(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I have submitted my site selection ballot for the 2022 Worldcon. It involved two different log-ins to different sites both run by Worldcon NZ, it involved filling out a PDF and typing in my Worldcon 2020 member ID from one site and my voting payment PIN from the other site, and then saving and emailing the PDF to another email address, but I have done it.

It really shouldn't be this complicated. I know people have talked some about amending the rules moving forward to make electronic ballots the primary option, and I support that, but I'm not convinced that the rules as they currently exist in the Worldcon constitution required quite the level of convolution we actually had. An https webform ballot integrated with payment processing seems like it could have met all the requirements in the constitution as long as paper ballots were still accepted as an alternative, for the small handful of stubborn people who would use it.

In any case, my concerns about Saudi Arabia as a host site are sufficient that it was important that I vote against it. I'm not sure we need another Chicago convention so soon, and the year after a DC convention, but Chicago is a fine city and I had a good time at Chicon 7.


Meanwhile, from the Worldcon Mark Protection Committee's official report in the Agenda for the 2020 Worldcon Business Meeting:

The headache caused by the nomination of Archive of Our Own (“AO3”) for Best Related Work only intensified after it won the award. We received many notices of items—e.g., “4.7 million fanfics are now Hugo winners”, "Everyone Who Contributed to Fanfiction Site “Archive of Our Own” Is Now a Hugo Award Winner”, and “The most talked-about win of the night was Best Related Work, which went to Archive of Our Own. Yes, all of it. So, if you’ve written fan-fic and posted it on AO3, you won a Hugo."—none of which is accurate or the intent of the award. At least one person tried to monetize having contributed to AO3 on a book cover. Our attempts to explicate that the award was for the creation of the website has, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears, and much of our year has been taken up with exerting exert legal pressure to have pins using our marks removed from sale on Etsy and Kickstarter. (Etsy at least has been responsive to our takedown requests in the past.)

I'm disappointed by this, I really had the impression that some people had gotten talked to about how their messaging about the AO3 Hugo was counterproductive and wrongheaded, but apparently they just decided that their whining fell on 'deaf ears' and waited to get in one last salvo.

Comments

[primeideal]

The Hugo thing is a bummer, but am I reading that correctly that Worldcon 2021 will be in DC, assuming no pandemic-related disruptions? *chinstroking intensifies*

[seekingferret]

Yes! At the Wardman Park Marriott. I am very excited, it's the closest a Worldcon has been to home since I started going to Worldcons.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Lovely. They bury the fact that it's one monetize situation and front load the headache of their own making. Acknowledging that this isn't an unknown situation, such that they have prior experience talking to Etsy.

Has it become more clear to what extent the members paying for virtual attendance will get to vote during the business meeting?

[seekingferret]

There's no mechanism in the constitution for virtual participation in the Business Meeting, so the decision made was to have a pro forma business meeting with a bare quorum on site in Wellington to do the bare minimum things the constitution requires the business meeting to do, and everything else will get pushed off until the DC Business Meeting.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

With a whole year of that charming passage of wank to ferment.

Or more if we don't get this pandemic out of community spread.

[alexseanchai]

why don't I have an AO3 Hugo icon

(I mean this one is? but also it's not obviously so?)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Pretty sure you can go get one of these, or perhaps one with this text and the party hat. The ones with a rocket I think were premiums.

[jack]

Saudi Arabia? We must be massively overdue for a Middle Eastern World Con, but my first thoughts were indeed about the number of people who can't safely travel to SA. Although now I wonder, if SA is safe for more or fewer people than countries like the US. But somewhere else would probably be better.

It must be hard getting a serious bid in a new country though, just from having fewer connections and experienced fan con runners to draw on.

[seekingferret]

There's never been a Middle East Worldcon, and I agree that I'd like to see more international Worldcons, but I would not feel comfortable as a Jewish person going to a Worldcon in Saudi Arabia, and a lot of LGBT fans have concerns about going to a Worldcon in Saudi Arabia that are greater than mine.

This was the bid committee's answer to the question, which IMO does not do much to alleviate concern:

Q: I have a friend who’s a trans man and is dating a woman. Are they going to have a problem attending your Worldcon?

Jeddah: Nothing happens unless you “go out of your way to make a scene”. Hotels don’t ask about relationships between people staying in the same room.

[rosefox]

That's a wholly unsatisfactory answer that comes down to "It's fine if you pass". Yuck.

[seekingferret]

Exactly.

On the flip side, people of Middle Eastern and Latin-American origin have increasingly had difficulty gaining entry to the US for conventions over the past several years, which is a reality Worldcon needs to confront if it's going to continue having Worldcons in the US.

[ambyr]

I hear there’s about to be openings on the Worldcon Mark Protection Committee. Can we nominate you?

[seekingferret]

Well, there are and there aren't, see Kevin Standlee's note here: http://file770.com/conzealand-business-meeting-scheduled/

[ambyr]

Well, yes, I meant in 2021.

[seekingferret]

Oh. Well, maybe.

[seekingferret]

Other than being pissed at them mishandling this, I don't have all that much interest in the kind of business the MPC does. If there were going to be a real Business Meeting this year, my preferred tactic would have been proposing a resolution of the business meeting instructing the MPC to consider all people who contributed to AO3 in any form in the year 2018 to have a share in the archive's Hugo Victory for purposes of its work in protecting WSFS's trademarks. My feeling is that the odds are good that by next year's Business Meeting, memories of last September will have faded to the point that a resolution like that would come off as needlessly grudgewanky. At least, that's my hope, if they don't pull more shit and stir it up again.