The 2024 WSFS Business Meeting Agenda published today by the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon contains the text of 12 amendments passed at the Chengdu Worldcon that are up for ratification; 20 newly proposed constitutional amendments; and the full text of 12 resolutions – but not the text of two other resolutions described by the committee as calling for the “censure of certain groups and named individuals over the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards”.
The titles of the two resolutions are:
- “Statement of Values for Transparency and Fair Treatment” submitted by Chris Garcia, James Bacon, Frank Wu, Chris Barkley, Steve Davidson, Kirsten Berry, Chuck Serface, Paul Weimer, Andrew E. Love, Claudia Beach, Nina Shepardson, Bonnie McDaniel, Tobes Valois, and Linda Robinette.
- “Chengdu Censure” submitted by Terri Ash, Kevin Sonney, Cliff Dunn, and Kristina Forsyth.
The resolutions will still be brought to the floor of the Business Meeting, but the substance of the charges will not be allowed to be discussed. Instead, Glasgow 2024, availing themselves of procedures in Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised, will treat the censure resolution as “a motion to form a committee on investigation as the first step in disciplinary proceedings.” This committee will be elected by the meeting to conduct an investigation into the allegations contained in the resolutions — including a reasonable attempt to speak with the members accused — and report back to the 2025 Business Meeting in Seattle, USA.
Glasgow 2024 has assumed the authority to say the Business Meeting will be placed in executive session while all of these proceedings are handled, and that session will be exclusively focused on the formation of an investigative committee into the charges. Glasgow 2024 says they will suspend livestream coverage during the related portion of the Business Meeting. The details of debate will not be published in the publicly available minutes, nor will this section of the meeting be shown in the posted recording of the Business Meeting.
The committee says this procedure has been formulated after taking “legal counsel to ensure adherence to Scottish law.”
We are concerned that publication of these items, as well as public debate about them in Glasgow 2024 spaces, will bring us out of compliance with Scottish libel and defamation law and expose Glasgow 2024, the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), and/or its members to significant legal liability.
But their statement in the agenda also says, “The World Science Fiction Society also has the clear right to hold its members accountable for their conduct and do so as transparently as possible.”
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@Mike Glyer
“Drafts of these resolutions went public a couple of months ago.”
Forgive me if I’m missing something obvious here, but can someone point me to where these drafts are online?
It would be better if we don’t assume bad intent on the part of the Glasgow 2024 committee, or of the people criticizing them, or of the people defending them.
There are a historically large number of proposals before the Business Meeting. It is not reasonable to expect that the proposals would be perfect and should all be enacted as written. Nor is it reasonable to expect that the Glasgow 2024 committee could proactively provide legal advice and guidelines to all the fans drafting proposals. It would have been nice, for sure, but they’re fans like the rest of us, volunteering their time without pay, and they would have had to do this on top of the regular duties they signed up for.
I hope the Business Meeting will make a clear statement of the principles and behavior that are expected of Hugo Administrators and Worldcon Chairs. There are elements of this in several proposals. It doesn’t have to name names.
L. Nickerson:
From the perspective of a non-attendee, this feels after-the-last-minute as it was only made public subsequent to the business meeting proposal deadline. I would be much less concerned if Glasgow had ackowledged concern regarding libel issues back in May when the supporting membership could have reacted by either 1) submitting censure proposals which could operate within the bounds of Scottish law or 2) submitting proposals responsive to yet another Worldcon being constrained by local legal issues.
To me, the release of information after the oppprtunity to act has passed, strongly echos the behavior of the Chengdu concom.
I do not think they are equivalent. I am happy to agree that actually futzing with the nominations/awards was far worse.
But I think they are analogous in a meaningful way at a time where any hint of Chengdu concom-like behavior should be unequivocally renounced.
The first post-Chendu concom after should have been looking to maximize membership engagement and transparency, and instead we get post-deadline decision to invoke an executive session whch will be hidden from the non-attending membership. Did you know that RRoO (9:27) expressly allows for the punishment of executive session member attendees who disseminate the details of what was discussed? Invoking a secret session cannot possibly be the right response to the Chendu debacle.
