DisCon III’s WSFS Division head Nicholas Whyte today announced on Twitter and Facebook that the Hugo Administration team of the 2021 Worldcon has resigned en masse:
Departing WSFS Division Head Nicholas Whyte was also in charge of the 2023 Site Selection voting.
The committee has not yet addressed the staff resignations.
This is the second team of Hugo administrators to quit DisCon III this year. The con’s original WSFS Division Head Jared Dashoff explained here in January why he and the Hugo Administrator resigned. It had to do with efforts to manage policies created by the committee “to deal with a) space constraints at receptions and award ceremonies, b) budget constraints of the receptions and trophies, c) constraints relating to font size on both ballots and in-ceremony visuals, and d) in response to multiple requests to list long lists of contributors to Hugo Finalists over the last few years….”
Dashoff made his comment in response to Colette Fozard’s guest post about why she resigned as DisCon III co-chair in the same timeframe.
The protested restrictions, which DisCon III announced January 11, were repudiated the next day by DisCon III chair Bill Lawhorn (see “DisCon III Abandons Previously Announced Hugo Policy”). Lawhorn said:
…All publications and visuals linked to the Hugo Awards will include all Hugo Finalist creators named to DisCon III with no restrictions to the number of names. This includes, and is not limited to, the Hugo Awards ballot, the visuals used during the Hugo Awards Ceremony, the plaques on the Hugo Awards trophies, the Hugo Awards Ceremony program guide, the DisCon III souvenir guide, and the DisCon III and Hugo Awards websites.
We will address concerns about the size of events such as the Hugo Pre-Reception, the number of Hugo Awards trophies, and any other cost considerations individually with the finalists….
However, it seems that when the time recently arrived to address these concerns, some controversial limitations were still on the table – see the message documented in Pixel Scroll 6/19/21 item #6.
When Nicholas Whyte announced on Facebook last January 17 that he had signed on as DisCon III’s new WSFS Division Head, he commented: .
…The Hugos have had some reputational issues to deal with. Having fought off direct assault by ill-wishers in 2015 and 2016, some pretty significant mistakes were made more recently. Many of those were outside the immediate responsibility of the Hugo Administrators, including most notably the awful botching of last year’s Hugo ceremony and the Hugo Losers Party in 2019, and the hostile response from some in the community to the winners of the award for Best Related Work in both of those years (cases where I very much stand by the eligibility decisions that were made by teams that I was a part of).
I have made mistakes as well, and I hope that I have learned from them. In particular, it’s clear, not least from the problems that arose in the last few days, that the Hugos as a whole need to be less siloed and need to improve communication in both directions with the rest of the Worldcon and with the wider stakeholder community (as my work colleagues would put it). DisCon III had already started putting structures in place that would improve this side of things, and I look forward to working with those and building on them.
What led to today’s round of resignations Whyte doesn’t explicitly say. He simply quotes Lawhorn’s aspirational statement about last January’s policy reversal, and says “It is clear that we have taken the process as far as we can, and that our input is no longer needed by the convention leadership.”
[Thanks to James Davis Nicoll for the story.]
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First of all, while Strange Horizons have the biggest team, the complaints did not come from them, but from a few members of the CoNZealand Fringe team. And Strange Horizon’s big team is spread out around the globe, so that only a fraction of them will be able to attend anyway.
The main problem is that no one knows exactly how many finalists will be at DisCon III, because no one bothered to ask us, even though it’s normally standard operating procedure.Most likely, the hard caps were never necessary, because a lot of people won’t be able to attend due to the date change, financial issues, travel restrictions, pandemic worries, etc…
Acceptance speeches and who gets to hold them have not been discussed at all, though with team finalists, it’s common to have one person designated as the one who gives the speech. I’ve been this person for Galactic Journey for two years in a row. Some teams have more than one person speak.
Anyway, I’ve heard from the finalist grapevine that this issue is close to being resolved.
Thanks for saying that. It had seemed obvious to me, until several people fixated on the number like they were preparing for an extinction-level event.
Rich Lynch: Thanks for the explanation about the 1950 Worldcon. I didn’t know this.
I think the Hugo administrators should set the rules for a two-hour ceremony. In 1988 First Fandom spent an hour and a half handing out prizes. This is one reason why First Fandom is not part of the Hugos.
The contemporary Hugo Awards are full of excellent writers and works. How do they differ from the kind of SF you were interested in?
