Introduction by Camestros Felapton: Since the release of the 2023 Hugo Award nomination statistics on January 20, there have been a plethora of questions about the awards and the process followed. One of the earliest insights into the data was made in a series of graphs drawn by Heather Rose Jones on her Alpennia (“A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics”.) The graphs revealed several categories with highly unusual “cliffs” in the number of nominations.
This new report [available here] builds upon that initial analysis and delves further into the unusual features of the 2023 data. By collating data from all of the Hugo nominations from 2017 onward, the report looks at unusual features in the nomination statistics, compares 2023 with previous years in multiple dimensions and looks at additional data such as the recently leaked validation lists.
This report contends that the nomination statistics provided cannot be treated as a reliable presentation of the actual nomination votes by members. The report shows that there are known errors in the listed names of nominees, inconsistencies in the vote totals, inaccuracies in the manner points were calculated in elimination rounds and highly atypical patterns of voting. In particular, there is evidence in the categories of Best Novel and Best Series of a very large number of highly similar votes for the main finalists in these categories, that these votes advantaged English-language works over Chinese-language works and that these votes do not resemble organic voting by members.
The 51-page report can be downloaded from two locations:
Adrian Tchaikovsky has announced on his website that due to the revelation of major problems with 2023 Hugo administration he will no longer acknowledge the Best Series Hugo presented to Children of Time.
A Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards
When the Children of Time books won the 2023 Hugo for best series I was overjoyed. The Hugos have been a major feature of the genre fiction landscape for decades. It should be a signal honour to be shortlisted for one, let alone to win.
Over the last month or so, a cascade of information has been released or uncovered demonstrating that those responsible for administering the award for the 2023 Worldcon (held at Chengdu, China) took a variety of actions that significantly distorted the result.
For details, I’ll direct you to Abigail Nussbaum’s writing here which is up to date as at the time of this statement. However the TLDR is:
Several works receiving large numbers of votes were ruled ineligible for unstated reasons, which from leaked emails appears to be the US-based administrators unilaterally deciding that they might cause political offence.
A number of Chinese-language nominations appear to have been entirely disallowed.
The second, in what seems to be a mass disenfranchisement of Chinese voters, means that the composition of the shortlists, as they were presented to be voted on, was entirely unreliable, with an unknown number of Chinese nominees denied their chance at contending.
Based on this information, I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site.
The Hugo awards have the potential to be a respected pillar of the international fan community. I would be delighted to be considered, honestly and on my own merits, for such an award in the future. I look forward to systemic changes so that future awards can be administered with an eye to clarity, equity and accountability.
Glasgow 2024 has announced changes to its membership rates to take effect from March 1, 2024. These changes include increases in all Attending rates, closure of the Membership Installment plan to new participants, and the release for sale of Day and Weekend tickets.
ATTENDING MEMBERSHIP RATES. The in-person Attending Membership rates from March 1, 2024 will be as follows. All these memberships include the right to attend the convention, WSFS rights to participate in the Hugo Awards and Site Selection, and for those over 15 years old, full access to the Online Convention, both during and after the convention.
Full Adult (26 and over) – £230 (previously £210) First Worldcon Adult – £165 (previously £150) Historically Under-represented Adult – £165 (previously £150) Scottish / Local Adult – £150 (previously £140) Full Young Adult (16-25) – £135 (previously £125) Scottish / Local Young Adult – £95 (previously £90) Teenage (11-15) – £90 (previously £85)
Infant tickets will remain at £5 (excluding child care) and WSFS Only (Supporting) Memberships will remain at £45.
MEMBERSHIP INSTALLMENT PLAN: They will be closing the Membership Installment Plan to new applications as of March 1, 2024. The Installment Plan enables you to pay for an Attending Membership Supplement in a series of convenient monthly installments. Contact them at [email protected] if you wish to sign up for the plan before it closes.
