By Kevin Standlee: Popular Ratification is the name of a proposal that would change the way that amendments to the WSFS Constitution are ratified, opening up the process so that all WSFS members (attending and non-attending) would have a vote in the process.
Currently, changes to the WSFS Constitution must be passed by the vote of the WSFS Business Meeting at two consecutive Worldcons. Only WSFS members attending the Business Meeting may vote. The current system allows the second year’s meeting to make changes to the proposal, provided that such changes do not increase the scope of the proposal.
Many members have complained that it is unfair that only those WSFS members who have the resources to attend Worldcon and the ability to spend a substantial portion of their time at that Worldcon in the Business Meeting have a voice and a vote in the amendment process.
Some people have proposed things like holding the meeting entirely online or allowing proxy voting. This proposal does not address those ideas, but does address something that I know I have heard many times. People who attend Worldcon but whose other commitments do not allow them to spend 10 AM to 1 PM for three or four days of the convention attending the Business Meeting have complained, “I can’t spend all of that time, and I don’t want to sit through all of that debate stuff. I just want to vote!”
WSFS doesn’t have a Board of Directors. It is governed by a “Town Meeting” direct democracy. Because of this, the Meeting can often spend a lot of time arguing procedural matters. There is no delegated decision-making body. All legislation is in the hands of the members, but only those members who come and sit through the arguments, amendments, and maneuvering. This can be immensely frustrating and time-consuming. It is a big barrier to participation.
Short of changing our system to an elected representative democracy, there are a few ways that we could allow all WSFS members to directly vote upon proposals, Popular Ratification is one of those ways.
Under Popular Ratification, the Business Meeting would still be the place where constitutional amendments start. The process of hashing out a proposal and wordsmithing it would continue to be at the Business Meeting. Once a proposal passes the Business Meeting, it would be the responsibility of the following year’s Worldcon to submit those changes to a vote of all of all current WSFS members. Those members would not have to attend Worldcon or the Business Meeting.
This new ratification process would allow members to vote in advance or at the convention. This is the same system as we use for voting on future Worldcon Site Selection. Unlike Site Selection, no additional fee would be required to vote on ratification of constitutional amendments.
All WSFS members, attending or not, could vote. Any proposal that gets more yes votes than no votes would be ratified and would take effect at the end of the Worldcon where the ratification vote was held.
There are exceptions and special cases defined in the motion, including dealing with proposals with conflicting effects.
This proposed procedure is similar to how changes to the constitutions of some states in the USA are handled. In those states, the legislature originates constitutional amendments, which are then submitted to the voters of the state for ratification.
I think that this proposal strikes a balance between the debate needed to originate constitutional amendments and recognizing that all of the members of the World Science Fiction Society have a stake in the process of making changes to the Society’s rules.
This proposal would not speed up the process of changing the WSFS Constitution. Some people think that it should be possible to make changes very quickly, and even to apply changes retroactively. While I understand the passion that these people have, an organization’s fundamental governing document should not be subject to sudden changes. This is why WSFS has required that constitutional changes take two years to complete. The two-year ratification process reduces what has been called “meeting packing,” It is not difficult to round up a bunch of people at a single Worldcon to push through proposals, It is a lot harder to do it two years in a row.
This would not be the first time that WSFS has changed its rules to allow people who cannot attend the Business Meeting to have a stake in a major part of how Worldcon works. Until the early 1970s, the selection of the site for future Worldcons was done entirely by a vote of the Business Meeting. You had to be at the meeting in order to vote. According to what I have read, only those people who were present at the start of the meeting where the vote would happen could vote. The doors were secured and late-comers were not admitted. This was to make sure that each bid could make a speech before the vote so that all the voters could hear it. Voting was done only in person.
By 1975, the members of WSFS had voted to introduce advance voting by mail. Today, almost fifty years later, we take it for granted that site selection voting is done in advance and at the convention. The Business Meeting’s role has been reduced to a ceremonial receipt of the results, even when there have been legitimate questions raised about the voting. Today, the idea that the Business Meeting should have a substantive voice in the determination of the results of Site Selection appears to be considered absurd by most members.
