from. I did take time out, however, to attend a panel on European SF. This was the second of two such panels. I wrote about them on the translation awards web site.

I reluctantly skipped Mike Carey’s GoH interview (conducted by Paul Cornell) to mess with computers, during which time I did at least confirm that the netbook would work fine with an external screen. That wasn’t much consolation on the day though. Thankfully the hotel had a good supply of power points and I was able to cover the BSFA Awards live using my laptop. You can replay that coverage here. The award winners are listed here.

Thankfully the award ceremony did not take too long, and I was able to get to the Virtual Conventions panel in good time. I wasn’t able to get the laptop connected in that room, but much to my delight I managed to run the Cover It Live session on my iPhone using the public mobile phone network. You can replay that here, and listen to Jim Mowatt’s audio recording of the panel here. I was particularly pleased to see a number of people attending the panel in Second Life, where they were able to watch the coverage on a virtual “big screen”. Here are a bunch of avatars doing just that:

Many thanks to Bill, Spike and Glenn for helping this to happen.

Thanks are also due to Mitch Benn whose live concert drew most of the Eastercon audience off the hotel Internet for the evening and allowed me to get the laptop up and running in good time for the live webcast of the Hugo Nominees announcement. I even had time to record a short interview for Star Ship Sofa, which you can listen to here.

The announcement event was, I think, a great success. The room was packed by the end of the panel, though it did take a while for people to file in after the concert finished. We had 140 people online during the coverage, including many nominees, and a further 61 people have watched the replay. Although it won’t always make sense to have this announcement at Easter, and the next three are liable to take place in the US in meat space, I’m very much hoping that this becomes a regular feature of the fannish year. Many thanks to Vincent Docherty and his team for making it happen.

Star Ship Sofa did a broadcast with a bunch of guests watching the nominee announcements as they went live. You can listen to that here. I got a real buzz out of listening to them commenting on my coverage.

Monday saw my final panel of the weekend: I got to moderate a panel that included Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod. This was about the use of dialect in literature, and the consequences for the accessibility of books. None of the panel really wanted to talk about accessibility, and we spent a lot of the time talking about writing in Scots. With Iain and Ken on board, that was a lot of fun.

I did also attend a panel that Paul Cornell did on religion in science fiction. That was very interesting, and I was lucky enough to have a god speak to me through the Internet during the panel. Fluff Cthulhu tweeted me from Tokyo (he, Feòrag and Charlie Stross are guests at Hal-con this weekend).

There was a dead dog party, but I flaked and got some sleep instead.

Overall I thought it was an excellent convention. I’m sure a few things did go wrong, but I didn’t notice anything serious. The thing that concerned me most was the venue. In many ways it is ideal for an Eastercon. It is a nice space, and very easy to get to both from the M4 and central London. The Heathrow location is ideal for bringing in members from the continent and from across the Atlantic. However, with almost 1400 people in attendance it was starting to get quite crowded. I understand that the same venue will be used in 2012, when George R.R. Martin is due to attend. That could cause major crowd control issues.

Also the hotel food is pretty bad. I only ate in the restaurant once — for breakfast with Anne Murphy on Tuesday morning — and that was bearable. The “buffet” food laid on for con attendees, however, was awful, and by Monday I took to eating in the next-door McDonalds instead because the food was so much better.

The good news is that there are reasonable restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, you just can’t see them from the front door. There’s also a Starbucks in the nearby Sheraton. So it is possible to eat tolerably well.

Crowding, on the other hand, is hard to fix. The con staff did an excellent job of putting up signs encouraging people to do one way flows, not block passages and so on. No amount of signage, however, can fix narrow corridors, and looking at the hotel web site I think the largest room only holds 700 people. A London Eastercon ought to be able to attract 2,000 attendees, and the Radisson is too small for that.

Here are some Eastercon reports from around the blogosphere:

• Danie Ware thinks that fandom has gone digital
• Christian Sauvé reports en Français
• Jim Mowatt has a recording of the Virtual Conventions panel…
• … and a bunch more audio coverage
• Paul McAuley had a great time
• As did Spinks, for whom it was a first convention
• Aliette de Bodard also enjoyed herself
• Al Reynolds was delighted at how busy it was
• Mark Charan Newton met lots of people
• MD Lachlan did martial arts
• Nukapai has a lot of panel reports
• Billy has an extensive write-up of the whisky tasting
• There are some excellent steampunk costume photos here
• WordPunk Radio has more audio coverage

And that only scratches the surface of a very well-blogged and tweeted convention.

Here are a few WonderCon reports that we spotted around the web:

• ericsearleman of Haikasoru
• Some videos at Con-News.com
• Some costume photos at Cinematical

Norwescon Registration did indeed sell out stopped selling new at-the-door memberships on Saturday night.

Saturday was Masquerade Night, and there were plenty of costumes in evidence, both on stage and in the audience. We got some pictures of those we could — the photographer area was full by the time we got there, and we had to be content with snapping pictures of costumers queued up to get into the photo area — but many other people were taking photos as well. There are thousands of photos in the Norwescon Flickr Group including those we added of Saturday Night in the Hallways and of Friday night’s presentation of Match Game SF (the SF/F-themed re-creation of the game show Match Game/Blankety Blank).