Dave McCarty’s Facebook page is where some are trying – without success – to get full explanations for the ineligibility rulings in the 2023 Hugo Nomination Report released on January 20.
McCarty, a Chengdu Worldcon vice-chair and co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division, previously gave File 770 this reason for ruling R. F. Kuang’s Babel, fan writer Paul Weimer, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman tv series, and second-year Astounding Award nominee Xiran Jay Zhao as “not eligible”:
After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.
People have been trying to pry more information out of McCarty in a prodigious exchange on his Facebook page. Initially he referred them to the original reply above. And slapped back at one fellow who persisted in questioning with “Asked and answered.” Then, when that didn’t silence the questioner:
And
Clearly, Joseph Finn isn’t Tom Cruise, and Dave McCarty isn’t Jack Nicholson.
Yet it’s an innate part of human psychology to want to be understood and accepted by other people. The need is so strong that even the formidable McCarty had to make some effort to answer this question.
Neil Gaiman has been quite upset about what is essentially a Catch-22 explanation – the Sandman series was a Rule 3.8.3 casualty, but the individual episode that triggered the rule was also tossed as “not eligible”. Earlier today he had this exchange:
Silvia Moreno-Garcia replied:
When Jon Nepsha tried to lay some guilt on McCarty his friend Tammy Coxen stepped in with a heavy hint that there’s a more noble explanation, it’s just not being said out loud.
But McCarty himself has taken the opposite tack by defending the adequacy of the report.
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Ben is also listed on the Hugo awards administration here.
Here is a serious suggestion: The MPC Chair calls a special meeting– held via Zoom and publicly broadcast– where Dave and Ben are compelled to appear on threat of expulsion, and they are held accountable to answer all questions about what happened to the satisfaction of the MPC, where failure to satisfy the board means removal?
I think the rules are that each member of the MPC serves at the pleasure of the worldcon concom that elected them, and least some of them. It’s not clear for others, there are 3 elected each year at the business meeting. Different ones for Dave and Ben. Complex rules which I am sure Kevin Standlee has studied, though lord knows why anybody would want to. Perhaps the MPC can remove its own (as is sometimes the case) or perhaps ancient worldcon concoms must re-meet to boot them if desired. But yes, Ben was on the hugo subcommittee and as such probably knows that accountability would come for this, and I will presume took his actions expecting that would happen, but I can’t be sure. It does seem likely neither will work on Hugo admin again.
First: I advocated against the Chengdu bid (but I did finally attend, blah blah blah)
No one should be punished for trying to help the Chengdu worldcon per se. The SF fan are genuine. The fan there are just like other SF fan. Do not penalize anyone for that alone.
@Brad Templeton
I think the point all the horrified lawyers are frantically trying to make is that if it’s no one’s job to be a “Supreme Court” arbiter who rules on use of the marks, that’s the same as abandoning them. If the community decides no one is in charge, no one is in charge. And anyone else is welcome to pick it up
There’s helping and there’s rat fucking the Hugo’s. I think that deserves a second look.
testing
I’m not sure if I’m lost in the queue, or what. Briefly, it doesn’t just matter what WSFS/MPC policy is, it matters what the legal status of the Hugos trademark is. Several senior IP lawyers, including Mike Dunford, have said that failing to supervise the licensee’s use of the Hugo name risks its becoming a “naked license” and an invalid copyright. That means that doing nothing about Chengdu and telling everybody you have no power to do anything is taking a grave legal risk.
If you google “Mike Dunford twitch”, you’ll see a two-hour livestream of him explaining the legal issues.
@Mamde Hardy
That was why I include that bit about “just ‘a simple country lawyer’?” the other day.
I enjoyed reading him when he was more easily found. And yes, he does know IP as well as fandom.
@Marshall, WIP by-laws state that special meetings can be held either in person or by conference call, after any five members of the Board of Directors (who are the same persons as comprise MPC’s membership) request one in writing to the Chairman of the Board. Advance notice required is either 28 days via postal mail, or “72 hours’ notice by personal service, fax machine, telephone or electronic mail”.
2/3 supermajority is required to remove anyone.
