45 thoughts on “Proposal: that there should be a permanent Hugo Tech Working Group. Guest Post by Doctor Science”

1. Thank you, Doctor Science.

2. Does Dr. Science still have a Master’s Degree in Science? And what does Rodney have to say about it?

3. Creating standing committees of the WSFS Business Meeting is relatively easy and can be done in a single year, by amending the Standing Rules. Look at Section 7, and specifically 7.7 and 7.8, which defines the two standing committees of the Business Meeting that currently exist. Such committees are appointed by and report to the Business Meeting, and are directly responsible to it.

   In contrast, the Mark Protection Committee is a standing committee of WSFS (not of the Business Meeting), created directly in the WSFS Constitution. While its membership includes people elected by the Business Meeting, the meeting cannot order the MPC to do anything. It can request and recommend actions, and the MPC historically tends to go along with such requests and recommendations, but the only way that the Business Meeting can bind the MPC is by amending the Constitution, which takes two years. Standing Rule changes can be done in a single year.

   The process for changing the rules is not, in my opinion, especially “arcane.” You have to draw up a proposal (that is, the change to the rules you want to accomplish) and get at least two members of the current Worldcon to agree to sign on to it. Then you submit it to the current Business Meeting. (Glasgow will at some point publish the address to which you submit the proposal.) The WSFS BM staff will work with you if necessary to clear up technical issues, and will add it to the agenda of the meeting.

   The first Business Meeting (called the Preliminary Business Meeting) is generally on the second day of the Worldcon. This meeting is intended to work on agenda-setting for the rest of the meetings at Worldcon. However, Standing Rule changes can be done at this meeting directly. You’ll need to attend this meeting.

   More generally, the Preliminary Business Meeting can kill new proposals (either by postponing them indefinitely or by objection to consideration), and can amend them, so it’s unwise to skip the PBM. Some people misunderstand the word “preliminary” and don’t realize that there’s more to it than setting debate time limits. Constitutional changes passed on from last year can’t be killed at this stage, but new constitutional amendments can be killed, and they can be amended.

   In your case, I suggest that if you really want to do this, your best chance of doing so would be submit it as a Standing Rule change. If passed, and particularly if given immediate effect by a 2/3 vote, it would be the the task of that meeting to appoint people to the committee for its first year. The committee would then be expected to report to each year’s Business Meeting.

   Even quicker (and not requiring a super-majority to go into immediate effect) would be a proposal to create a special committee for this subject, with instructions to report back the following year. Such a committee probably would end up with a report on what it had done so far and a motion to either continue itself for another year or to make it a standing committee.

   There are a number of people who can help you with specific wording. It doesn’t have to be just me! Remember that the WSFS Business Meeting staff (I’m not one of them) is there to help you with things like getting stuff into the correct technical form.

4. What an excellent idea.

5. That is a great suggestion. When we can send proposed agenda items to the business meeting, I am more than willing to second it.

6. @Troyce: In fact, Doctor Science’s highest RL degree is a Master’s degree in Art — of theoretical population genetics, don’t ask me how they decide what counts as Art and what’s Science. But yes, people on the internet started calling me Doctor Science and I still think it’s hilarious, so I still do that bit, with the voice.

7. @Kevin Standlee:
   Thank you very much for your insight.

   Doing it up as a Standing Committee of the Business Meeting can only work if most/all of the people who would be on the first year’s Working Group (the one for Seattle 2025) were already on board before we get to Glasgow. So I think my next step is to talk to people on the Seattle committee, and find out what they think.

   I’ll also talk to LA.

8. In my humble opinion, not only should there be a separate technical working group, but the entire administration of Hugo awards should be hived off to a standing committee, as others have suggested.

9. Great initiative. An appropriate long-term objective would be for the MPC to tie the use of a standardized software package maintained by the WSFS with the ability to use the Hugo marks in association with a WorldCon.

   That should include verifying that each membership is tied to a unique individual.

   Regards,
   Dann
   This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery. – God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

10. @Doctor Science, Troyce, everyone else — I think Troyce was making reference to the old “Ask Dr. Science” radio sketch that used to be on NPR. The tagline for it was Dr. Science saying “I have a master’s degree — in science!”