DAY AND WEEKEND TICKETS: Glasgow’s Day and Weekend Tickets will go on sale from March 1 at a significantly discounted price to those that will be charged on the day. These tickets are available in two forms: one for those aged 16 and over including access to our online convention, and one for younger fans covering physical attendance only.
Day and Weekend Tickets do not include WSFS rights; a separate WSFS Only Membership will be required for individuals who wish to participate in the Hugo Awards, Site Selection and Business Meeting.
Our advance Day / Weekend ticket rates will be as follows:
Day
Adult (over 16)
Under 16
Thursday 8 Aug
£50
£20
Friday 9 Aug
£75
£25
Saturday 10 Aug
£75
£25
Sunday 11 Aug
£75
£25
Monday 12 Aug
£45
£15
Weekend 10 and 11 Aug
£140
£45
People planning to attend on two or more days should check these rates against the Full Attending In-Person rates, particularly if they are eligible for a concessionary rate (First Worldcon, Scottish / Local etc) or also plan to buy a WSFS Membership, as the Full Attending Rate may offer a cheaper option.
Update 02/20/2024: Joe Yao of the Chengdu Worldcon committee has provided new information: “The Panda Study Trip has NOTHING to do with Chengdu Business Daily, it is a local travel agency who generated this product. There is NO leader from CBD who posted this information on their social media platforms.”
Zimozi Natsuco reports they received an ad about a commercial study trip from China to the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon, which features these graphics:
(The H Book Club blog has pointed out on X.com that the cityscape in the second panel is of London.)
Natsuco sent an inquiry to Glasgow 2024 chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart asking whether the company organizing the trip has contacted the convention.
Honorable chairman,
Today, I received an advertisement for a commercial study trip. The trip will be organized by Panda Study Trip, a related company of Chengdu Business Daily (CBD). The leader of CBD posted the advertisement in his WeChat Moments.
In this advertisement, the company claims that it will bring children to join the Glasgow Worldcon. Children will work as volunteers during the conference. They will join several panels held by the company and hold personal sci-fi art exhibitions during the Worldcon. They will also join the Hugo Award ceremony. Before the trip to Glasgow, the children will receive professional training in science fiction under the guidance of a Cambridge Ph.D. The cost for the whole summer camp is over 68888CNY, about 7500 pounds, which is much higher than a regular trip from China to Glasgow.
I wonder if the company has set up connections with the Glasgow committee and if there is any fund support. Also, I wonder if it is possible under the law of WSFS to organize this kind of business trip. Also, I’m looking forward to an official announcement from Glasgow.
Glasgow 2024 chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart replied in File 770 comments:
This is not affiliated with us in any way. We have had no correspondence on this matter with anyone from Chengdu. Children are not permitted to volunteer at our convention for multiple reasons including health and safety and child protection. There are no panels of this nature being organised by Glasgow 2024 and there is no other way to host panels at Glasgow 2024 other than through our own programme team.
Natsuco followed up:
Though the advertisement came from WeChat Moments of a leader of Chengdu Business Daily, I believe this plan will be officially announced. And I am willing to share the details in my email, which has been sent to your committee.
Also, maybe this is an experiment to test the reaction from the fandom. But I think as a huge commercial plan, it is difficult to be cancelled. It showed the ignorance and disregard of the WSFS constitution in CBD.
This plan is set up for those parents who do not have enough knowledge of science fiction and Worldcon. It describes Worldcon as a chance to fulfill the children’s experience and education. It takes advantage of poor information and the lack of promotion of Worldcon in China.
Arthur Liu / Heaven Duke offered this comparison point about the price of the trip.
However, there are a few additional comments I’d like to add, which I wouldn’t have expected Rcade or anyone else to know about, but which I feel are pretty relevant. I’ll tackle things in the order they appeared his piece, even if that’s possibly not the best logical structure for a standalone article.
These sponsorships will not be accounted for in the convention’s financial report, Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow revealed during a panel discussion in December at Smofcon, a conference for convention planners. “None of that appears on our financial report because we didn’t get any money out of the deal. The convention never saw that money. What the convention saw was Hugo finalists who would show up and their plane ticket was taken care of and their hotel room was taken care of. It means that our financial report is completely accurate and totally misleading.”