Reference: https://www.wsfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/WIP-Bylaws_20150823.pdf
Even if it accorded with the by-laws to hold a meeting of the corporation’s Board of Directors over Zoom with public broadcast (and I doubt that, but am not an expert on corporate governance), as someone who’s been on the Board of a couple of non-profit public benefit corporations, I can tell you that no corporate Board of Directors of my experience has been reckless enough to hold public, let alone broadcast, Board meetings. Directors have a functional need for private discussion, where the resulting public record (the minutes) consists of the verbatim wording of motions passed by the assembly and the text of reports accepted by it and entered into the record. Best practices suggests the minutes include nothing else.
Two reasons: 1. It focuses the assembly’s attention on the fact that discussion is not to be confused with action, and that a deliberative assembly literally cannot act without a recorded vote to do or not do something. 2. It avoids legal and related exposure from people’s half-baked comments getting enshrined in the corporate records for all time (a particularly bad idea, given that individual Directors lack have authority to speak for the corporation except if voted power to do so).
As an aside, between meetings, a Board of Directors cannot act at all (because it’s dormant), and therefore, e.g., cannot announce to Party A “You must show up at the upcoming special meeting and satisfactorily answer questions, or will be ejected.” The same point frequently has to get made about the WSFS Business Meeting: Urging that it Must Act Now and not wait for Glasgow (as some, not you, urge) misses the point that a deliberative assembly acting when adjourned is not a thing.
On the other hand, a corporate Chairman of the Board can certainly say to Party A “It’d be a supremely good idea to show up.”
phocion: They may not have the money to actually sue Chengdu, but they should be able to point to the license they gave Chengdu and say “they violated these rules in a way that damages our brand, so this is not a legitimate use of the Hugo Awards trademark”.
There are two problems here.
The first is that I don’t think a cancelling of the 2023 Hugo Awards result and a re-do of the nominating and voting would do anything other than cause more damage. Assuming it is something we can do, I don’t think it is something we should do.
The second problem is this: While the Chinese apparatchiks who took over the main convention, changed the date, moved the location, and turned the Worldcon into a propaganda event for the Chinese government are assholes, they didn’t actually violate their marks license.
The problem is that the Hugo Awards fuckery was done by McCarty and Yalow (who was complicit, as co-Worldcon chair and a member the Hugo Admin committee). The Chinese let them take the lead on the nomination and vote processing. McCarty made decisions based on “advice” he got from Chinese team members, but he made the decisions. McCarty and Yalow chose to be complicit in censoring Hugo Award nominees, and they’re the ones we need to hold responsible.
IANAL, but I don’t think suing them would succeed. I think our best possible recourse is condemnation and peer pressure, to ensure that they never get to serve on a Hugo Admin committee or chair a Worldcon again.
The problem is that both of them have been in fandom a long time, and both of them — even now — are receiving encouragement and support from other long-time fen for whom loyalty to friends is more important than integrity, people who are telling McCarty to lie low for a bit, and then he can come back and do Hugo things again.
(And to those fen I say: yes, we are watching you say these things, and we won’t forget your willingness to let McCarty and Yalow slide on this horrendous thing they have done.)
Are there enough other WSFS members for whom the integrity of the Hugo Awards is important enough that they will vote McCarty and Yalow off the MPC, that they would vote for a resolution to censure those two for the damage they have done to the Hugos, that they will exert enough pressure on future Worldcons to keep McCarty and Yalow out of the process? I would like to hope so.
It is not abandoning the marks to not use trademark rules to deal with this. I think most understand the MPC is there to make sure people don’t use marks like Hugo and Worldcon in the wrong way, not to rule on the fine details of whether a given year’s awards were run properly. You could but you would actually have a hard time succeeding, at great cost and might not get what you want. It’s just not what you have an MPC for. If WSFS wants a “assure seated worldcons follow the constitution” commitee it’s discussed issues that would cover many times but never wanted to bite. As I’ve said, I think WSFS should have a means to deal with problems that doesn’t take 2 years, but playing games with trademark law is not the means.
I do agree one does not want to punish people for trying to help and trying to engage. Perhaps it would be good even to muse idea of a code of how you do this — when you engage, when you should fight, when you should resign. To me, resigning seems like the clear path here, but both these men did not, though I suspect they would have known it was the clear path. They are not telling us why they didn’t take that path, and we can’t pretend to know. They did at least not hide that it happened (though it was hidden for several months.) That took some courage. I don’t understand McCarty’s statement that they were all his decisions and he wasn’t forced, they make no sense, I suspect there is something more. Even if true, you would not say something like that.