I’ve always been on the side of the spectrum that thinks the Hugo awards ceremony is a chance to see people being recognized and appreciated — and they’re not in the way, or taking up my time in any unpleasant way when they vocalize that experience in their acceptance remarks. I don’t need the ceremony to set a 100-minute record (like the one Marta Randall proudly emceed), I had three hours to spare for this if that’s what it took. That’s why I came.
The idea that winners have to rush their remarks under threat of a red light (which has been done) because they’re somehow keeping us from doing whatever-the-fuck-else is more important is far from my own thinking. (If something more important needs attending to, be on your way with my blessing, but don’t gripe about people enjoying the moment.)
Seriously. If you just want to know who the winners are, go see a movie and read the results afterwards. But let the ceremony be the ceremony.
@Martin Wooster
The Hugo Administrators have enough to do. They do not control the ceremony and do not want to. That’s why there’s an Events team.
Yeah, I don’t like the rush-rush-rush ceremony type at all, it’s just about the only bit of Worldcon I get to feel like I’m “attending” with a bunch of other people all at once and it being treated as a nuisance if anyone’s allowed to speak for more than a few seconds is just depressing. I get why some finalists want it to go quickly – nerves! time zones! – but really, a few people taking a couple of minutes to say something when they’ve just been handed a shiny rocket and a couple of presenters/guests taking a bit of extra time to be funny/entertaining isn’t going to kill anyone. And I love it. It’s the ceremony – it should feel like one.
I don’t participate in the Hugos for the finalists, and I do think making sure at least some ordinary congoers can attend is actually important, but c’mon, let people have a minute to give their speeches. It’s fine. It’s their moment. Let them have it.
I just gotta say “random fandom, can’t withstand ’em” made my day.
This is unclear. I would defer to the WSFS constitution, which tells what a nominee is:
Except for the awards for artists, fan writer and editors, which are for individuals, Hugo nominees are works, not people. While the constitution has some language about informing the nominees which muddles this, the clause above is literally the first rule of Article 3 (Hugos.)
There is one nominee. It is the work. No matter how many people worked on it. Nothing more is specified, leaving it up to the Hugo committee to decide what to do about plaques and statues and ceremonies. I think there are many options open to them, including letting groups responsible for a work purchase additional statues or engrave extra plaques is that is what they need. The ceremony is not dictated in the constitution but usually attempts to give a roughly fixed amount of time on stage for each award, and the award never goes to more than one nominee.
This accords each nominee equal respect, because each nominee is either a work or an individual. We do get caught up in personalities of course. I thought the best artwork Hugo was a better idea than the best artist Hugo, but I guess fans don’t all feel that way, since they didn’t much care for it (and continued to nominate artists who in some cases had not published any work in the year in question.) But it would be purer to what 3.2.1
Brad Templeton: This is a needless effort to derail the conversation. Hugo ceremonies have always celebrated creators. It’s not “getting caught up in personalities” to focus on people and not just story titles.
I want some cool speeches, random lunacy and unfiltered happiness from the ceremony. I do want some limits on time, but not harsh enough limits to stop the fun parts.
Mike, I don’t at all deny that ceremonies celebrate creators. I simply say that this is up to the committee and event team, and the constitution doesn’t recognize the creators at all. They are not Hugo winners. They are not Hugo nominees. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t celebrate them and give them rockets and speeches and everything else. And we call the individuals nominees and winners to be sure. It means it’s not a WSFS matter, and in fact it’s not even a Concom matter if they have delegated this to the Hugo committee as they usually do (at least the rules part.) Fans can, and will, whine and dislike, but in the end the ceremony is a show, not a democracy. Pretending it is one is sure to cause conflict, an assertion I need not offer much proof of.
(You’re a rare exception, both a Hugo winning fan writer, and the editor of a Hugo winning fanzine.)
That’s an exceptionally terrible and unconstructive way to look at this.
We’ve always called them nominees. If this second wave of resignations has anything to do with how this year’s nominees are being treated, telling them they are not nominees at all feels like a pretty bad way to address their concerns.
I was presuming there were two (or more) sides to this, one of which feels nominees are being badly treated, another which feels that administrators are overwhelmed unfairly. Without taking either side, I suggest looking to how the Hugos are actually defined to resolve it, rather than customary practice. If WSFS wants to encode the customary practice into the constitution, fans may do this over the course of the next 2 worldcons.