It is perhaps worth noting that a number of contracts covering aspects of the Worldcon do appear on various Chinese internet sites. I don’t have an exhaustive collection of these, and I believe that other people may have more complete records. For example, a contract with item number SCIT-GN-2023080147 is for the post Hugo ceremony party, and had a winning bid of 488,500 yuan, or around $68k USD. Another contract covering communications and the con websites may be of interest to Filers, as it explicitly mentions File 770 as one of a number of sites to monitor and respond to. The value of that contract is listed as 765,000 yuan, or around $107k USD.
Whether these contracts show up on any future financial report remains to be seen. [Click for larger image.]
The Smofcon discussion has drawn attention since Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford revealed last week that Chengdu Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty manipulated the nominations and final vote…
This is a minor and pedantic point, but it’s a bit of a touchy subject for me. As far as I’m aware, I was the first person to raise the Smofcon Chengdu panels on social media on January 28th, which was also run on that day’s Scroll. This was over two weeks before the Barkley/Sanford report was published, which makes no mention whatsoever of Smofcon or indeed Smofs. Of course, that report has massively escalated coverage of all the issues around Chengdu, but the subject of Smofcon in conjunction with that report was raised by other people.
Chengdu sponsors “were not particularly intrusive,” Yalow said, but the con could not change a sponsored panel’s scheduled time or panelists without consulting that sponsor.
I haven’t had time to dig out references to back this up, but I believe there were a high number of changes to scheduling of the non-sponsored, more fannish or literary panels. This caused stress to the people who were on those panels, causing scheduling conflicts with their other activities, etc. That’s probably not attributable to the sponsors, but it does feel like the fan and literary panels were treated as second-class citizens.
I’m going to sidetrack here slightly, but can I remind people of an item I wrote up in the November 11th Pixel Scroll, regarding how the con’s commercial activities impacted the more fannish stuff? This was part of a long write-up of a long Chinese-language article from a mainstream magazine, presented here via machine translation with minor manual edits, and with my emphasis added:
Previous conventions would set up a memorial area, which is a place for middle-aged and elderly science fiction fans to reminisce and reminisce about the past. In 2017, the British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss [who had previously visited Chengdu, and has several works published in China] passed away. There was a small space at the World Science Fiction Convention that year, displaying his works, and photos from his life, as well as some of his treasure possessions, and a black and white TV playing back interviews with him. In 2023, Aldiss’ daughter Wendy had also come to Chengdu. She told our reporters that the Chengdu Worldcon was originally going to hold an exhibition for those photos, but it was not possible “because of a lack of space.” …
[Double Hugo finalist, CEO of the publisher 8 Light Minutes, and member of the Chengdu concom] Yang Feng originally planned to stage a commemorative exhibition at the convention, in honour of Mike Resnick, the former editor-in-chief of the American science fiction magazine “Galaxy’s Edge”. After Resnick’s death in 2020, his collection and books were put up for online auction, and 8 Light Minutes bought a large number of items. “Look, this is full of his things,” said Yang Feng, pointing to a glass cabinet. Initially, the organizers promised an exhibition area of 70 square meters. Worried about missing out, “thousands of yuan [was spent] on freight shipping” the collected items. However, the exhibition area ended up being occupied by several technology companies, and Yang Feng was only given a glass cabinet.
Whilst this was probably not directly related to any of the sponsors, I believe it does show how priorities can change for what is supposed to be a fan-run con when business interests are involved.
There was one part of Chengdu that disallowed sponsors. “One of our ‘do not break this rule ever under any circumstance’ was no sponsorship in respect to the Hugos,” Yalow said.
The moderator Coxen read the question aloud: “One of the objections to Raytheon as a sponsor for DC 3 was not just who they were but the perceived lack of transparency around it. How do you think we could reconcile that with the effective but relatively subtle sponsorship Chengdu had?”