I believe the right course is either to painfully re-run the affected categories and after 2 years, declare them to be the actual winners, or failing that, to require an asterisk next to those categories in all references to them involving the mark, including by Chengdu, saying, “Some nominees in this category were disqualified from the ballot for reasons the award administrators refused to disclose. As such it is possible the results do not match the desires of the nominating and voting members for that award.” A purely factual statement, but it shames China and what went on.
@JJ
Here’s where I think almost everyone, including me, is out of their depth. Is that the best possible recourse for the interests of the fandom community, the best possible recourse for the interests of protecting the WSFS/Hugo IP, or the best possible recourse realistic under the current rules regardless of what people would actually like to do?
Because I suspect that the Venn diagram of those three options have far less overlap than most people are imagining. I also suspect meaningfully answering that question involves consultation fees in excess of the WSFS budget to people who do not care about Robert’s Rules of Order or fannish history. At all.
@Brad Templeton
The shockingly qualified lawyers are yelling as loudly as they can that it does not matter what fandom thinks the MPC is or is not for. If this ever ends up in front of a judge in any capacity, a fandom history page about how a bunch of fans decided in nineteen-mumblemumble that properly incorporating or delegating responsibility was somehow rude is going to carry exactly zero weight.
@Ed Green
My point is that we should not punish Chinese SF Fan unilaterally and unnecessarily, nor people who tried to help for the intention to help. How they “helped” and messed up is on them, but the original intention to help should not be a minus.
JJ: I actually agree that cancelling the 2023 awards, or suing the Chendu team, isn’t the best way to deal with this. I was just trying to make the point that this situation seems to have revealed some serious weaknesses in the WSFS’s current strategy for handling their trademarks.
Brad Templeton:
I think what people are arguing is abandonment is the possibility that they can’t use trademark rules to deal with a situation like this. It’s one thing to choose not to go the legal route in this particular instance, but another if they actually don’t have the authority/ability to enforce the trademark because they haven’t been careful about how they license it. It’s also another thing to publicly announce their lack of ability to enforce the trademark in this particular situation, which would seem to suggest they might also be unable to enforce it in other situations. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s the abandonment argument as I understand it.
@phocion: I’m pretty sure there has, here in early days, been no public statement whatsoever from Worldcon Intellectual Property, Inc. / MPC, and, in fact, I’d wager that said corporate Board hasn’t even met recently.
You might think I’m being pedantic, but if anyone can cite caselaw establishing that casual statements by corporate Director X in his/her personal capacity automatically speak for the Board, I would be utterly fascinated to see it.
I know social media tends to assume that X speaks for Y with wild abandon, but whether such is true in this universe, and especially in this universe’s courtrooms, requires more evidence than “someone on the Internet thinks so”.
So, here’s my theory about why McCarty is behaving like he is: there was fuckery at the nomination phase, which he was complicit in, for whatever reason. I can speculate, but I don’t know anything. Despite being complicit (and possibly compelled) he really hated the fact that this was the case. Either he got advice, or decided, that the best way to bring attention to this was to delay the long list to make sure that people were upset and paying attention, and then let the numbers demonstrate that there was, in fact, fuckery. This would have worked if he’d just did what he evidently intended to do, which was give a non-answer to every question. “All relevant rules were followed.” “All relevant rules were followed.” Say that often enough, you sound like a robot or someone who is under some sort of duress. But McCarty is incapable of following the script, and ad libbed. So instead of silently pointing to the problem, a problem that he evidently strongly feels he cannot discuss frankly, he was an asshole to people who questioned his credibility, was defensive (and honestly, it makes sense that he’d feel defensive, since he was involved in something he clearly doesn’t approve of) and his anger and defensiveness bring his credibility into question in a way that robotically repeating a non-answer would not have done.
@Brad Templeton
Every Trademark attorney who has commented on this situation disagrees. If there are no enforced rules to deal with the trademark in this situation, there is no trademark. Under US law, you can not have a Trademark without maintenance of the “goodwill” of that trademark. And “goodwill” is an actual meaningful legal term, that means “maintaining the basic standards and expectations of the mark”.
Abandon the “goodwill” and you abandon the mark.
If the MPC are empowered to protect the mark, they are also empowered to protect the “goodwill”. Or they are not empowered to protect the mark, and the mark doesn’t exist, because no one is protecting the “goodwill”.