    @Kevin Standlee — If I understand the proposal and what’s driving it correctly, it doesn’t seem setting up a standing committee of either the Business Meeting, the MPC, or any other organization would be sufficient, since they are all advisory only. I’m reading the proposal to be a change (necessarily through the WSFS constitution) to procedures as well, that requires Worldcon N to use the HAS, so that each new convention doesn’t reinvent the wheel. An exploratory committee in the first year may be part of the process, to establish formally where things stand, review existing software packages, etc., but if the problem is defined as “Each Worldcon can do as it pleases WRT voting software”, a constitutional change would be required to take that freedom away.

11. @bill: yes, you’re right, that’s the “bit” Troyce & I are riffing on.

    I think you’re also right that the Proposal is properly for an Amendment to the Constitution, because it means to take away a Worldcon’s ability to go its own way with regard to Hugo-handling software.

12. Eh. I think any of these “Let’s draw from multiple Worldcons for the people running the Hugos” solutions fail to understand that these aren’t independent groups. We literally know for a fact that adding people from Chicon and Glasgow to Chengdu wouldn’t have actually made a difference.

    Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow were also members of the Chicon (Worldcon N-1) committee, and Yalow was a member of the Glasgow (Worldcon N+1) committee. Diane Lacey had been on multiple Hugo committees before, albeit not specifically the N-1 and N+1 ones.

    Kat Jones wasn’t on the committee itself, but assisted in the “vetting” of Hugo nominees for Chengdu; not only was she the Hugo administrator for Worldcon N-1 but also would have been the Hugo administrator for Worldcon N+1.

    So… sure, if you want to take the Hugo-running duties out of the exclusive control of that Worldcon’s committee, I guess that this is as good a way as any, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve added some checks into the system.

    Chengdu’s Hugo committee had 9 members: 4 Western fans and 5 Chinese fans (I’m assuming from the names). Spoiler: It wasn’t the Chinese fans that turned out to be the problem, it was a few Western fans who were long-time members of the community.

    It also should be noted that this kind of rolling membership does have contagion issues. Under this system, Chicon would have been forced to have members appointed by Chengdu (and so would Glasgow). Do you really think that, in a situation where a con goes rogue (which I’m dubious this plan could stop), that it makes things better to have other cons being forced to defend their integrity because they’re inextricably linked with the rogue con committee?

    After all, this is similar to how the MPC is formed. Does it really make you feel good about the Hugos to know that Ben Yalow is still one of the people getting to decide if Worldcon IP should be transparent about this situation or if it should hold closed-door meetings where no one gets to know what was discussed and then hold votes where it’s not recorded who supported censuring him (or even what the censure was intended to signify)?

    I think any of these kind of solutions need to pass the Yalow test: If the entire group of wise old elders that you want to create turns out to be Ben Yalows, does it still solve the problem you’re trying to solve?

    I’m mildly opposed to the idea of making mandates about what specific software needs to be used for administering the Hugos, for the simple reason that this implicitly mandates that a bunch of volunteers need to create and maintain the software under whatever conditions the constitution specifies, which seems a bit outside the scope of the constitution, though saying that whatever software is used needs to meet X, Y and Z criteria seems more plausible.

13. I appreciate the creativity and effort everyone is putting in to brainstorming solutions to the problems with the Hugos. It shows how much we all value the awards (submitted my nominations yesterday!) and want to protect them.

    I think Brian G has a valid point – that the people making up any of these proposed Hugo Award-running groups meant to be separate from the current Worldcon administration will, in the end, be the same people who make up the administration of the various Worldcons.

    In addition to that, I foresee this particular proposed group having the same or similar problem that it seeks to solve. Namely, that individuals want to create their own software rather than use one created by someone else. Suppose the 3 from Worldcon N want to create all new software for their con. All they would need for majority approval from the group would be to get a sufficient number of Gurus or people from N-1 or N+1 to side with them. Then, when N+1 becomes Worldcon N in turn, the people that didn’t want that software could propose writing all new software and would only need sufficient Gurus or people from N-1 or N+1 to side with them and the cycle starts all over again. We could end up with endless in-fighting and still not have stopped the problem of people trying to re-invent the wheel each con.