To be clear: no-one on the panel ever mentioned Raytheon in the main discussion about sponsorships, although they did namecheck Google and Boeing. It was only when an audience member at the very end asked a question that the most controversial Worldcon sponsor ever was included in the discussion.
She [Tammi Coxen] responded jocularly. “Nobody knew who the sponsors were, at least from the West, so nobody asked you hard questions about them from the West!”
Yalow dodged the question. “That’s a political question that is in a sense above my pay grade,” he said.
The photos from that Brand Conference show Yalow, McCarty and Montgomery both in the audience and on stage. The China Telecom logo can be seen on a large video wall, in English, so all three of them would surely have seen it. [Click for larger images.]
Observation 1: Per the Diane Lacey emails, June 12th is one week after Dave McCarty said that he would be arriving in China i.e. it seems almost certain that in the same visit that included this brand conference, he was also working on interfering with the Hugo nominations.
Observation 2: Whilst I wouldn’t expect someone to pick up on this in the bustle of a flashy PR event, perhaps they would have been curious enough to have researched who exactly China Telecom were after the fact? That person would have quickly learned from Wikipedia that
“In January 2021, China Telecom was delisted from the NYSE in response to a US executive order.[27] The same year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoked China Telecom’s operating license in the U.S. for national security reasons.[28] However, China Telecom (Americas) Corp plans to keep offering other services on United States soil.[29] In March 2022, the FCC designated China Telecom (Americas) Corp a national security threat.[30]“
As I am not a US citizen, what US agencies might think about China Telecom is fairly academic to me. Perhaps I’m being naive, but following the 2013 revelations from Edward Snowden, I’d be surprised if their relationship with China’s government is much different from US telcos and tech companies and the NSA/CIA/etc. However, given the history with the Raytheon sponsorship, maybe someone on the Chengdu concom might have wondered whether China Telecom might not be seen as a problematic sponsor? NB: As I understand it, China Telecom are one of the big three mobile phone networks in China, so I imagine for a Chinese Worldcon attendee, their sponsorship of the event would be no more controversial than, say, AT&T or T-Mobile sponsoring a Worldcon in the west.
The October 11th Pixel Scroll contained a further update about the sponsors. In it, I linked to a Chinese language WeChat/Weixin post from the con’s account, that listed all the actual sponsors, with brief descriptions of what business sector they operated in, thanks to help from a few different people online who researched them.
If after all that coverage “[n]obody knew who the sponsors were”, then I guess I was wasting my time doing the daily Chengdu write-ups.
One slightly curious thing is that Huawei is not listed as an official sponsor, but their branding did appear on at least one panel, at which (IIRC) one or two of their employees appeared. Additionally, per the Smofcon panel, they paid, or offered to pay, the expenses for at least one guest. Huawei might be considered another controversial sponsor, given the multiple entries in the relevant section of their Wikipedia page. However, despite them being namechecked at least twice, this did not provoke any reaction at Smofcon. (Disclosure: I’ve owned a couple of Huawei Android devices in the past, and both I thought were decent and offered good value-for-money for their price point. And again, they are a mainstream mass-market brand in China and many other countries, so their inclusion would not seem surprising to a Chinese attendee.)
Source: Zero Gravity Newspaper #14
I still intend to write-up the other Chengdu panel from Smofcon, which features three of the employees of Chengdu Business Daily from the Chengdu concom, plus Yalow, McCarty and Montgomery. There are elements of that video that I find much more upsetting than this “What did we learn from Chengdu?” panel. However, properly writing it up will involve a fair bit of re-reading of con reports and other research, in order to properly discuss some of that video’s content. I know that at least one Chinese member of the con has now purchased a Smofcon membership in order to watch that video, and perhaps they will also have comments to make on it.
WSFS’ Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (“HAMC”) members Cheryl Morgan and chair Dave McCarty have resigned. New chair Linda Deneroff says, “We are currently in a holding pattern. I have taken over leading the HAMC, but I still need to contact the other members of the committee to see if they wish to remain on it.”
