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.

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.

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.

If all goes according to plan, we should be hosting four live events from this year’s Eastercon.

On Saturday there is a panel on SF&F and Social Media. The panelists are planning to run this as a live event and take questions off Twitter as well as from the audience. UStream coverage is also planned. Hopefully we’ll be able to embed that in our coverage.

On Sunday we get the ball rolling with live coverage of the British Science Fiction Association Awards.

Immediately following that our reporter, Cheryl Morgan, has to hot-foot it to the panel on virtual conventions which will also be live online. Cheryl is moderating that one, and will be taking your questions through our live coverage.

And finally, the big event of the weekend: the 2010 Hugo Award Nominees Announcement. Hugo Administrator, Vincent Docherty will announce the nominees in a live panel. The information will go out on the Aussiecon 4 Twitter feed, and Cheryl will host a live online event covering the announcement. We expect a few of the nominees will drop by to celebrate. Make sure you are with us for this one.

The video of the 2009 Main WSFS Business Meeting held Saturday, August 8, at Anticipation is now online. If you have difficulty viewing the video through Vimeo’s online viewer, you can download the video (WMV format) to your machine using the link in the lower right corner of the video’s web page.

Vimeo limits users to uploading 500 MB/week, although once uploaded, the files stay up there and new files do not displace them. I plan to post the Site Selection Business Meeting next week.

The Main Business Meeting dealt with amendments to the WSFS Constitution pending ratification after having received initial passage at the 2008 Business Meeting in Denver. The Main Event was the debate over the removal of the Semiprozine Hugo Award. Also on the agenda: The Graphic Story Hugo Award and the explicit expansion of Hugo Award eligibility to electronic (web-based) publication.

This information is not secret. Feel free to pass it along to anyone else you think might be interested. You can quote this message entirely if you wish.

The video of the 2009 Preliminary WSFS Business Meeting held Friday, August 7, at Anticipation is now online. If you have difficulty viewing the video through Vimeo’s online viewer, you can download the video (WMV format) to your machine using the link in the lower right corner of the video’s web page.

The Preliminary Business Meeting includes reports from WSFS committees, consideration of resolutions such as extensions of eligibility for the Hugo Awards, first consideration of new constitutional amendments (two were proposed; one morphed into a non-binding resolution and the other was killed by Objection to Consideration), and setting initial debate time limits for items to be discussed at the Main Business Meeting.

While the bare summary of what the PBM may sound boring, there were some parliamentary fireworks at Friday’s meeting. Indeed, from a meeting-watcher’s point of view, Friday’s PBM was probably more interesting than the Main Meeting on Saturday.

Due to Vimeo’s upload limitations, the Main Business Meeting will not be posted until next week. The reason the Business Meeting Videos are posted to Vimeo and not YouTube is that YouTube uploads are restricted to a maximum length of 10 minutes. Vimeo’s restriction for non-premium accounts is 500 MB/week.

Who’s where – changes folks posted – other tidbits

@kwnewton my panel on hard SF & cross genre mixtures is today at 3:30 but that’s a change from original schedule. Hope folks can find it. #worldcon09

@ceciliatan Awake at #worldcon. Today going to afternoon tea at the Queen Eliz. hotel, autographing at 6pm, on panel at 10pm, Sex Toys of the Future.

@EllenKushner Today 2-3 pm: Reading part of a new Riverside story #worldcon

@chizinepub Dealers room: 10-6. Signings by Bob Boyczuk, Dan Rabuzzi, Claude Lalumière & Dave Nickle. LAUNCH PARTY@7:30: Delta Hotel Rm 2802 #worldcon

@CherylMorgan Grabbing a quick lunch before my fan writer panel. #worldcon09 (posted just after 1pm Montreal time)

@bovil RT @CherylMorgan: Graphic Story is ratified overwhelmingly. We now have that Hugo until at least 2012. #worldcon09, #wsfs

@Marianne9 RT: @Krasnostein: @CherylMorgan: OK, final vote on ratification. In favor 32, against 73 #worldcon09, #wsfs. Semiprozine is now saved (Yay!)

@CherylMorgan The meeting voted down all of the messing around and ratified Making the Web Eligible overwhelmingly. #worldcon09, #wsfs

@BohemianCoast We now have five issues of Voyageur online;  We now have five issues of Voyageur online; #worldcon09 #anticipationsf