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Jul. 17th, 2020 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI 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:
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.
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.