    I think there are solutions out there to be found. I just have doubts that this solution will solve one of the identified problems.

14. Please don’t tar and feather everyone who works on the MPC and other WSFS committees. Ben and Dave acted dishonorably and are paying the price.

15. @Kevin: I appreciate and have applauded all the times you have shown up at F770 (and I’m bet you are active in other social media sites doing the same sort of thing!) to explain some process, policy, or historical event of the WSFS/Worldcon/Hugos.

    But I share Dr. Science’s sense that the “rituals” (an apt word I think!) are arcane.

    That judgement is not to single out WSFS as some uniquely arcane organization: but to acknowledge that the conventions of official policies and procedures documents for any group (including, as Dr. Science I have no doubt knows as well as I, universities) tend to be largely opaque to outsiders.

    For instance: I went and checked the link you kindly provided: the four paragraphs (two of which are describing two committees), 7.6-7.8 are 140 words long.

    Your explanation of the “not especially arcane” process is 562 words long: it is clearly written and conveys the necessary information very well (besides all the marginalized literature, theory, and creative classes, I also taught business communication/technical writing classes for most of a quarter century).

    But without that additional 500+ words, I would have had very little sense of what Dr. S has to do for the proposal: she’s asking for help, which is great, but there are lots of people who for whatever reason are less likely to ask for that sort of help, or even realize they can ask. I wish her the best of luck with the proposal!

    I know a few years ago, the process of creating new Hugo award categories was much discussed here and elsewhere — I remember the gaming one, and something for children’s or YA literature — and reading a lot of discussion around what the “Best Related Work” meant or should mean in the wake of some of the winners.

    I was interested in the last one because while I enjoyed many of the fan pieces that were nominated and won, I thought that it made sense to have a category for biographies and critical studies of sff. So I downloaded various official documents, and tried to read through it, and also read what people involved in the two groups were posting, and I noped right out of it.

    Some of my choice is where I was professionally (moving into the “burnout/loathing of all organized institutions/the Old Guard in administration and in academic organizations who claim to want change and involvement from new people but fight it toothandnail); maybe twenty years previous to that I’d have made a different choice.

    But almost nothing I read then from the people posting about their experiences with the committees, and the Business Meeting time and procedures, and the WSFS documents seemed in any way welcoming and open to new ideas.

16. @robinareid et al. – We WANT people to understand what we do, so perhaps we tend toward the over-explication. But if you or anyone else is interested in either attending the business meetings or joining one of its committees, I, for one, would welcome it. The reason some of us are on the same committee(s) year after year because people either think (a) it’s too hard to join, (b) I don’t understand how to join, or (c) I’d be unwanted if I join – all of which are true and untrue to some extent. But if you don’t make the attempt, it’s going to be the same people year in and year out until we get burned out. And where would that leave things?

17. When we can send proposed agenda items to the business meeting, I am more than willing to second it.

    Proposals can be submitted to: businessmeeting [at] glasgow2024 [dot] org.

18. Linda Deneroff on March 4, 2024 at 2:04 pm said:
    Please don’t tar and feather everyone who works on the MPC and other WSFS committees. Ben and Dave acted dishonorably and are paying the price.

    I appreciate the work that you and other individuals have done. However, I’ve lost a lot of faith in the MPC/WIP group as a whole knowing that at least 5 of you (approximately a third of the group) do not believe that Ben and Dave deserved to be censured for their actions on the Chengdu Hugo Team.

19. So… sure, if you want to take the Hugo-running duties out of the exclusive control of that Worldcon’s committee, I guess that this is as good a way as any, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve added some checks into the system.

    Moving the power to run the Hugos from an individual Worldcon to a permanent WSFS committee would add a check to the system. WSFS members wouldn’t have to worry any more that an individual Worldcon in an authoritarian country would have the power to manipulate the nominations and voting.

20. But almost nothing I read then from the people posting about their experiences with the committees, and the Business Meeting time and procedures, and the WSFS documents seemed in any way welcoming and open to new ideas.

    In one of the discussions since the Hugo scandal came to light, a person who has tried to become a part of committees inside the WSFS/Worldcon community had a good metaphor. They said they’ve been encouraged to climb the ladder but nobody ever tells you there’s a “missing rung.”