Trademark Laws supersede our Fandom Bylaws.
And to turn this about, here’s the thing that Kevin Standlee could say today that would fix all of this: “In order to protect the goodwill of the Hugo trademark, we revoke Chengdu 2023’s use of it, and call on the chair of the Worldcon 2024 to proceed as if Chengdu 2023 had not performed their duties to the WSFS”
And legally speaking, the MPC has the entire authority to do so, because they’re delegated the whole power to protect the trademarks. And again, you can’t divide protection of the “goodwill” from the trademark, without abandoning the trademark.
Lydia Nickerson: Despite being complicit (and possibly compelled) he really hated the fact that this was the case. Either he got advice, or decided, that the best way to bring attention to this was to delay the long list to make sure that people were upset and paying attention, and then let the numbers demonstrate that there was, in fact, fuckery.
PLEASE stop trying to provide cover for McCarty.
He and Ben Yalow avidly promoted the Chengdu bid, and despite many of us professing concerns about censorship, they repeatedly assured us that they would be able to run a clean Hugo Awards program. When we expressed doubts about the veracity of that claim, we were accused of racism.
He accepted free vacations and many gifts from the Chinese government, and repeatedly bragged publicly on Facebook about all of the acclaim and largesse he was receiving from the Chinese.
Do not portray him as a noble victimized martyr here. He very deliberately chose this. He chose to fuck the rest of us WSFS members over by administering the 2023 Hugo Awards in a manner contrary to his mandate of integrity.
He had the ability to walk away from this and say that it was wrong. And he chose not to.
My statement, summarized, said “let’s come up with some general guidelines that do not mention specific countries but indicate features that would cause a country to be disqualified from consideration.”
Trying to maintain a list of countries that can/cannot have a Worldcon will get very messy very quickly and can be gamed.
However, if instead, we say what will disqualify a country from consideration, we only have to put it in the rules in some fashion, and then we don’t have to maintain a country list. It’s the idea of maintaining a country list concerns me, since business meetings could be spent on the country list, and no other work would get done or voted on.
Have we heard anything from Ben Yalow on this? He was originally the reason I had the tiniest spark of hope that Chengdu might not be so bad. Now that spark is thoroughly snuffed. Much as I disagreed with many of his opinions on things, I admired his knowledge of, history with, and passion for the Hugos. To say I’m hugely disappointed in him now is an understatement. While Dave McCarty may have made the specific decisions to allow censorship with the finalists and mysterious skullduggery with the nominations, everyone connected to this “and the rules we must follow” statement is complicit. Dave has said it was something “they” decided on as a non-answer to questions they knew would come. I can’t imagine how that wouldn’t include Ben Yalow co-chair.
I would define “blatant skullduggery with the nomination and/or voting process” as not using the Hugos service mark the right way. And since one of the legal standards of a trademark is, as mentioned, protecting the standard of the goods/services rendered so your trademark (or service mark, to get extremely pedantic) has a recognized and consistent standard attached, that’s bad!
Failing to protect the standard of your service (and loudly declaring there’s no way you can possibly do so) indicates there is no standard of service attached to the mark, which from my understanding is an abandoned mark. It’s also my understanding that protecting the mark does not HAVE TO involve legal suit. When Kevin was firing off C&D letters to Etsy sellers with Hugos pins, I’m pretty sure no lawsuits were brought and yet the mark was being defended (perhaps overzealously). I am maybe a touch salty that AO3 members’ “oh look, we won one one millionth of a Hugo!” was so incredibly damaging to the Hugos brand that it necessitated a swift public statement, but obvious manipulation that calls into question the integrity of the entire award is… not, somehow.
Lawyers and others are sounding the claxon sirens about how very damaging this is because we don’t want the Hugos to undergo a hostile takeover by bad actors or corporate publishing houses, but they’ve left the legal door wide open for someone to do so.
Here’s a hypothetical question you can ask that will demonstrate the depths of f”kery that the WSFS and MPC are in…
“If Harper Voyager put ‘Hugo Award Nominee’ on the paperback print of Babel, what legal action are the MPC required to undertake, and what would the result be?”
We keep talking about the “rules we must follow” statement.
But we don’t ask the (to me) obvious follow up questions
Did you follow the published rules, that have been approved and used to administer the Hugos?
Did you use rules mandated by the Convention?
Did you use rules mandated by the host Government?