@bill
Chris linked to his in an earlier comment here where it was reposted at File770 from Journey Planet’s Be the Change issue: https://file770.com/a-resolution-by-chris-j-garcia/
Not sure about the other one.
@ChewyGlacier I don’t actually know the exact process for getting on the agenda for the business meeting, but I believe that the motions to censure were submitted in a timely fashion, and that the committee considered putting them on the agenda in a timely fashion, and have decided to not do that for reasons. Possibly even good reasons. I don’t think they can reasonably make any decisions about what to include on the agenda until after the proposals have been formally made. The fact that they were “public” is probably not relevant. There may or may not have been some private discussions about whether or not this had legal implications, but the convention can’t reasonably say anything official until they have the actual motion, with its specific wording in hand.
If they had done this at the business meeting after, that would be a very different kettle of fish. If they had pretended argued that the motions were in some form defective, but declined to explain how or why, that would be a different kettle of fish. This, I think, is in the very normal routine of sausage making.
Lydy Nickerson on July 21, 2024 at 10:23 pm said:
Because you might not be the only person who doesn’t know this, here are the relevant rules:
WSFS Standing Rule 2.2:
So it takes at least two WSFS members (neither of which need to have attending supplements, or if they do, they don’t have to attend the Business Meeting). The making of 200 copies is waived if the Business Meeting undertakes making an Agenda document, which has been the usual practice for some years now.
Also WSFS Constitution Section 5.1.6:
The rest of the subsection doesn’t directly affect the matters at hand.
The Business Meeting of this year’s Worldcon announced well in advance how to submit business to the meeting (email it to the business meeting address, which was published in the same announcement), and apparently 50 separate proposals were submitted with sufficient support (at least two members) to meet the requirement.
Until a few years ago, the deadline for submitting new business was 18 hours before the Preliminary Business Meeting, and the way you learned what was on the agenda was to show up at the PBM. In those days, the “maker must provide 200 [paper] copies” was far more relevant, and there was a lot more self-collation of documents by people arriving at the PBM. There were years when I was a Business Meeting officer and would hang around the Con Office until the 18 hour deadline had passed, particularly when I was Secretary and had to get the Agenda finalized and printed before the next morning’s meeting.
A reminder: I am not a member of this year’s WSFS Business Meeting staff, nor that of any other seated Worldcon. I am not speaking officially for any organization. Please do not ascribe anything to what I say in this post as anything other than explaining the details of the sausage-making process to anyone who might not know what they are but might have some interest in it. If this sounds like I’m lecturing, I apologize. I genuinely want everyone who wants to participate in the process to know how to do so.
@laura — thank you
(and I note that the referenced proposal seems about as non-libelous and non-slanderous as it could be; I wonder if the other one is similar in that respect?)
@bill
I’ve found the other now via a Discord so I don’t know if I should share a link. It does give a specfic name (not just the committee in general) and is more stridently worded. But pretty sure it is all concerning facts which can be inferred from Dave’s own stats report. No idea about libelous or not.
Please share the link. A lot of us are not in Scotland.
Lydy Nickerson:
I’m not saying they should have made any decisions regarding any specific proposal in advance.
I’m saying there is no doubt that they were aware of the possibility that they would need to restrict proposals based on local laws, and that they should have put the membership on notice of that in advance of the deadline.
Perhaps this is where we differ. I think the post-Chengdu worldcon needed to be exemplary in transparency and member access. Failing to warn the membership of scottish legal constraints, and now dealing with the Chengdu bad actors behind closed doors with participants held to secrecy under threat of punishment… that may be normal SMOF sausage making, but it is far short of what was needed to repair the damage of Chengdu.
@Laura–
Inferring things isn’t generally sufficient for Scottish or English libel law. You need to have proof. We’re I think mostly agreed, as a community, about what the Chengdu Hugo committee did (the numbers, for instance, are ridiculous.) That’s plenty for Glasgow Worldcon to decide they don’t want the individuals there. It’s enough this and other Worldcons, as well as other conventions, to decide they don’t want these individuals on staff in any capacity
It’s not enough, in Scottish law, to support a censure resolution that specifically cites “facts” we can only infer. We would need to have proof.
This is a case where we’re fairly sure we know what happened, in broad outline, but we don’t have the evidence that would be sufficient in court. That’s frustrating, but is happens. It happens sometimes even in the legal system, where there’s just not enough evidence to prosecute.
We’re not any country’s legal system. We can’t investigate the way police or a prosecutor would. And China would laugh at us if we tried.
Just go with this being referred to committee, and next year maybe Chicon will pass a nice, anodyne motion of censure. Everyone will know what it means, and there will be no legal issues.
Obviously I have no choice about it going to committee. They believe it needs to and it’s their party. We’ll just have to see what happens in Seattle. Hopefully some of the other proposals that specify consequences for the censures are passed in Glasgow so that can at least be in the works already.
@rcade
I found it via the Discord where business meeting related discussion has been going on since early this year. (Previously the Hugo Study Committee’s Discord.)
Lis Carey: I’m curious. You are making authoritative statements about what is and is not sufficient in Scottish law, what fails to meet the burden of proof, whether the available evidence is sufficient in court. Do you have some legal training in this area?
@Mike Glyer–
I spent about half my career as a law librarian, along with the other half as a medical research librarian.
Even in US law, hearsay and inference are worthless as evidence. We can reasonably infer a lot in the Chengdu Hugos. We don’t know, in the sense of being able to prove, anything other than that it looks really funny, not in the humorous sense.
Court cases don’t run on what reasonably appears to have happened. They run on provable facts. We’ll never get anything out of Chengdu that will let us prove what appears to have happened.
What private organizations, including nonprofit corporations and social organizations, can do is exclude people that they believe have acted badly, remove them from any offices, ban them from events.
What they would be well-advised not to do, even in the US where libel law is looser, is make definitive factual statements that named individuals did specific bad acts, and publish them.
Lis Carey: We have documented that last year’s Hugo team assembled personal dossiers on prospective finalists. That’s worthy of censure. We can prove that finalists who qualified under the rules were kept off the ballot. That’s worthy of censure. Your general statement that we can’t prove things that should be censured flies in the face of the evidence.
You were on firmer ground when you were only arguing about the Scottish libel standard. Because there are things that have been proved.
I feel like I really am missing something here. We only know what we are “accusing” Dave & co. of because he himself flat out told us. If he hadn’t told us that he disqualified Babel, Paul, etc., we would have just gone on thinking it was odd that they weren’t finalists. He thought he was right to do so and we want to go on record that we disagree. I honestly expected this to be one of the less contentious things on the agenda.
I really, really wish someone who actually practices law in Scotland would come forward and discuss whether or not this was a reasonable thing to do. Does anybody know anyone with the necessary expertise?
That would be useful. And if anyone sees such a thing online please let me know. (Because the internet lawyers I’ve seen write at their own platform or social media accounts; it would be a lot for me to expect one to give it away in my comments section.)
@Liz Carey
To me, that in itself is worthy of censure. The alleged bad actors are also playing hide the ball with the details of what happened. There’s no reason to reward that.
Maybe the consequences proposal should require telling the truth about what happened before they’re lifted.
A resolution of censure against a member of an organization doesn’t have to cite a bunch of facts. It doesn’t have to cite any facts at all, when the bad behavior by the member is already known to the people who will vote on whether to censure them.
It is a fair bet that most of the people attending the Business Meeting have sufficient knowledge of what was done to harm the Hugo Awards and by whom. It was widely covered in the mainstream media and on sites within the genre.
The near-universal outrage among WSFS members expressed all over the place this year deserved a vote on censure, not a “motion to form a committee” that buries the issue for a year.
The Worlccon constitution actually gives a Worldcon committee -broad- powers to change Business Meeting procedure (for that year only) as long as it doesn’t break core principles (e.g. absentee protection). Since a Worldcon can arbitrarily add to the Standing Rules for their convention, it would have been trivial for the Scottish worldcon to make rules retroactively allowing them to make the changes to the agenda they did.
It’s true that they didn’t (cumbersomely) publish changed Standing Rules to this effect. But nitpicking aside, nothing I saw on the agenda is outside their Constitutional power.
Laura says:
This is simply not how commitees or the BM works.
The BM can simply amend the modified motion to be an at-the-moment censure.
The BM can simply have the committee report the next day. Or after an hour. Or five minutes.
NOTHING that Glasgow did prevents a censure this year if that’s the intent of the majority of the BM. All they did was avoid an immediate libel, suggest ways to avoid committing actionable libel1 at the con, and -suggest- that the censure motions be pushed to a commitee. None of that binds the BM, which can amend motions with any sort of majority.
Joshua Kronengold: You should support that statement with specific citations from the WSFS Constitution.
On the other hand, since you admit they haven’t published rules changes, is your comment anything more than an announcement you plan to obey in advance whatever they tell the Business Meeting to do?
Joshua Kronengold: “NOTHING that Glasgow did prevents a censure this year if that’s the intent of the majority of the BM.”
Suppose the Business Meeting takes that course. Glasgow says they will suspend livestream coverage during the related portion of the Business Meeting. The details of debate will not be published in the publicly available minutes, nor will this section of the meeting be shown in the posted recording of the Business Meeting. Sure, people in the room can run out and say whatever. But the censure action will not be made known in a public official record of the meeting.
Joshua Kronengold: and -suggest- that the censure motions be pushed to a commitee. None of that binds the BM, which can amend motions with any sort of majority.
I realize you are much more familiar with business meeting procedures than me, but the section in the agenda on censure motions does not in any way sound like a suggestion.
Mike Glyer:
They could, but Roberts Rules of Order Newly Revised expressly authorizes punishment of members who violate the secrecy of an executive session (9:27).
I think there really is something to what Kronengold is saying. I believe he is referencing the “such other rules” of section 5.1.4.
If the censure rules are merely “such other rules” then the business meeting can easily toss then out.
However it is yet to be seen how the concom would react to a business meeting that overrode their rules. Perhaps the concom would not abide it.
Personally, I do not see the Glasgow’s implementation of these rules as a violation of the constitution, but rather as a failure to be the paragon of transparency that we needed post-Chengdu.
ChewyGlacier: I guess you haven’t met very many fans if you think anything in RRONR will keep them from being the first to tell their friends the Big Thing they know about. I’m aware of the provision you quoted.
If I am the Linda Robinett who signed the censor thing, I hope they could have the courtesy to spell my name correctly.
@Linda Robinett
Assuming by your comment here, it is you.
@ChewyGlacier exactly. They are well within their Constitutional powers if one takes it as a this-year publisehd rule (I mean, we’re talking about it; it’s published; this would make it lower priority than the actual SR, but still binding). But while it’s higher prioirty than any majority vote in the meeting, rules made by the Worldcon can still be Suspended with a 2/3 vote.
WRT comments on how I, personally intend to vote, I don’t see how it’s relevant. I’m one voice in a likely 2-300 in the room. I helped draft one of the censure motions, but am also skeptical on to-the-person censure motions even in this rather extreme case — it will depend for me on the arguments in the room (and possibly statements on Scotish law) but ultimately the majority (or supermajority) will carry.
While a censure is a strong (ish) way to exprss disapproval, I think passing measures to make this kind of thing harder to do in the future — like the WSFS.inc change, the auditing change, or the “no mystery disqualifications” rule would be much more substantive and also not risk personally running afoul of Scottish libel or slander laws.
It would be MUCH better to OTC (justified if one is concerned that any discussion of these even in executive session will result in personal or convention liability even with a strong supermajority required; this is what OTC is for) the censure motions and pass some of the “lets fix this” motions than fail to pass substantive changes and pass feel-good censure motions isntead.
They could, but Roberts Rules of Order Newly Revised expressly authorizes punishment of members who violate the secrecy of an executive session (9:27).
Even in Scotland? I’m pretty sure their censure would have to take place in executive session, the results written on a rock and thrown into a peat bog, known for centuries only to the bog bodies.
@rcade
“I’m pretty sure their censure would have to take place in executive session, the results written on a rock and thrown into a peat bog, known for centuries only to the bog bodies.”
If the final version that came out of secret, executive committee said something like “Worldcon 2024 censures Jane Doe and John Roe for actions taken in 2023 as part of Worldcon 2023”, and this was the extent of public comment, it’s difficult to see how that would be a liability issue for the Convention and its members. Happy to be educated otherwise by someone who actually knows what they are talking about, though.
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