Over the years, WSFS has changed its rules to increase its openness to participation by all of its members, not just those physically present at the convention or at the Business Meeting. This has included such steps as publishing the meetings’ minutes, making the governing documents available online, and recording and posting recordings of the meetings. Publishing recordings of the Business Meeting was controversial when we started doing so in the 2000s. There were some members of long standing who strongly objected to recordings being made. They certainly did not want those recordings published where anyone with a web browser could see them. It did not become a fully accepted part of the process until the Business Meeting passed a rule confirming it. Now, we take for granted that the Business Meeting can provide for official recordings. Also, any member of WSFS present at the meeting may make their own recordings. Thus, the proceedings of WSFS, once obscure, are open to everyone who wants to see them.
We have changed our rules to allow the non-attending members to vote on where to hold future Worldcons. We have made the Business Meeting less mysterious and something where all members can hear the debate over proposals. Surely we can change our rules to allow them to have a vote in the process for changing our fundamental governing document. Doing so would be another step in an ongoing process of opening up the governance of the World Science Fiction Society to all of its members.
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As one of the sponsors, I would like to make a technical comment:
I wrote and maintain the system used to collect nominations and votes for The Hugo Awards that was used for Chicon 7 (in an early form), Loncon 3, Sasquan, MidAmericon II, and Worldcon 76.
Based upon my work creating and maintaining this, and my experience from over 30 years working as a professional software engineer who has not worked with websites and web applications professionally, I believe that I could make the modifications to run the votes required under this proposal with between 40 and 80 hours of personal effort, with some help in testing and verification.
I suspect that the developers who have provided the more modern web interfaces for Hugo Award voting used at other recent European and North American Worldcons could probably adapt their systems with a comparable effort.
Further, the commercial operation that Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for Our Future and LA in 2026 have partnered with for site selection appears capable of offering such a service. This indicates that there is at least one, and probably other, commercial services available that could offer this service if a Worldcon has more financial resources than volunteer resources available for this problem.
There is no technical reason that this cannot be done. Kevin has outlined the other reasons for doing it, so I will not repeat these here (although I may do so in the business meeting if I need to provide rebuttal).
Ron, it’s probably worth noting that NomNom has the functionality for this already built thanks to the request from Glasgow to support advisory votes 😀
Agreed. I vote in more than one election for organizations I belong to including the Hugo Awards and on-line bid voting using only a computer. Some involves money! Chengdu of dubious trust took my money and gave it to Glasgow and I voted.
I’m all in on this, and I think this will enable us to make the distinction between the voice of the Business Meeting and the voice of the WorldCon a bit less.
Kevin writes that current WSFS philosophy is that the foundational document of an organization should not be subject to quick change, which is reasonable. However, it makes the organization fragile under actual attack–it can not adapt and respond. Two principles that might improve that would be to understand that the rules of an award need not be part of the constitution of an organization, and don’t need quite this level of protection. I am not familiar with many organizations that put the fine details of award rules into the societal constitution and heavily protect them. The awards are also what have come under attack. The constitution might describe core principles but not fine details, but as much as we argue greatly about the Hugos, they shouldn’t be in the constitution or be a large fraction of it.
The Hugos are, other than the awards ceremony, not done at the convention. Nominating, voting, administration are all done outside of it.
A lesser change to removing them from the constitution and giving them their own process would be to allow ratification to take place well before the convention. The key is that ratification is done by the members of the next convention, not AT the next convention. That still applies a moderating effect. For example, when measures were adapted to counter the puppies, they could not come into effect for 2 years, but ratification in January would have responded much more quickly.
I believe it could be a further step for the more participance in the business meeting.
Not only the online votes but also the online meeting could be accepted. Online meeting is developing and there are more online members. Online members should not be limited in the limited votes like the Hugo. What really matters is participance. You cannot say that the meaning of Worldcons is sending ballots and votes without discussing and meeting new friends.