    It’s good that Linda Deneroff and Kevin Standlee are here making comments and encouraging people to get involved. But the people who run WSFS committees and the Hugos need to ask themselves if they are genuinely open to bringing in people to decision-making roles — or if all they actually want are people to work the cons in jobs where they’d have no power over anything and the same old SMOFs would still be in charge of everything.

21. Brian G: Chengdu’s Hugo committee had 9 members: 4 Western fans and 5 Chinese fans (I’m assuming from the names). Spoiler: It wasn’t the Chinese fans that turned out to be the problem, it was a few Western fans who were long-time members of the community.

    At this point we don’t know what the involvement of the Chinese members of the Hugo Admin team was, because we haven’t gotten to see any of McCarty’s e-mails with them. And we probably won’t ever get to know.

    And while those members may also be SF fans, I would like to point out again that the Chinese fans originally involved with the bid were mostly (or all) supplanted by Chinese business people whose businesses directly benefited from the convention after the bid won… something that a lot of people either haven’t noticed or continue to gloss over.

22. @Linda Deneroff – My apologies for giving that impression. That wasn’t my intention. It seems like many proposed solutions are just re-arranging things rather than changing the things that need to be changed.

    @rcade – But the Chengdu problems were not because of an authoritarian country’s laws. The problems were caused by people living in and working in North America which (let’s face it) is where the proposed committee will most likely be located. Pretending that these proposals will solve the problem isn’t going to help.

    I’m not trying to be defeatist or to pretend that everything is fine and dandy. I’m as worried by the Uganda bid as everyone else. I want someone to come up with a solution that actually solves things. I just don’t think this is it.

    @Doctor Science – I hope I’m not being rude or insulting to you. I really do appreciate the time, care and effort you put into working on this proposal. Truly, thank you for doing this.

23. @JJ

    I would like to point out again that the Chinese fans originally involved with the bid were mostly (or all) supplanted by Chinese business people whose businesses directly benefited from the convention after the bid won… something that a lot of people either haven’t noticed or continue to gloss over.

    That’s very true. I did notice back when it happened and I don’t think I’m glossing over it now. I just don’t agree that these proposals would have changed anything about the outcome had they been in place then, considering the heavy influence Dave McCarty had on the proceedings. There is nothing magic about locating a Hugo Award committee permanently in a particular place. Every country, every state or nation has laws which can be problematic. Any committe, no matter where located, will have volunteers from other countries helping out and/or interfacing with the current Worldcon. And those volunteers can be influenced/led/misled/have bad intentions. The same can be said for the permanent committee members, for that matter.

    I don’t want to be defeatist, I just don’t think the proposals I’ve seen will have the effect people want them to have. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they will work out. And if they do, I’ll be very glad. But my life experience is warning me they won’t.

24. Lorien Gray: I don’t want to be defeatist, I just don’t think the proposals I’ve seen will have the effect people want them to have.

    My comment was not intended for you, it was intended for all of the people who continue to insist that the Chinese members of the Hugo Admin team are innocent and blameless, when we don’t know whether that’s true and we’re not likely to ever know whether that’s true.

    I agree with you that this is a really hard problem. And I’m evaluating all of the things being proposed and listening to all of the arguments and hoping that something which does a better job than the current system can be found.

25. But the Chengdu problems were not because of an authoritarian country’s laws. The problems were caused by people living in and working in North America which (let’s face it) is where the proposed committee will most likely be located. Pretending that these proposals will solve the problem isn’t going to help.

    You are treating your assumptions as fact and proceeding from there. We don’t know that the fraud took place entirely within the Western members of the Hugo team for Chengdu. I’d say more but this point has been made many times in comments here.

    I’m not pretending about anything. Even if the problems were entirely what you assume them to be, the scandal still demonstrates that the existing way of doing things lacks accountability and is susceptible to corruption.

    Do you want Worldcon to go someplace authoritarian with the same vulnerable process in place? Or to have a future Worldcon chair decide that Dave McCarty was treated unfairly and appoint him to run another Hugos?

    A standing Hugo committee that has many elected positions, like the MPC, gives the members of WSFS actual representation in the administration of the awards. Letting each Worldcon run the Hugos gives us no representation at all.