I don’t know enough about the players involved (nor do I wish to learn, frankly) to judge who is right or wrong. But I do see people arguing over something that is not what the constitution says it is, and that could be a source of the dispute. That’s the purpose of constitutions, to give an anchor which is (mostly) immutable to resolve disputes. Often in a different way than the disputing parties might imagine. That the creators are not technically nominees is simply a fact. That we have often treated them as though they were is also historically true. People are fighting over the question of who a nominee is, who gets recognition and how to decide it. It is not derailing the question to point out the question of what a nominee is already has a mutually agreed upon answer decided by a democratic process.
Can there be doubling down on derailing, or is that description too Escheresque? Please stop. Nobody needs a constitutional amendment to micromanage the Hugo finalists reception. That’s absurd.
In the end, with vastly incomplete information, all of the Hugo Finalist issues for the last 6 months and now two teams having resigned is a matter of extremely poor communication to and with finalists, with opaque con-internal politics which make trying to figure out what really is going on and why a Fandom equivalent of Kremlinology.
(side note: If you have never seen DEATH OF STALIN, do)
Of the times that the Hugo Ceremonies went on in an interminable fashion, and people were unhappy in the past, my understanding has been that the problem was not usually the nominee acceptance speeches, but the presenters nattering on and on and on and on. Last year’s flustercuck was caused by centering GRRM rather than the nominees, for instance. From over here with very little information, it looks like both DisCon and the commentariat are trying to solve the wrong problem.
I agree with Mike that if I am at the ceremonies, I don’t want them run with precision and without joy. I have the time. But what I, personally, have the time for are things like Chris Garcia’s delightful meltdown, or Jeannette Ng’s stunning and provocative acceptance speech. Those are things you cannot force into existence, but you can create space for them to happen. What DisCon appears to be doing is trying to squeeze that space, make such things less likely, but still preserve the power of the presenters to drone on and on if they so choose.
What really stuns me is that near as I can tell, if they’d just gone in with the assumption that the nominees also value the ceremony and the award, and entered into collaboration with them, this would not have happened. It says something about the convention that they assumed this was an adversarial process.
Okay, I’ll assume you’re a paid stage manage. That’s great.
And has nothing to do with asking a team of volunteers to wrangle a huge group people who may, or may not have a clue about the mechanics of the ceremony.
Or are you volunteering to do this service, for free, at a future Worldcon?
Folks, the situation is about to be resolved (for those who don’t know, I’m a finalist, so I have some info that isn’t public yet), so we should maybe all calm down.
Thanks, Cora! Good to hear.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear, it was meant to be absurd. Obviously one would not want that, it’s sort of the point. We (the fans) should not be getting involved and politicizing how the ceremony lists people on the program or how many statues they make. I have only pointed out that in the constitution, nobody is entitled to a listing or a statue or being called a nominee, except in the categories where there are individual nominees, like Fan Writer. But I guess we disagree on this, so I will leave it there.
Thank you. I hope the resolution is satisfactory to all and will make the Hugo Awards and DisCon stronger in the future.
I’m not sure everyone had calmed down since January, really, but it would be nice if we all got to chill between now and the actual ceremony.
ETA: Thanks Cora for updating us.
Craig Miller: I find it interesting – but not surprising – that people who don’t care about the Hugos “know” that the vast majority of Worldcon members don’t care about the Hugos while the members who do care are equally certain that the greater number of members do find them important.
I presume you’re referring to me, and if so, you are wrong on all counts.
I care about the Hugo Awards a great deal, have been deeply involved with them for years, and they’re an important part of the Worldcon experience for me. And the number of members of Worldcon who care about them, vote, and want to attend the ceremony usually numbers 2,000-3,000 people.
But that’s still a minority of Worldcon attendees. There are thousands of Worldcon members who don’t care about the Hugos and have no interest in attending the ceremony (I know! when I first found this out, I was shocked, too). Some of them are there mainly for the Masquerade and hall costumes, or to meet up and spend time with friends. Some members spend their entire Worldcon in the Filk room or the Gaming room or the Fanzine lounge or the Consuite or the Dealer’s Room or the hotel bar.
There’s no question that the Hugo Awards are an important part of Worldcon for a lot of members, but for even more attendees, they aren’t. And that’s okay. The reason Worldcon is such a multivaried con is because it is specifically intended to cater for fans with a lot of different interests, rather than for a homogenous group of people who are all focused on the same thing.
