19 thoughts on “Chengdu Worldcon First Main Business Meeting Results”

1. Thanks for this update

2. I’m extremely glad to hear that both of the items up for ratification were approved.

3. I suspect that F.3.A will be very contentious come ratification time at Glasgow, and rightly so; I don’t think there’s a good argument that would pass muster for why that level of collected details is required for a valid ballot. Certainly I’d vote against it.

   (also, I’ve been commenting here on and off for years… why am I getting put in the moderation queue?)

4. I can’t remember. It’s your lucky day.

5. It strikes me that requiring a snail-mail address for a site selection ballot to be valid is a great leap backward, and might have the unintended effect of disenfranchising fans not aware of the requirement.

   I think that this a a Bad Idea. I am willing to have my mind changed if someone can explain how a postal address can verify the validity of a ballot in a way that an email address can not.

6. It will be interesting to hear the committee reports tomorrow. And of course, with next year’s meeting in Scotland, things can change even more.

7. I think that there were suspicions that the online ballots from China were done en mass. Requiring snail mail addresses would prevent this. I suspect that this sort of sketchy voting or sketchy seeming voting will never happen again. I agree that we don’t need snail mail addresses. Some fans may be living at temporary sites such as a dorm room.

8. Thank you for the updates. What about the eligibility extensions? Did those pass?

9. There are also a number of places just in the United States (I’m thinking particularly of reservations) where people just don’t have home addresses. Sure, P.O. boxes exist, but if the concern is voter fraud I don’t think anybody is going be able to tell if the P.O. box number is legitimate or came out of a random number generator. (Not that you couldn’t very easily make up street addresses as well.)

   That being said, I’m actually in agreement that this language needs clarifying (there’s a strong structural implication that the address space is currently mandatory) but I’d be inclined to go in the opposite direction and only mandate that the voter provide some form of contact information so they can be reached by the winning bid.

   @Cora Buhlert: Per a separate Facebook post yesterday, they passed at the Preliminary Business Meeting.

10. Cool, thanks.

    The elgibility extensions were submitted by me, so of course I want to know if they passed.

11. I would like to understand how requiring a postal address would prevent ballot stuffing; there is no requirement for an address to be valid, after all, and faking an address is super easy. I could generate you 100,000 real random addresses in the time it took me to type this comment, and they would all be actual places that exist, but have nothing to do with me.

    Moreover, what about people who do not have a postal address? As I said to some friends when this was raised in the Discon 3 business meeting, this is an interesting way to say you never want homeless people to be involved in fandom, or if you want to get judgy about how people of limited means spend their money, that you never want anyone who’s nomadic involved either.

    This is a bad requirement, and should not be baked into the constitution.

12. ELI5: for the Independent Films amendment, does “passed with 2027 sunset” mean that it can be tested out as a category until the 2027 Worldcon, or it gets bunted to the next Business Meeting?

    Extremely pleased that the Games Hugo category is finally official, less so that F.11 is going forward, as much as I want independent features to be recognized. The degree of separation between big blockbusters and small indie features is something the Hugos will eventually have to reckon with, but this doesn’t feel like the way to do it.

13. Also, based on how heated the comments got under this post (to an unnecessary, almost embarrassing extent, if I can be blunt for a second), I’m not looking forward to F.7 and F.8 tomorrow. There still seems to be fundamental miscommunication and mutual bias between Chinese fans and Western fans (at least in the Worldcon sect).

14. @N: F.11 still has to be ratified in Glasgow. If ratified, there would then be an additional vote at the 2027 Business Meeting on retaining it after a couple years of seeing how it worked in practice.

15. @Goobergunch: Ah, gotcha. It’s very likely going to die at Glasgow.

16. I am strongly opposed to F.11.

    Over the past five years, I’ve argued vociferously & ineloquently on behalf of independent cinema as being worthy of Hugo consideration. So my opposition is not from the perspective that these movies shouldn’t be recognized.

    I believe that creating a separate exclusive category inherently positions Independent Cinema as a lesser form that just can’t compete on merit.

    On top of which, there are already too many categories.

17. I feel like the idea of making sure that all votes are being cast by real actual people is a valuable one, but that the proponents of this idea have no idea how difficult that actually is.

    Requiring a postal address simply imposes a technical requirement that a vote-bundler can easily meet (because they’re filling out enough ballots that they know exactly what the rules are) but a legitimate voter might not (because this is a 1/year at best situation for them, and they might not be keyed into the ‘address is required, phone number is optional’ rules).

    The fact that it only requires a postal address and not a domicile address makes the requirement less meaningful in terms of telling you anything about the voter. Add in that the addresses aren’t checked (and the difficulty in checking international addresses and the wide variety of things that are deemed postal addresses in different countries) and this is just a paperwork hoop that isn’t really providing any meaningful protection.

    I mean, let’s be honest, the problem that some people had with Chengdu site selection wasn’t that 1000 individual voters didn’t bother to write “PO Box 100, Shanghai” on their ballots, it’s that some people believe that the organization behind the bid simply spent $100k to rent Worldcon for a year by voting in the name of 1000 people who may or may not exist.

    Adding a requirement that anyone who wants to rent a Worldcon needs to make sure all of the ballots have “PO Box 100” written on them wildly misses the point. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist, while failing to do anything about the theoretical problem that some people think does.

    (Also, the computer programmer in me kind of hates the idea of the same information being submitted multiple times, and no provision for what happens if the information doesn’t match. Things like postal addresses and email addresses should be provided when you apply for membership, and just linked to your membership number. To me, a far better solution would have been to amend Section 4.2 to specify that a qualified voter needs to have provided information x, y, and z prior to or at the time of site selection voting, and change 4.4 to require provision of name, signature and membership number (to make sure there’s a link to your membership information). If the con already has this information, it seems silly to have it be make-or-break if you don’t fill it out again.)

18. Click

19. (Also, the computer programmer in me kind of hates the idea of the same information being submitted multiple times, and no provision for what happens if the information doesn’t match. Things like postal addresses and email addresses should be provided when you apply for membership, and just linked to your membership number. To me, a far better solution would have been to amend Section 4.2 to specify that a qualified voter needs to have provided information x, y, and z prior to or at the time of site selection voting, and change 4.4 to require provision of name, signature and membership number (to make sure there’s a link to your membership information). If the con already has this information, it seems silly to have it be make-or-break if you don’t fill it out again.)

    Yes, this! IIRC, most/many of the Chengdu ballots were purchasing their DC memberships as part of paying the ASM/voting fee. Which maybe made sense when lots of people paid the ASM by mail with checks. But it means there is even less opportunity to validate that a person is real. You totally could include not only a fake address, but a fake email address, because there’s no check ever done on any of it. Now most people pay the voting fee by purchasing voting tokens, which is usually done online using the membership system, so you know that person is a member. And you can more easily build-in checks to the membership purchasing system. It’s also a positive of electronic voting, because membership checks are built in.

    Tl;dr – Getting rid of the “buy a membership with your vote” would be a more effective way of solving this problem than requiring specific information on the ballot

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