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.

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Dear Jason, 

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? 

Yours sincerely,

Kat

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