The Hugo Awards Marketing Committee (“HAMC”) members listed in its report to the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon were Dave McCarty (Chair), Linda Deneroff, Craig Miller, Cheryl Morgan, Mark Olson, Kevin Standlee, and Jo Van Ekeren.
By Rcade: At the 2021 Worldcon in Washington D.C., a sponsorship by Raytheon caused such a furious backlash that convention chair Mary Robinette Kowal apologized and announced that the con was donating an equal amount to an organization devoted to peace.
Two years later millions of dollars were spent on the Chengdu Worldcon by commercial and Chinese government sponsors, funding expenses that included event promotion, airfare and lodging for all Hugo Awards nominees and convention committee members, shuttles between the hotel and convention center, human translators at events and tourist excursions to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
These sponsorships will not be accounted for in the convention’s financial report, Chengdu Worldcon co-chair Ben Yalow revealed during a panel discussion in December at Smofcon, a conference for convention planners. “None of that appears on our financial report because we didn’t get any money out of the deal. The convention never saw that money. What the convention saw was Hugo finalists who would show up and their plane ticket was taken care of and their hotel room was taken care of. It means that our financial report is completely accurate and totally misleading.”
The panel was titled “What Can We Learn from Chengdu?” and included three members of the convention’s committee: Yalow, advisor Helen Montgomery and business meeting chair Donald Eastlake III. The other panelists were Vincent Docherty, an advisor to the upcoming 2024 Glasgow Worldcon, and Marie Vibbert, a 2023 Hugo nominee who made the trip to China. The moderator was Tammy Coxen, chair of the 2014 Detroit NASFiC convention.
In late January, John S of Ersatz Culture called attention to the Smofcon panel as part of his ongoing reporting about problems with Chengdu. The discussion drew further scrutiny after Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford revealed last week that Chengdu Hugo Awards administrator Dave McCarty manipulated the nominations and final vote, excluding some top vote getters after his team investigated nominees for anything political in their work or life that might cause concerns in the host country.
The hour-long Smofcon panel was a discussion of how future Worldcons could potentially emulate Chengdu, where Yalow said “damn near everything” was funded by sponsors.
When the first audience question began with a comment that sponsor dollars bought “splashy” presentations but communications with members before the con would’ve also been nice, Coxen interjected before any panelists could respond. “What I wanted to focus this panel on was not the tearing down but the building up,” she said. “What can we take away, what can we learn.”
There was a lot of enthusiasm on the panel for Worldcons aggressively pitching their event to sponsors, tempered with the reality that opportunities would be far smaller than they were in China.
Yalow offered this advice: “When we went to sponsors and said are you interested in sponsoring it … the way you had to structure that pitch is not what benefits can the convention can get out of it. The way the pitches were always structured is what benefit does the sponsor — or the government in the case of government sponsorship — what benefit does that person or that organization get out of it. A pitch that says ‘Well we can do all of these really cool things’ is a failed pitch.”
Chengdu sponsors “were not particularly intrusive,” Yalow said, but the con could not change a sponsored panel’s scheduled time or panelists without consulting that sponsor. The only disclosure of the commercial arrangement was in the backdrop of the panel, not in any convention publications. “From the person on the other side of the table, the person sitting in the audience, it looked exactly the same,” he said.
There was one part of Chengdu that disallowed sponsors. “One of our ‘do not break this rule ever under any circumstance’ was no sponsorship in respect to the Hugos,” Yalow said.
The WSFS Constitution, which sets the rules of Worldcon, grants members the right to examine a Worldcon’s “financial records and books of account.”
As the panel was nearing its close, the issue of financial transparency was raised for the first time by a questioner in an online chat visible to the panelists and audience but not shown on video.
The moderator Coxen read the question aloud: “One of the objections to Raytheon as a sponsor for DC 3 was not just who they were but the perceived lack of transparency around it. How do you think we could reconcile that with the effective but relatively subtle sponsorship Chengdu had?”
