Terry Fong, chair of the former Winnipeg in 2023 Worldcon bid, has announced the committee is now considering a bid for the 2023 NASFiC. The WSFS rules provide for a North American Science Fiction Convention when the Worldcon is held outside North America. Fong’s press release invites comment:
Given the strong show of support with the at-con vote at DisCon III, and the encouragement we have received from a plethora of fans, the Winnipeg in 2023 Worldcon Bid Committee has decided to look into bidding for the first ever Canadian NASFiC in Winnipeg, MB.
Leading this exploratory effort will be Robbie Bourget and Linda Ross-Mansfield.
We welcome all comments on this. Should anyone be so inclined, we have set up an e-mail to receive comments: [email protected]
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Lenora Rose:
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They wouldn’t have backed the proposal if they too didn’t want it. And the proposal wasn’t “let the Business Meeting recommend that the site selection should be able to overrule the con chair with regards to invalidating votes”. It was: “Please recommend Site Selection to invalidate these votes”.
It was a way to try to get the Business Meetings support for invalidating votes and put pressure on the con chair to make it happen. However you may phrase it.
I don’t have much opinion about who will organise NASFiC, I’m not go there anyhow, but I thought the proposal to the BM was an ugly episode that should never have happened.
If the Chinese translation required only province for physical address, and the Chinese translation was approved by whoever approves the ballot form, it’s not clear to me why anyone thought there was a question about the validity of those ballots because they didn’t have a street address. Am I missing something?
No, I don’t think the Winnipeg committee signed that resolution under duress, or for any other reason than they hoped it would pass.
I located a Chinese copy of the site selection voting instructions on the Chengdu site, and ran the relevant paragraph through Google Translate and got this —
The English language ballot version of the same paragraph says —
Although the voting instructions were translated into multiple languages, the Chengdu site points prospective voters to an English ballot form on the DisCon III site. Not quite sure — does that mean Chinese-language voters had to apply what they gleaned from the instructions to an English-language ballot form?
The DisCon III website has been updated to replace the voting documentation with the results of the vote, so it’s not easy to tell anymore what people were dealing with before the deadline.
Here you go – found the URLs via the Wayback Machine (which has also archived the PDFs themselves).
https://discon3.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/81st-Worldcon-Site_Selection_2021_FINAL-ZHCN-Instructions-Only-1.pdf
https://discon3.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/81st-Worldcon-Site_Selection_2021_FINAL-ESUS-Instructions-Only-1.pdf
https://discon3.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/81st-Worldcon-Site_Selection_2021_FINAL-FRCA-Instructions-Only-1.pdf
https://discon3.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/81st-Worldcon-Site_Selection-Final-1.pdf
Danny Sichel: Thanks. I also found those archival links to the multi-language voting instructions yesterday, which is why I said my remaining question is whether all voters, regardless of what language they read the instructions in, had to complete the English-language ballot form.
Only the instructions were translated. The ballot was in English. And all the translations said that only the English language ballot was official.
Linda Deneroff: Thanks for the answer!
Ah, diversity–it’s a wonderful thing.
(This is not aimed at Linda–she is just the messenger. And before someone says that the administering Worldcon was in the US, let me ask if you really want the Site Selection ballot and Hugo ballot for 2023 to be only in Chinese.)
The instructions seem to make a distinction between “Make sure you enter” and “Include”. If both sets of data are required, they should use the same terms.
And what about someone who gives you a post office box rather than a street address? Is that okay, and if so, why is an email address any worse?
My take: It asks for an address. An email address is an address. Deal with it.
Evelyn C. Leeper
I remember looking at Worldcon membership statistics from the pre-Internet days (well, let’s say “from the days when Internet access wasn’t assumed”), and seeing some members listed as APO (for example here https://fanac.org/conpubs/Worldcon/BucConeer/Bucconeer%20PR%201.pdf#view=Fit) – an “Army Post Office” address, which would have no street address associated with it.
IMO, PO boxes are addresses. (I have a box at a mailbox place; I get packages there, because I don’t have to be present and they’ll hold them, along with actual letter-type mail.)
According to the Chinese I spoke with at DisCon III the word can translate variously into ‘address’ or ‘province’. But Linda’s correct, an address is an address. I don’t think an email address should be sufficient but since people use P.O. boxes it shouldn’t require a street address.
I don’t think anyone at this stage disagrees that an email address (or a province) is an address. It was what people knew beforehand, and especially Chinese SF fans, some of whom might have been struggling with translation issues, which was at issue. And it sounds like they were not given a translation which distinguished what kind of address. Which admittedly agrees with the “in hindsight” understanding we have now.
Elsbeth stated:
“According to the Chinese I spoke with at DisCon III the word can translate variously into ‘address’ or ‘province’. But Linda’s correct, an address is an address. I don’t think an email address should be sufficient but since people use P.O. boxes it shouldn’t require a street address.”
Therefore, Elsbeth, you are saying that the 1590+ ballots should have been what? Disallowed except as ‘no preference’? That was the initial thought that the administrator was thinking.. Yet even though the administrator asked for the non- binding resolution, which would support that, his final decision was to count them as they were voted, the vast majority for Chendu, and the same vast majority came from China.. Whether or not the co-chair or others influenced the final decision is still, at this point, moot. It is the lessons learned that should be carried forward and clarified for future site selection administrators.
@ Linda
It’s Elspeth with a ‘p’. Folks sometimes get it wrong.
I was confused by you coming up with that then realized I’d shoved a lot of things in to a brief paragraph. Sorry.
As Evelyn (incorrectly attributed to Linda) said, an address is an address. I don’t agree that an email address is sufficient but that was part of the discussion about address.
In Chinese ‘address’ can be translated as ‘province’ thus the votes from China should have been – and were – allowed.
The observation that because some people use P.O boxes or an APO requiring a street address won’t work.
And not to worry, the lessons learned are being carried forward: the Business Meeting created a subcommittee this year to go over Constitutionally required addresses.
The committee started work just over a week later.
@Evelyn C. Leeper
PO Boxes and street addresses are both mailing addresses. An email address is different. And there is precedent for recognizing them as substantially different — the same Bucconneer con report linked by Andrew (not Werdna) to support recognizing APO mailing addresses requests e-mail addresses in addition to (physical/mailing) addresses in membership applications (pp 14, 16).
I think this paragraph, in relation to registering for a dealer table, is instructive, and makes clear that the desire for (mailing) addresses and e-mail addresses support different goals: