Dublin 2019 WSFS Business Meeting Day 1

Corina Stark did a fantastic job of notetaking in “WSFS Preliminary Business Meeting Liveblog”, which can be read on Alex Acks’ blog.  

Once video of the meeting has been uploaded, it will be available at Worldcon Events on YouTube.

The agenda is available here. The references (e.g. “D7”) refer to items in it.

Short summary: The business meeting rejected the proposed Best Translated Novel Hugo by a motion to postpone indefinitely. Basically, everything else was assigned a debate time and will be taken up tomorrow.

Here are the highlights – see the full post for what the participants had to say, and details of the parliamentary maneuvering.

Last year’s Worldcon chair (Worldcon 76) Kevin Roche responded to a question about their financial report. “Kevin Roche reports they are still in litigation which reduces the pass-along funds, but he has brought three checks for Dublin, CoNZealand, and the 79th Worldcon. First four complaints dismissed with prejudice, defamation claim still pending…. Kent Bloom questions Roche about surplus to give a donation for preserving the Worldcon memorabilia. Roche will check his budget, but they anticipate prevailing in the lawsuit however it is a hope not a guarantee.”

The motion to add a Standing Rule giving the Committee of the Whole the ability to extend itself rather than repeat the labyrinthine maneuver from last year’s business meeting was passed, and (by a second vote) given immediate effect. The text of the rule is —  

Rule 5.12: Committee of the Whole. The Committee of the Whole shall have the right to amend its duration without seeking permission from the Business Meeting by way of a motion to extend debate.

Motions to extend the Hugo eligibility Prospect and Worlds of Ursula K LeGuin both passed.

Debate times were set for ratification of business passed on from last year, to be considered on Saturday.

Debate times were set for new constitutional amendments D1-D6.

D7 – the “Five and Five” motion to cut back the number of Hugo finalists in a category to five – was challenged by a motion postpone indefinitely. . [See discussion of motion at File 770 in “Reform or Rollback?”] The motion to postpone indefinitely failed, for lack of a two-thirds majority, 46 in favor, 30 against. Debate time was set.

D8-D11 debate times set.

D12 – The proposal to add a Best Translated Novel Hugo was eliminated when the meeting voted in favor of a motion to postpone indefinitely.

D13 – The proposal to add a Best Game or Interactive Experience Hugo survived a motion to postpone indefinitely and debate time was set.

All the items for which debate time was set will come up for consideration at a subsequent business meeting session this weekend.

11 thoughts on “Dublin 2019 WSFS Business Meeting Day 1

  1. I’ve now read the live blog as well. It’s just as well I wasn’t there since there were no captions. I would have been pretty unhappy.

    Well done Jo Van for getting the two study committees combined, among other things. Thanks to all the attendees for their hard work.

  2. I’m very fascinated with this “the threat is forever gone now, lets tear down the city walls”. Of course, its being argued by some who opposed having city walls even when they thought there was threat

  3. The video from the Preliminary Business Meeting is now online in the Worldcon Events 2019 WSFS Business Meeting playlist. The first two parts (everything up to the recess) have less-good video due to a technical challenge of getting the sound from the amplifier fed back into the camera on the platform at the back of the room. The sound is much better in the second two parts.

    I cannot guarantee that I’ll get videos up same day. The internet connectivity at the convention centre and at my hotel is awful. I have limited access to a faster connection, but it’s a 20-minute walk from the convention centre, and even with the faster speed, it took roughly an hour for the videos to upload and process.

  4. Pingback: Pixel Scroll 8/16/19 Scrolls From Topographic Pixels | File 770

  5. @Hampus: Exactly! And calling transparent is hilarious. It’s more transparent than most parts of the constitution. (Not that I have much sympathy for anyone who doesn’t understand due to not reading the rules, which is the only excuse for understanding 5&6. You nominate 5 and there are 6 finalists. There’s the elevator pitch, as he wanted….) 😉

  6. @Kendall
    Yeah, he was definitely getting ahead of himself and arguing for taking away EPH there. But I still disagree. Just because you can’t explain it in an elevator doesn’t mean it isn’t fair. And the process is transparent if you’re willing to understand it. If someone is really interested, they can take more time than an elevator ride to find out about it.

  7. The video of the first Main Meeting went up yesterday afternoon Dublin time, at the expense of me not setting foot in the Convention Centre Dublin until after 9 PM on account of dealing with post-Business-Meeting stuff all day long aside from a brief lunch. Much walking. 22K steps. Ow.

    I will try to get the videos from today’s Site Selection and Second Main Meeting posted today, but I also have commitments to do tonight’s Hugo Award event coverage for TheHugoAwards.org, and that might be incompatible with long trips off site to places where I have enough bandwidth to upload 15+ GB of video to YouTube.

    I personally expect that we’ll need to have a Monday Business Meeting. There were 16 constitutional amendments proposed this year, and while we’ve disposed of about ten of them, the remaining ones are the most substantive and potentially contentious ones.

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