She responded jocularly. “Nobody knew who the sponsors were, at least from the West, so nobody asked you hard questions about them from the West!”
Yalow dodged the question. “That’s a political question that is in a sense above my pay grade,” he said.
Helen Montgomery answered, “As the chairperson of Chicon 8, coming in right after the whole Raytheon thing at DisCon, we were like, OK here’s our sponsorship policy, which we’d been working on — we had to change it after Raytheon. … I can’t quite get my head around the words, I’m sorry. I think it’s a really tricky balance. The people who come to Worldcon want Worldcon to do more and more and more. And we’ve tried really hard to do the more and more and more. But we are at a point where we can’t do more unless we get more money. So do we charge attendees more so we can do more? We’re going to get all kinds of pushback around that. Our other alternative is sponsorship, right? And like I’m saying about the position Seattle is in. Boeing is right frickin’ there but Boeing does military stuff. That balance is just so hard and I don’t have a good answer to that question.”
In her apology for accepting the Raytheon donation, DisCon III chair Kowal offered three action items for future conrunners to avoid making the same mistake: “Developing a sponsorship policy for your organization that reflects the values and concerns of our community. Creating a robust plan for doing due diligence on potential sponsors. Creating a mission and value statement against which to measure actions.”
A final question at the Smofcon panel was about the Hugo nominee Vibbert, who revealed she was offered an honorarium and turned it down because of concerns about the sponsor. An audience member asked if she would share the company’s name.
Glasgow 2024 Worldcon chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart today responded to public concerns about how the Chengdu Worldcon handled eligibility decisions for the 2023 Hugos, and also announced the resignation of Glasgow’s Hugo Administrator Kat Jones, who participated in doing assessments of potential finalists which others on the Chengdu committee used to make those decisions.
Glasgow 2024 Chair’s Statement, 15th February 2024
As Chair of Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, I unreservedly apologise for the damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards.
Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.
I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress.
I, and Glasgow 2024, do not know how any of the eligibility decisions for the Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards held at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention were reached. We know no more than is already in the public domain.
At Glasgow 2024 we are taking the following steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.
The steps we are committing to are:
1. When our final ballot is published by Glasgow 2024, in late March or early April 2024, we will also publish the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot.
Full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
2. The Hugo administration subcommittee will also publish a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
Glasgow 2024 will continue to address this matter as we go forward as a Worldcon.
(signed by) Esther MacCallum-Stewart Chair, Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures.
Diane Lacey shared 2023 Hugo administration team emails with Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford for use in “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion”. And she sent them the following letter, written to “sincerely apologize to my community”. Their report links to a copy, however, Lacey has accepted File 770’s offer to publish the letter as a separate post as well.
January 25th, 2024
Let me start by saying that I am NOT making excuses, there are no adequate excuses. I am thoroughly ashamed of my part in this debacle, and I will likely never forgive myself. But the fans that have supported the Hugos, the nominees, and those that were unfairly and erroneously deemed ineligible in particular, deserve an explanation. Perhaps the only way I can even begin to ease my conscience is to provide one.
I was asked to join the Hugo committee for Chengdu, and I agreed to do so because I care about the Hugos. I’ve been a member of several Hugo committees going back to 2009 and I was the Hugo Administrator in 2012. The Hugos have always been important to me, and I believed, in part because of the depth of Dave McCarty’s experience, and because I thought he felt the same way, that they would be run with integrity.
It happened gradually. We vetted entries, as always, checking length, publication dates, etc. Then things began being removed from the vetting lists. We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated, exactly as many have speculated*. This certainly accounted for some of the disappearances. These were all Chinese language publications so I don’t know who the authors might have been. I was never privy to the actual nomination numbers.