26. @Brian_G:

    Your thought experiment of how a HTWG wouldn’t have helped w/Chengdu23 assumes that the members of the working group are J Random SMOFs, but they aren’t: they are, specifically, people who do the tech work.

    So the N-1 person from Chicon would most likely have been Dave Matthewman. The HTWG would also have included a tech person from Glasgow, very likely Kat Jones, it’s true. But even with McCarty & whoever was doing data-entry and vetting on the Chinese end, they wouldn’t be able to just write their own proprietary code, they would HAVE to work with the rest of the HTWG to come up with software that passes the requirements for transparency, checkability, & dependability.

27. We know for sure that Dave McCarty and members of his staff made major errors in judgment, removing Chinese nominations that should have been counted, and compiling dossiers on Western potential nominees for political vetting. Those were not software errors. I am skeptical about McCarty’s comment about buggy SQL, since it seems he was doing things in the database that he should not have been doing.

    I am strongly in favor of open source software. It would be nice to have open source software for Hugo administration. However, if anyone thinks that better software could have prevented the gross errors in judgment by the Chengdu Hugo administrators, they are mistaken.

    Also, the proposal for a Hugo Technology Working Group is overly bureaucratic, and it misses the point of what is actually needed for success. It is not necessary to amend the WSFS constitution to create an open source project. You can go to GitHub or GitLab or BitBucket and create a project in minutes. The requirements for the Hugo administration software are not going to change radically from year to year. You don’t need or want new developers for each Worldcon. The Hugo administration teams for each Worldcon are the software users. The users’ concern is running the Hugos, not running a software project. It will be better if the open source project is separate from WSFS. If the software is not satisfactory for any reason, WSFS should be able to switch to a better alternative.

    If a HTWG is set up within WSFS, somebody within the group is still going to have to create the open source project on GitHub or wherever. Somebody is going to have to recruit people with the needed skills and mentor people who are willing to learn. Somebody is going to have to set up continuous integration. Somebody is going to have to write unit tests, and documentation, and do usability evaluation. All these things have to happen whether or not the project is within WSFS. All that WSFS adds is a two year delay, and making it more complicated, bureaucratic, and political. Whereas an open source project can be started immediately, and it can kept simple and focused on what is actually needed.

28. As someone who is in the process of actually building one of these pieces of software, I can think of few things that would make me less-inclined than a committee directing my development.

29. The proposal seems to exaggerate the role of the tech. I support better transparency and oversight, but I’m skeptical of singling out the software part like this.

    The 2023 disaster was a people problem, not a tech problem. The stats document for 2023 would have been just as fictitious without the sql bug McCarty has admitted to. That McCarty used his own software is a symptom of him being stubborn, and in that sense it’s somewhat connected to the issues in 2023, but it’s not the cause of any of the problems with the 2023 process.

    The software involved in this does not seem to me to be hugely complex. It’s not something arcane that only a few super-nerds can have opinions on. The part that’s most opaque to non-techies is the security of the website and voter authentication – and that’s a place you don’t want to run three year old software because updates requires a committee meeting. If we have administrators we can trust, they should also be trusted to choose reliable software tools for the job, without a tech committee as a separate entity. If on the other hand we have administrators who can’t be trusted, having reliable software doesn’t help.

    PS: Mike, the links in the article are broken.

30. I totally agree with the last three comments here.

31. Does anyone know what software was used to run the Hugos by the last several Worldcons preceding Chengdu? I think some of them used Kansa, an open source effort begun by Worldcon 75:

    https://github.com/maailma/kansa

32. According to what Chris R said, it seems that some variant of Kansa was used for at least counting nominations for 2020-2022.

