The coffee and baked goods setup adds a highly civilized touch to meeting room 300 CC and there’s plenty for those here since the SRO audience Kevin Standlee worried about has not materialized. At least not today. More later, with actual news content…
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Have fun storming the castle!
Suggested hashtag #WSFSBM
Lots of people here are at their first ever business meeting.
Also lots who have been to at least 10 business meetings.
Recordings of mtgs will be posted as quickly as possible to YouTube channel Worldcon Events
Very few empty chairs in the room.
Just saw some pictures on FB. That’s a very full room.
Kevin says that this is the first time that he can remember since 1984 that we’ve run out of the required number of paper agendas.
Liveblog here:
http://katsudon.net/?p=4238
‘4 and 6’ and EPH will be debated LAST, probably on Sunday, after the Hugo ceremony
I think it’s better for those proposals to be debated after the ceremony, because I expect the awards to reflect the damaging effect of slates.
The first video from today’s business meeting is up:
Morris: I’m sitting here taking notes for a post while you are liveblogging in the comments. Should I shoot you or shake your hand? The latter I have decided….
You can’t do either unless there’s a second.
From the liveblog: “1040: EPH (E Pluribus Hugo) sponsor notes that he has a 1300 plane on Sunday, so EPH needs to be done before he leaves please.”
If EPH is pushed to Sunday’s 10 a.m. business meeting and the sponsor (presumably Kilo) has a 1 p.m. flight, what are the odds it will reach a vote before he has to leave?
Serpentine! Go back and serpentine!
Mike, I’m sure your notes are much more thorough than my brief comments. I’m just posting what I think are interesting high points.
And I expect to be leaving before the end of this session of the meeting.
Hmm. Looks like the debate has been vigorous but not out of control. Encouraging.
I don’t mean to count chickens yet, but it seemed to me unlikely that many among the people who raged the loudest against fandom and its evinced tastes would actually go to all the trouble of attending Sasquan and the WSFS business meetings
@Morris Keeson: I can’t help think what “BM” euphemised when I was a tot. But perhaps you meant exactly that!
Which reminds me that my family resides in a neighborhood called Forest Estates and there is an unofficial neighborhood Forest Estates Community Association. Which at least used to publish a newsletter. My suggestion that the newsletter be titled FECA Matters was rejected out of hand. (Perhaps on the listserv, feca-l, though I no longer recall the details…)
Dammit, forgot to GOD STALK! (Button.)
The Rachel Acks live blog was really interesting (thanks Hampus). I actually got quite tense when EPH was getting some unhelpful motions.
Mark, at work; can’t listen to live blogs. What sort of unhelpful motions? Were they quashed?
Cassy: it’s not a listen to blog; it’s a read the updates blog. Go to the link and it’ll all be there in visual form.
Judging from the live blog, I’m not too optimistic about EPH passing. The “This is complex and involves math” argument (as Barbie would say, or was it Brian Z?) seems to have a sizable number of adherents.
Per the live blog, there was a motion by Ben Yalow to dump the language of EPH in its entirety and send it to a committee instead of voting on it this year. I was pleased to read this update: “Motion to amend by substitution fails by a lot.”
The live blog states that the Hugos administrator for this year claimed that EPH “adds a lot of work to the administrators.” In terms of counting votes, it doesn’t. Software already exists to count nomination votes under the EPH rules. In terms of explaining EPH to the public, it does. But that was true of instant runoff voting and it worked out pretty good.
Cally; my mistake. Thanks. Assumed an audio-blog for some reason.
I think it has always been a tough sell. I’m choosing to remain optimistic that enough people have familiarized themselves with EPH — and are upset about the prospect of slates ruining 2016 and beyond — for it to pass.
That liveblog was fascinating, especially since I don’t know the rules of order, or what “serpentine” means in this context, so I was picturing it as a special Dance-Off Challenge between opposing factions…
I’ve just been reading through some old tweets (I don’t have twitter, so I go every so often to various people’s tweet feeds and look at their backscroll) and came across our own Wombat telling a lovely illustrated story about a Narwhal.
jayn: “Serpentine” means that all people voting one way or the other (they do it twice, once for Yes and once for No) on a subject stand up or otherwise make it clear they are voting, and then count off and sit down, going back and forth from row to row. There are three sections in this meeting hall, so they had to do each section separately. I do like the idea of a dance-off, though.
@Cassy
What rcade said (thanks rcade).
@Microtherian
It was a little disappointing, but the liveblog suggested the EPH attendees dealt with it well.
I do hope there aren’t too many people who think they can depend indefinitely on purely social solutions (i.e. increased membership and increased participation) and not pass EPH as well. Enthusiasm for reading dreck so we can no award it with integrity has got limits.
Wow, I hope EPH passes.
Oh, me too–but I think it has a good chance. It didn’t get postponed indefinitely, so that’s the first hurdle over.
@Mark–in my opinion, it’s perfectly okay to No Award slates without reading them, if you oppose slates on principle.
