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.

Goodness only knows why convention committees have programming at 9:00am, especially if they know that most people will be in the bar until very late. The panel item in question was on Welsh language science fiction, which I will admit is a minority interest, but given that Al Reynolds, Liz Williams and Fran Dowd are all Guests of Honour here, it was a very apposite subject. Most Welsh people who are involved in SF, of course, do not speak the language. Many of us grew up in a time when speaking it was still officially frowned upon. But Welsh science fiction does exist and I get a little annoyed with people saying that it all started with the new Doctor Who.

But I am getting head of myself. I have last night to report upon. First up I attended a panel on podcasting. That went very well, and several of us used the hashtag #easterpod on Twitter to report on the panel and carry on a backchannel conversation. If you search Twitter for that hashtag you should get a good sense of the panel.

The panel on alternate sexualities, where I substituted for Farah Mendlesohn, also went well, though it suffered a bit from the classic BritFan disease of wanting to focus on the negative rather than find anything positive to say. We got a lot of useful contributions from the audience.

The big news of the evening, however, was the announcement of the chosen site for the UK in 2014 Worldcon bid. It will, as widely expected, be London, and the reaction in the blogosphere has been very positive thus far. The bid will be chaired by Steve Cooper and Mike Scott. There web site is here. And the venue will be the Excel Centre, which I have included a map reference to below. The Excel is already home to a 35,000 person annual comics convention, so it has plenty of space. It would be great to fill it. I’m hoping to bag an interview with Mike and/or Steve later in the weekend for podcasting on Star Ship Sofa.

Close

Just minutes ago, the bid to bring the 2014 Worldcon to the UK officially announced that they are London in 2014. An early photo was posted of the official announcement ceremony at Eastercon. More news on this as it develops.

Video of the presentations and Q&A sessions for seated and future Worldcons and SMOFCons held at this year’s SMOFCon are now available for download from YouTube.

Anticipation (2009 Worldcon) report and Pass-Along Funds presentation

Aussiecon 4 (2010 Worldcon)

Renovation (2011 Worldcon)

Reconstruction (2010 NASFiC)

2012 Worldcon Bids (Chicago)

2013 Worldcon Bids (Texas)

2014 Worldcon Bids (UK)

There were no bid presentations for 2015 or 2016 Worldcon Bids

2017 Worldcon Bids (New York, Japan)

2010 SMOFCon Bid Presentation and Site Selection (San Jose)

2011 SMOFCon Bids (Hawaii, Amsterdam)

2012 SMOFCon Bids (Pennsylvania)