33. Mostly correct; I was corrected out of band.

    For 2020 (CoNZealand), nomination and vote collection was done by Wellington as developed and maintained by Matthew Gray. Nomination canonicalization and tallying was not, I’m not 100% sure what the final software was for it. I think it was actually Dave’s package.
    For 2021 (Discon III), nomination and vote collection was done by Wellington as maintained and extended by Fred Bauer. Nomination canonicalization was done by a Kansa variant
    For 2022 (Chicon 8), nomination and vote collection was done by Wellington, as maintained and extended by myself and Victoria Garcia. Nomination canonicalization was done by a Kansa variant
    For 2023, I am unaware of what software was used in detail, but I believe Dave’s software was used in canonicalization and counting.
    For 2024, Glasgow 2024 is and will be using NomNom for nomination and vote collection, and I believe (barring a panicked request that I expedite development on it… Nicholas, anything I need to know about? 😉 ) a Kansa variant for canonicalization and counting.
    For 2025, Kathy Bond has indicated she’d like me to ensure NomNom works for them, so that’s the plan. Hopefully I have nomination canonicalization implemented for them by then.

34. Yeah, that is all correct except that I would add David Matthewman to the list of developers for 2019, 2021 and 2022 (and 2024), and we must credit Eemeli Aro with writing Kansa in the first place. Going a bit further back, 2017 and 2019 were entirely Kansa. I had no involvement at all in 2018, but I suppose that Dave McCarty used his own software. I cannot speak to any other year.

35. As an end user, I remember being impressed in 2017 and then disappointed in 2018 that we were back to what looked like 2016’s system (presumably both Dave’s). Then happy again when 2019 was like 2017.

    What I remember from 2020 was that final voting didn’t open until 1 week before it was originally scheduled to close. They extended it a week so it closed with only 1 week before the convention.

    All seemed to work well in 2021 and 2022 as far as I recall. 2023 tried to look cool with the fading in and out as you scrolled at the expense of usability. I’ve been happy with 2024 so far…no mystery about what’s saved and getting email confirmations.

    2023’s issues honestly don’t seem to have been software problems. In spite of the stats being absolutely impossible in many cases, there was still one category where I could see that my nominations must have been calculated correctly. So as far as I can tell, the real problems were deliberate manipulation, not unintentional bugs.

36. no mystery about what’s saved and getting email confirmations.

    I’m really glad to see someone notice that. I suck at HTML/text copy, but I think I hit the right content there.

37. @Chris R
    Definitely appreciate that all that interface was well thought out.

38. @Chris R: Thanks for providing the software history. Do you know if it’s possible with the Kansa variant being used for counting to create a bunch of totally fake nominations and votes, process that data with the software and compare its results to the expected results to confirm it worked correctly?

39. I see no reason that would be hard; that’s actually roughly how data gets into it for the real deal anyway.

40. If something bureacratic must be done, the main issue is ensuring that votes are counted.

    I suppose that even the “limited governance” of WSFS could plausibly extend to maintaining a membership list.

    So how about something like the following rough sketch.

    Noting in advance that
    – a) legalities of data protection must be thought through more carefully than in this spitball version;
    – b) someone versed in election security should refine the ballot verification process;
    – c) I think one Committee to “protect” stuff is better than lots of different ones;
    – d) I’ve left my disagreement with EPH out of the discussion;
    – e) I endorse a return to paper-only ballots but this could be done electronically with a lot of extra work.

    Change to 1.7.1: “There shall be a Mark Protection and Membership Integrity Committee (MPMIC) of WSFS, responsible for: (1) registration and protection of the marks used by or under the authority of WSFS; (2) securely maintaining and, upon request or at the end of eligibility, deleting personal contact details of all individuals entitled to membership rights under this Constitution, for the sole purpose of supporting the exercise of those rights.”

    Addition of X.X: “Upon obtaining explicit consent from each member, which will detail the purpose of data collection along with members’ rights to amend or delete their data at any time, each Worldcon Committee shall update the MPMIC with current members’ names and contact information to be used exclusively for verifying voting eligibility.”

    Addition of 1.7.X: “The Mark Protection and Membership Integrity Committee (MPMIC) shall issue a unique verification code to each member for the purpose of securing ballots in WSFS voting processes.”

    Add 1.7.X: “The MPMIC shall send to every member a report on the results of the audit of any WSFS voting process, including minority reports, within thirty (30) days after it is initiated.”

    Change to 3.7.2:”The Committee will apply or attach each member’s unique verification code to their nominating ballot or ballot envelope in a manner suitable to the chosen ballot formats, and shall include with each ballot a copy of Article 3 of the WSFS Constitution and any applicable extensions of eligibility under Section 3.4.”