Questions like that WERE asked, and McCarty just repeated himself.
What do you mean? Those sort of follow up questions were asked. Repeat of the statement and insults were given. Equal disdain toward questioning the accuracy of the stats.
Marshall Ryan Maresca on January 24, 2024 at 3:27 pm said:
You’re absolutely right that “This is how the system works, so we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to get this fixed” is how I feel about everything that is going now and that has gone wrong in the past.
I know how the rules work right now better than most people. The fact that I know the rules doesn’t mean that I agree with those rules.
Brad Templeton on January 24, 2024 at 6:26 pm said:
The relevant rule is section 1.8.1 of the WSFS Constitution, which I hope isn’t that difficult to read:
The appointees from Worldcons and NASFiCs can be replaced at any time by the committee that appointed them. There is no explicit mechanism defined in the WSFS Constitution to remove any of the nine elected members from the WSFS MPC. I can think of one possible mechanism, but it’s never been done, so I don’t know if it would work.
If someone wants to propose such a mechanism and doesn’t know now to form such a proposal and wants help, I can compose the wording and you can propose it as a change to the current rules. If you don’t want my help, there are others, including the staff of the 2024 Worldcon Business Meeting (I’m not one of them), who will help you.
Carole Parker on January 25, 2024 at 3:51 am said:
And I asked you, “Who makes the decision? Who enforces your proposed rule?”
@Kevin Standlee
You were repeatedly advised by a group of trademark experts that before making any more public statements on how you can’t enforce rules on any Worldcon, you need to talk to a Trademark Attorney; disclosing the full details to them about how you’ve organised Worldcon Intellectual Property of California so they could advise you on how you need to proceed.
One way to sidestep the problem of Worldcon going to repressive countries, which then manipulate and discredit the Hugo Awards, is to establish a permanent Hugo Awards committee. This committee could be filled in the same manner as the Mark Protection Committee.
Nominations and votes could be collected at the official Hugo Awards site instead of the current Worldcon site. Each Worldcon would be informed that it has no say in this process and its only responsibility is to hold the ceremony where the awards are announced.
If a Worldcon committee objected to nominees or winners or attempted to manipulate the process in any way, the Hugo Awards committee should cancel the awards ceremony by refusing to release the results there, then hold it online after the convention is over.
Future Worldcons need to know that they will not be allowed to tamper with the Hugos in any way. Achieving this is unlikely while the WSFS Constitution vests all powers over the Hugos to the current Worldcon and there’s noting but a site selection vote to keep the con out of repressive countries.
Have the ballots been destroyed?
@Kevin Standlee
Kevin, a bunch of scarily qualified people have been very clear over the last few days that the head of the MPC being rhetorically unable to say who makes decisions or enforces rules is a huge problem.
Or, put another way, if Dragon Con decides they’re going to award Hugo Awards this year, who decides if that’s a problem and who enforces the decision?
@Jay Blanc
“@Kevin Standlee — You were repeatedly advised . . . ”
Pretty much any lawyer will tell you that if you don’t pay a lawyer for it, it shouldn’t be counted as legal advice. In other words, some random guy on the internet (no matter what his expertise is or his credentials are), without discussing with you in detail the particulars of your situation, isn’t qualified to tell you what to do with respect to legal issues. The particular facts of a situation, especially those facts that may not be publicly known, matter.
@rcade
“One way to sidestep the problem of Worldcon going to repressive countries, which then manipulate and discredit the Hugo Awards, is to establish a permanent Hugo Awards committee. . . . Nominations and votes could be collected at the official Hugo Awards site instead of the current Worldcon site.”
If you take away administering the Hugos from Worldcon, there’s no reason for Worldcon and WSFS to be connected. Read the constititution — Worldcon exists to administer the Hugos.
@bill
I don’t think you’re quite understanding what rcade is proposing – they aren’t proposing taking the award ceremony away from any given Worldcon (unless it’s demonstrated that the given Worldcon is unable to uphold the standards of the award, which would be determined by the currently-nonexistent license agreement for awarding the Hugos, which would also need to be written). They’re proposing that the nomination/voting process be handled separately from the award ceremony, by someone who isn’t “the people running the convention this year.” The Hugos would still be handed out at Worldcon, just the people running the given con would have no input or control over the award selection process. Under this proposal, that power would go to a new, permanent, standing committee under the umbrella of WSFS. The theoretical HSC (Hugo Selection Committee) would oversee the nomination and voting, the Worldcon would host the ceremony.