So … I’ve been reading up on Discon 1 recently for a blog post about the Best Dramatic Presentation.
In other years, I can find con reports describing how the crowd reacted to the announcement of winners (or in the case of 1959 the reaction to “no award”).
But for Discon, nobody seems to have written much about what people thought about the BDP category.
Do you have any recollections you might be able to share?
FYI, for those who haven’t worked on a Worldcon before, the space for the pre-ceremony reception is planned out long before the nominations are finalized. Expecting 87 finalists for one nomination and their +1s would put a lot of stress on concom’s budget in space as well as money. Keep in mind, this is a non-profit production.
Quite frankly, when nominees provide these long lists of names to be included on the final ballot they’re putting an unfair burden on the concom. Clearly not all 87 of these people contributed equal parts of time, energy and money into the creation of the work. I appreciate that the producers want to show their gratitude to everyone involved, but their social media promoters, chauffers and caterers should not be included.
I agree with Cat Eldridge that producing the award ceremony is not a democracy and whoever said it would be showed poor judgment. While I’m sure the finalists’ input is appreciated, it is the event committee who makes the final decision on how to handle the proceedings. The finalists are honored by being ensured participation in the programming (having worked there, I know many interested folks do get turned away) and whatever else is applicable to their skills, such as space in the art show for artists.
I also agree with Mike Glyer in enjoying the experience of being at the Hugo ceremony. There aren’t very many other conventions that offer their members full participation in the process. It’s fun to have something to dress up for, since we do so little of it in fandom. It’s the Hugo Awards ceremony that makes Worldcon a little more special than other conventions.
Adrienne Foster: As Cora Buhlert pointed out, Strange Horizons’ 87 staff are from all over the world, and many would not be traveling to the con. Rather than get into a dither about a worst case that can’t happen, a better place to start is to collect information from the finalists and see how many might really come.
This is something I posted elsewhere.
If the Hugo Admins hadn’t set the limit first, if they had asked first “how many representatives would you like to be able to have attend the party and ceremony?”, that would have set up an expectation that finalists could list as many people as they wanted, and they would all get to go to the party and ceremony as finalists with their +1s. And then when the Hugo team did the calculations and came back with, “okay, this is how many places each of the bigger teams get”, people would be angry and screaming because they had the expectation that everyone would get to participate.
It’s better to set the limit first based on projections, specifying that this is a tentative limit which may be adjusted based on actual responses, then ask for RSVPs and make adjustments when totals are calculated. Which seems to be what the Hugo team was trying to do with their most recent announcement of 4 persons per finalist.
Jo Van: Two things. First, there’s no decision that’s going to be complaint-free, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a decision that more people will respond to reasonably.
Second, a process that focuses on real information doesn’t look like the committee just privately doing some kind of division of finalists into the number of guests they’re willing to host at the reception (or seat in the front rows of the ceremony), because while it includes the committee’s inventory of these things, it doesn’t take advantage of info about the demand for these things — i.e., who expects to attend. And not interacting with finalists to get that info makes the committee look indifferent — and makes more people mad.
Pre-coffee thoughts…if we can’t sort this out, we’re gonna be screwed when nonhumans get involved. I mean, humans are within an order of magnitude of each other in terms of mass and volume. Our shapes are uniform to a material degree. Our atmospheric needs are similar. All of our names are reproducible by (at least some†) other humans. Our close groupings (social, cooperative, emotional, sexual) are generally within two orders of magnitude of each other in numeric terms.
So imagine the seating, stage access, and parties when:
An uplifted dolphin is a nominee.
An AI is both the nominee and the work itself. It was going to be run on a device in the ceremony, but refuses to undergo any kind of virus checking. (“That’s private!”) All available devices have virus check on by default.
A collective entity of a million tiny members is a nominee.
A collective entity of a million large members is a nominee.
One member of a collective entity is a nominee, but the entity’s customs prohibit identifying which one.
Both halves of a symbiote are competing nominees for the same award.
An alien whose life processes depend on gravity of about 10g is a nominee.
One of the nominees is fatally allergic to another of the nominees.
– -o0o- –
† Not just biology, but native language comes in here. My surname is unpronounceable by most people where I live, unless they practice a lot. One of the phonemes is simply not in the local language. Compare that to something that requires the speaker to form their tentacles into a glyph as part of the name, or to release a certain scent.
@evilrooster: They would have no choice but to hire General Services “–We Also Walk Dogs”.