    Change to 3.12.3: “The complete numerical vote totals, including all preliminary tallies, shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ten (10) days after the Worldcon. Additionally, within the same period, the results of the last ten rounds (or all rounds if fewer than ten) of the finalist selection process for each category shall be published. Nomination and final award ballots, along with their disaggregated verification codes, will be retained and made available for audit by any MPMIC member or members for an additional ninety (90) days.”

41. As an aside, this keeps freaking me out a little because my first C coding job was developing an OS/2 package for a Finnish insurance company called Kansa.

    God, what a complete clusterfucxk that was. I think every company involved in that project wound up going bankrupt?

42. No agreement that WSFS should keep a list of its own members just long enough to be able to tell them whether their ballot was counted?

43. @ Linda Deneroff:

    I am sorry that I wasn’t clear: I had zero problems with Kevin’s explanation/explication and did not find it over-long in any way. I like not only his comment but his willingness to share information as I tried to explain. And since my comments tend to show that I tend toward the verbose, plus autism monologues, I would be a hypocrite to accuse anyone of over-explaining.

    My point was that if the relatively short WSFS document (policy, rules, guidelines, whatever) needed so many words to explain something, that it’s fair to call the rules arcane

    I am turning 69 this year, and over the last fifty or so years, I’ve been involved in a number of organizations, volunteer groups, and even my university committees to do the work, finally ending out more than burned out a few years even before Covid which is when I retired.

    The incident I mentioned about looking into getting involved with a proposal to create a New Best Related (book) Work was some years ago: I wasn’t burned out then, but it was getting close.

    I know how hard it is to get volunteers not only to join a group but to stay with it, just as I also know that some groups tend to welcome and encourage new involvement (without demanding that the new people look like/act like/agree with the older members), and some don’t. Even now I’m currently involved in the last effort I intend to volunteer for, trying to work on changing organizational culture and practices.

    I don’t have anything left I can offer the WSFS or the Hugos in part because due to chronic health problems, including Diabetes 1, and living on a fixed income, I cannot ever attend a WorldCon that isn’t very close (I hope to be at the Seattle one for the first time). Since a number of people have made it clear that only those privileged enough to be present in person can participate in the Business Meeting, that means that a lot of people will not be able volunteer even if they wished to.

    So the question is how much is the WSFS organization culture maintaining the system where the same people year in and year out do all the work while failing to moderate the culture or set up options to bring in new people and provide training and mentoring before the same people burn out.

    It’s hard (I know because that’s a major part of what I’ve been working on), and what’s depressing is how many of those in power in the organization keep saying they want change and diversity and transparency, and how little time/effort they are willing to put into actually making changes.

    I remember being told years ago (at my university in this case after volunteering to get involved in a teaching online initiative that was the administrative cause of that year, soon to be forgotten of course!) that “yes, we want you all to think outside the box, but you can’t keep asking us to do things we’ve never done before.”

    I resigned from that committee at the end of the term.

44. At present, the software is not complex. I have conducted a number of votes similar to the Hugo vote. It took a day to write the software to do the calculations and take the votes, if that. One hardly needs a committee for that. One could write more software to automate a bit more of the process, though it’s frankly not worth it. In addition, it is implied with a committee of this sort that their software must be used, or would any Hugo committee be free to use other software if they didn’t like it? If not, what does this create that doesn’t exist?

    What you do want, perhaps, is not particular code, but procedures. In particular, the main procedure needed is to have any ballots received go through a tool which logs them for auditing and forwards them to the current hugo committee. That’s not a complex tool, in fact any mailing list tool could do that (like google groups etc.) if the ballots are converted to emails, sent to the master address, and from there redirected to the current commitee and any auditor (though most of these tools archive messages so that’s their main function.) This technology already exists, no need for a committee to build it, only to have a rule where some entity is in charge of the subscription list, and every year changes where the mails go.

    Canonicalization is almost always a mostly human process, though you could make software help with it a bit.
    A tool to generate and validate voting/nominating tokens (Hugo PIN) could be useful but is also not that complex. I mean, if you want it to be high security it’s more complex but unfortunately also complex for the users.

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