One thought on “CoNZealand Business Meeting Scheduled

  1. I went ahead and put the agenda on the WSFS rules page as well, as it needs to be there anyway and will be in the archive page. Individual Worldcons’ web sites usually go away, but in theory the wsfs.org pages should remain indefinitely.

    The WSFS Mark Protection Committee is working out the details of how it will hold its meetings and also meet the requirement that those meetings be open to the attending members of the convention. As anyone who has ever attended an MPC meeting knows, the number of non-MPC members who turn up at the Worldcon meetings is generally a single-digit number (sometimes 0). The MPC’s business is IMO rather important for WSFS, but a lot of it is also deadly boring unless you’re deeply into both WSFS rules and intellectual property wonkery.

    As I understand it, the Business Meeting intends to adjourn without voting on new members to the MPC (three members’ terms expire this year), leaving those seats vacant. The MPC will thus meet sometime after the Business Meeting as it usually does for the purpose of electing officers for the next year and fill those three seats ad interim until next year’s Business Meeting. I speculate that if the three members whose terms expire this year are willing, they’ll be appointed to hold those seats until we hold a six-member election next year.

    When filling three terms and partial terms, we do a normal preferential instant-runoff-voting ballot, with the first three people winning getting the longer terms and the remaining winners getting partial terms. This has happened now and then, but never for more than four seats total that I recall. I also seem to recall one case where there was an absolute tie for the fourth and final seat, which was decided by a coin flip. Or maybe rock-paper-scissors. Counting such a race will make extra work for the tellers, who will need to run six IRV counts instead of three.

Comments are closed.