That actually describes AO3 and how they view themselves.
@Cora Stepping ooooooover the land mine there, I was thinking entities the size of cars. But I would point out that the AO3 constituency was happy with the way in which the award ceremony went in that case.
@evilrooster
I’ll admit that I didn’t get the pun on my first read of that comment.
Sure, although I think there’s only one Worldcon I am likely to attend (and only if Winnipeg actually gets it) and with the understanding that I am not a stage manager (although I have stage managed): I do front of house (including house managing, and box office but not concession), and I do tech, including sound but not lights. Or at least I did up until March 13, 2020.
@Andrew: It was a particularly terrible pun.
I should add that I’m better at front of house than tech and that as far as I can tell, the main fuel for my ascent is that I show up on time and am able to toss my phone in a drawer for the full shift. Neither of which you’d think would be uncommon enough to be monetizable but they are. Also, descending stairs are my kryptonite.
:roll_eyes:
@JDN
Ah, some sort of reverse Dalek.
Yeah, people who see me moving on the horizontal or up stairs at speed wonder why I have the cane, and then they see me trying to descend stairs and understand [1]. My boss once marooned me because I stepped off the stage lift to retrieve something from a storage level and he hilariously kept the lift descending down a meter or so. Any fit person could hopped down but my knees will disassemble if I try it. There are a bunch of minor tasks that are trivial for other people but nearly impossible for me. Happily, there are techs with their own different disabilities and I just trade off stepping down tasks for, oh, heavy lifting.
1: This is a particular issue in the balcony, which meets 1970 safety standards, which is to say there are no hand rails in the seating section, and the balcony railing has gaps large enough for a person to pass through. My fear is I will stumble coming down the stairs and miss the railing on my way by.
I too hope the ceremony continues with as little problem as necessary. They ARE important. It provides a level of recognition for a writer. It certainly, as Daniel Willis states, increases sales because of that recognition. Probably no single award has the effect on sales as a Hugo win does. It increases your chances of being invited as GOH for conventions, which besides being fun, helps your visibility. The in person activities, including the receptions, is important to all the nominees. Even if you don’t win, you get the fun of being feted as a finalist. It’s a nice benefit for a job that is usually quite lonely in its execution.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen “Hugo Nominee” or “Hugo Nominated Author” on a cover or ten, and it certainly increases my interest as a potential reader.
It increases my curiosity whether they mean nominee or finalist, which as you know bob are now different things thanks to authors who played on the ambiguity between someone nominated in the sense of getting at least one vote, perhaps one cast by the author themselves, and someone nominated in the sense of making the short list.
“Why do we have this infinity pool stretched along the stage?”
“In case e’E”e!!’ee wins Best Novelette.”
Thanks to the Puppies I now have a shortish list of authors whom I’ve already reached a decision about, but to me that’s more of a minor glitch than an ongoing problem. But I’m so hopelessly behind on everything that the main effect is to move a book from my personal slush pile into the “maybe I should look into this” category. Hearing an author talk at a convention is a much better way to pique my interest.
@Laura
I checked the first 20 names on the Strange Horizons nominee list. Most of them are “first readers” — apparently, beta readers who provide feedback to authors. Some are copy editors.
In years past, when Strange Horizons was nominated, the names submitted were people who held higher-level editorial and publishing roles, as has been traditional for Hugo-nominated publications over the years, plus a catchall “Strange Horizons Staff”. This year, it looks like they decided to name the staff individually.
While zines can’t work without a staff, and the best zines probably have better staff than average, designating anyone who handled a story in the publication process as part of the named Hugo nominees (and potentially winners) seems presumptuous.
Strange Horizons compromised every other time they’ve been nominated including leaving off a co-editor-in-chief once. DisCon said no limit this year and they took them up on it. Good for them.
That’s not at all what first readers do at magazines like Strange Horizons. First readers triage the submission slush pile, exercising a combination of their own editorial judgement and their learned understanding of the magazine’s editorial voice to decide what should be rejected or passed up the editorial chain. It’s an unpaid, thankless, and largely-invisible job. It’s also vital. Without first readers, many SFF magazines couldn’t operate at the scale they do, if at all.
Saying, “How presumptuous of Strange Horizons to list the staff that made the Hugo-finalist-worthy work possible” and equating them with chauffeurs and caterers is one way to view the magazine broadening recognition of what it takes for their magazine to produce the quality work they do, I suppose.
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