Mm… whilst I wont get involved in what has (or has not happened) at Chegdu 2023 (since I was not there), are there now (post that Worldcon) (i) any lessons to be learnt and if so (ii) what future rules need to be instituted to reduce any such matters happening again..?? best wishes
@Farasha — what you explained is exactly how I understood rcade’s proposal. And I repeat — Worldcon is WSFS’s way of selecting Hugos. Take that away from Worldcon, and it has no reason to exist as anything other than any other convention.
I’m aware that the establishment of a permanent Hugo Awards Committee requires constitutional changes. If the current Worldcon only had the role of presenting the awards, how many Worldcon committees would be upset to lose the responsibility of administering the Hugos?
I think Worldcon has plenty of reasons to exist that have nothing to do with administering the awards. Each con would still get the benefits to attendance and publicity the awards bring — assuming they don’t do what Chengdu did and lay waste to the integrity of the awards.
@Dave Lally
At the very least, I would like to see a requirement that the Hugo Admins have to “show their work” regarding removal or moving categories or number of moved nominations citing which wsfs constutional rule they applied.
If we want to keep a list of countries that can’t hold Worldcons, it seems like one of the various Freedom indices could be used to effectively outsource that decision-making. For instance, the host country must score more than 50 on the RSF Freedom of the Press Index.
That’s if we wanted to restrict the host countries entirely. I think there’s still a discussion to be had about the benefits of cultural exchange (we were sending Louis Armstrong into Russia to show the Soviets how awesome our music was), and I think I might prefer decoupling the Hugos from the convention (using a freedom index to indicate when that should happen.)
rcade — if you take administering the Hugos away from Worldcon, why should WSFS care about what’s left? Why not announce the awards with a press release?
You are making the case that the prestige of the Hugos adds benefit to Worldcon — no argument there. I’m saying that once you strip Hugos from Worldcon, what benefit does Worldcon bring to Hugos? Why should WSFS give the prestige of the Hugos to Worldcon? Maybe it would be better for the Hugos to be announced at ComiCon in San Diego.
@Bill , The experts (and they are) have ardently, and repeatedly, advised Kevin to get his/the committee’s own lawyer, and to do it fast.
@Madame Harvey — I think you and I are of like minds on the subject.
Worldcon is WFSF’s conference and the Hugos are WSFS’s award. They would still be connected.
Retroactively revoking the use of “Worldcon” and “Hugo Awards” is a non-starter. You do not right a wrong by disenfranchise groups of people who were the named nominees and winners.
Asking Glasgow or Seattle to do extra work is also burdening people who probably do not have the bandwidth.
Looking forward, fixing WSFS is a good start. Maybe creating a SWFU awards (sorry we fucked up) to the dropped nominees could be one of the ways to compensate, among others.
Now CCP might get involved. THAT is the real shitcase scenario, but let’s try not to punish people unduly. Cheryl Morgan does not deserve the hate mail, the named nominees and winners do not deserve to have their recognitions taken away.
@Bill
No one has ever suggested removing the voting of the Hugos from Worldcon or its attendees. Just the administration of the Hugos from the people organizing the physical convention, wherever it happens to be. Conflating those two is somewhat disingenuous. No one has or will ever go “I wanted to go to Woldcon and was excited to vote for the Hugos, but now that it’s Bob from the Hugo committee counting the votes instead of Alice the con-runner I think I’ll just stay home”.
@Laura Yes — an ammendement requiring any ineligibility disqualification to cite the WSFS constitutional section for the ineligibility seems like the very least change that should be made.
I’ll point out there’s a difference between administering the award (i.e., receiving and tallying nominations, determining finalists, then same with final votes and winners) and hosting the award ceremony. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosts the Oscars, but PriceWaterhouse does the administration. Hiring out the admin to a centralized, professional company would normalize the process, and reduce the drama of “How can an overworked volunteer hope to get this done?”
@Ryan H
Actually, they did. rcade’s initial proposal, that started this:
“Nominations and votes could be collected at the official Hugo Awards site instead of the current Worldcon site. Each Worldcon would be informed that it has no say in this process and its only responsibility is to hold the ceremony where the awards are announced.”
Collect from WSFS members just as Worldcons now do.