Yeah, it occurs to me that a fair number of people are going to be nervous about EPH, whether they’ve been listening to deliberate FUD or not, because it is admittedly technically complex. I get the impression the business-meeting-attending WSFS membership tends to be pretty conservative (in the original sense of that word – not “radically reactionary,” just slow to accept change or see the need for it).
I hope advocates for the measure will be able to argue persuasively for it on Sunday, in particular that there should be no significant additional burden to either voters or administrators.
rcade – if I were one of the administrators, I would not want to accept someone’s offered pre-made software which they *promised* me did what the rules required; I would want to hire someone I knew and trusted to write the software and/or write it myself, so that I could be sure that the letter of the rule was being followed. I don’t think I’m unusually distrustful in that regard.
Bah. I was watching the videos, but they seem to have hit a posting snag after the first three. I’ll just have to wait to see the end.
I wouldn’t either. The software I’m talking about is open source.
Relevant to this discussion, the current Hugo vote counting software isn’t open source, if I understand this comment to Kevin Standlee correctly. Commenter Ron Oakes says he’ll speak about a WSFS proposal to recommend open source software for Hugo vote tabulation because “my Hugo software isn’t open source, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Oakes is within his rights to want his own software to be closed source, but if that’s his position I think that it should be replaced with open source software next year. The proposal to recommend that approach (not require it) makes sense to me.
@Robert
Examination of the source code should suffice. EPH would be complex to carry out by hand, but the algorithm itself isn’t so weird that it would be difficult to verify that a given program implements it properly.
Given the right tools, I’d be reasonably confident of my own ability to implement it in code in an afternoon. Testing might take a little longer, since one would want to be thorough, but still. Not a big project.
I see no reason to fear volunteer provided software, so long as the volunteer is willing to make the code available.
There are certainly plenty of people in fandom qualified to audit code, and enough would do so voluntarily to make it viable.
@Cally
Quite right, I was speaking for myself as someone who wanted to read then vote to combat the puppy claim that NA was just a spiteful ploy, but I also support anyone who wants to simply NA on principle.
A Standlee Summary has been posted.
EPH isn’t tricky. I got it to work in Excel without VBA/macros.
Aww, glad you liked it, Cally!
Thank you all for contributing; it’s really helpful. What I know about coding could be inscribed on a fingernail in joined up writing, so I greatly appreciate the time and trouble taken by posters to translate it for me.
People do freak out about maths, but I think that the Hugos and the release of the stats on nomination and voting, prior to further consideration of 4/6 and EPH on Sunday, will be the most important factor in how people vote in the business meeting that day.
Meanwhile I have come down with the flying equivalent of con crud; planes are wonderful systems for acquiring other people’s viruses, so I have a very silly temperature, which I hope will stop being very silly in the very near future.
Doctors can get tetchy about an insect bite and a patient with high fever, including, unfortunately, my daughter; I am chewing antibiotics to strive to prevent it kick starting the bacteria which are in my lungs all of the time, and grateful for all the informed news and views here at File770.
My thanks to all of you!
I just watched a bit of the meeting. I am exceptionally impressed at Kevin Standlee’s ability to herd cats with good humour.
Towards the end of video 3, someone attempts to make a late amendment to a motion that’s just been laboriously thrashed out and finally dispatched to committee for rewording. His amendment is ruled to be far too late, and so his “reward” is to be added to the committee by Standlee. Cue uproarious laughter from the entire room.
More seriously, kudos to those taking the time to attend and deal with the nitty gritty.
@Stevie: Very sorry to hear about the illness. Get well soon!
Hmm, so EPH will likely have a challenging time when it comes to the debate. I hope its given the go-ahead, even if it ends up being decided against next year if something better is found. I don’t think we can reasonably expect social solutions to work anywhere near quickly enough given the numbers required to prevent even a smallish group voting together from dominating the ballot.
@RedWombat
That birdwatching narwhal story is adorable. 🙂
@everyone
I missed you!
ETA: @Stevie
I hope the antibiotics do their job and that you’re feeling better soon, too.
rcade, I believe the Hugo counting software, or one version, is available from Jeff Copeland, who wrote it. (Last I heard, his was in Perl.) The committees can pass it from year to year, so as not to have to re-invent that wheel. The stuff that counts the final ballots is actually harder to follow, but some of it could be used for EPH.
ETA: I believe the Sunday presentation includes the demonstrations of how it works. Trying to claim it’s too complicated before then is jumping the gun just a tad.
I think there’s time set aside tomorrow devoted entirely to explaining how it works. I am hoping that wins over some undecideds.
As a preamble I oppose giving the Hugo ballot data set to anyone. Beyond that I would like an explanation why the EPH drafters believe they could generate a demo beween Saturday night and the start of the Sunday business meeting. Has any work has already been done? I was told it took the committee 19 hours to generate the Hugo winner results with data prepred for use in its software.
The software is already written and has been used with 1984 data and other data sets. Creating a demo with any new data would be a matter of converting that data (if necessary) into a form the EPH software can read. Whether that’s time consuming or easy depends on the form of the data.
I assume the demo uses some of the data sets used in developing and testing the proposal, including the 1984 detailed data.