Should I have resigned? Probably, but hindsight, as they say, is 20:20. It was apparent that there were issues beyond the slate. We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so. Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn. I just didn’t imagine that there would be so many issues, and that they’d be ultimately handled so poorly by Dave. (Okay, so maybe I do have a certain level of naivete.) Dave insisted that there needed to be more time elapsed before the Chinese nationals would be safe from the ensuing uproar, and he made it clear from the time the finalist names were released that he intended to wait the entire 90 days. Are they safe now? I hope so, I truly do, but I can’t imagine that ensuing uproar and the international media attention that came along with it has done them any favors.
As far as Dave’s apparent actions in cooking the results, I have to say I didn’t really expect that either. And if I had I, like many others have said, would have imagined he’d do a better job. (Again, my non-zero level of naivete at play.) Had that been the case I might not be writing this, but he didn’t do a better job. The fallout has negatively affected something I care deeply about, the Hugos, and I’m not sure they can recover.
Again, I am not making excuses. I sincerely apologize to my community. I don’t expect you to forgive me when I can’t even forgive myself. I’ve violated your trust, and I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I am so very sorry. Mea Culpa.
Diane Lacey
*Although since then, a better explanation has been given for the “cliff” phenomenon in the data.
By Kat Jones: This has been provided to File 770 in response to a request for information from Jason Sanford about the 2023 Hugo Award process and any point at which I interacted with it.
I have extreme concerns for my personal safety and others involved in this situation, and out of respect for that I would be grateful if comments could be closed on this statement.
I admit I’m confused by your questions – if you have the full emails and full threads, you already have the answers. I’m concerned that the confidential Hugo Award eligibility research work product that was ‘leaked’ to you may be incomplete or modified. And I am really shocked that this extremely extremely confidential material was shared in the first place.
In relation to my involvement with Chengdu, as the previous Hugo administrator from Chicon8, there is a necessary handover aspect from administrator-to-administrator. Then in addition, at the request of the Chengdu team I assisted with eligibility research for some of the English language works/creators in June 2023. I performed some of the 2023 Hugo Awards eligibility research on some of the English-language potential finalists.
In other years that I have been involved, Hugo eligibility research has proceeded as follows:
The top 10-12 nominees per category are listed without order or EPH data for a pool of Researchers to check for potential issues.
These researchers undertake checks against the eligibility requirements in the WSFS constitution under the direction of the Hugo Administrator.
They flag potential eligibility issues, confirm where no eligibility issues are found, research contact information, compile that information and pass that on to the Hugo Administrator.
They are no longer involved in any of the decision processes.
There is no way to know, from the researcher’s perspective, whether a researched work didn’t appear on the final ballot because it was excluded or because it didn’t get enough nominations, until the final stats are released.
The Hugo Administrator and Hugo subcommittee then vet the researched information on the top six nominees after EPH has been run, undertaking further checks based on any elements that have been flagged in line with the instructions they issued.
After their additional vetting and checks, if the Hugo Administrator determines that there are eligibility issues with a work/creator, they generally reach out to the creator to confirm whether there is any additional information that could clear up any potential eligibility issues and allow that work to remain on the final Hugo ballot as the nominators intended.
This continues until there are six valid nominees in each category.
For Chengdu, I conducted the eligibility research as instructed by the 2023 Hugo Award Administrator, and asked for clarifications where instructions were not clear. I did have concerns, and I shared them with the Administrator. Those concerns you should have evidence of if you have access to all communications. I was not involved in the evaluation of the data we flagged – and you’ll note in those emails we all expressed confusion over the vague instructions and had no idea whether anything we were mentioning was an actual problem.
I had serious concerns at this point about this process. I then stepped back and did no further work for the Chengdu Worldcon after the first pass of eligibility research. I only had visibility into that first step as a Hugo researcher. I did not ever and do not have visibility into why the choices that were made, were made.
I would not be willing to participate in any way in the administration of an award under such circumstances again. I don’t think we, as a community, should put our Hugo Award administration teams in this kind of no-win situation.
The safety, wellbeing, and freedom of our community members is a whole different kind of consideration.
Out of extreme fear for my personal safety and the safety of the other individuals in these communications, would you please do us the kindness of redacting our personal email addresses?