So we will meet an online business meeting as a part of online worldcon. In addition, it can also promote Worldcon in a bigger range of fandom and ordinary people by introducing a streaming for the duration of business meeting. People will watch Youtube or Bilibili and say”I can join this, too.”
I have not finished all the proposals. But maybe we can start some experiments like some online discussion on the proposals this year. It could be the start of the better change.
I have a lot of sympathy for this motion (for the reasons given by Kevin), however I wonder (out of my position of ignorance of the finer detail of WSFS BM workings) if this might facilitate gamesmanship á la Sad Puppies?
Can anyone kindly advise?
I would suggest that people who want to turn the WSFS Business Meeting into a round-the-clock 24/7/365 continuous Zoom call treat it as a separate proposal.
I’m deeply skeptical of a direct democracy with thousands of people yelling at the same time. If our current form of “town meeting” is not fit for purpose (and I personally do not think that it is), then let’s elect representatives to a Council of WSFS (I’ve suggested that 21 is approximately the right size for such a body) and require that its meetings be held in such a way that the other members of WSFS can see what’s happening, including an in-person meeting at Worldcon, but possibly including other meetings held online.
In the meantime, I think that even with an elected council, changes to the fundamental governing document of WSFS should be ratified by the membership as a whole.
Incidentally, I could certainly see shifting the Hugo Award rules to a separate document, not part of the Constitution of WSFS, but that’s a separate matter and it’s too late to propose new business this year.
My main concern is that lack of (and perhaps impossibility of holding) informed opinions by the masses of individuals who are casually interested in Worldcon makes the judgment of this community both vulnerable to being swayed by strident voices and generally pretty terrible. Direct democracy is always an up or down vote, and nuance dies in the face of proposals with catchy hooks and which pander to existing prejudices.
As a staff member to a legislative body (in my day job), there really isn’t a substitute for deliberation by people with skin in the game who can exchange ideas in real time. Direct democracy can be useful to circumvent certain kinds of legislative incapacity, but in my experience never, never leads to a high quality legislative product.
I’m not sure I can argue with a straight face that the current system is better, but on the whole I don’t think I can support this proposal.
What would be better than the status quo or this proposal? I would recommend a two-day WSFS business meeting, held at a different time of year, perhaps either the weekend before or after SmofCon, to be administered by the most recent Worldcon, and done either entirely online or as a hybrid in-person/online event, at the discretion of the Worldcon.
Kevin Standlee:
Um, so what do you actually think? Do you not think that it is not fit, or not think that it is fit? The phrasing is rather confusingly unfortunate, and I dare not guess from context.
@Jan: Yeah, I read that as Kevin S. believing that the current system is fit, but the statement is not not ambiguous.
Jan Vanek jr. on July 18, 2024 at 3:24 pm said:
I do not think that our current system is fit for purpose. It has not been fit for many years. I think that we should shift to a representative council that would originate legislation, and that any constitutional changes should be ratified by a vote of the members of the following year’s Worldcon.
I did not propose a Council of WSFS because there was already too much business submitted this year, and because I thought there might be a chance that Popular Ratification might pass this year. It did get first passage in 2014, but failed ratification in 2015 because a compromise to get the first passage in 2014 would have led to constitutional amendments taking three years to pass, and there appear to be a large number of people who consider one year to be too long, let alone the current two.
Thank you for clarifying, Kevin.
er…. No-one’s answered my query.
🙁
Jonathan C. on July 18, 2024 at 3:55 am said:
What do you mean by the question. If enough people buy memberships, they can take over the organization. Isn’t that obvious?
I would generalize your question to, “What if the ‘wrong sort of people’ vote?” That is a question that all democratically-run societies seem to face.
@Kevin
Thank you for the reply.
If enough people buy memberships, they can take over the organization. Isn’t that obvious?
Yes, of course ( 🙁 ), but doesn’t this mean that with only a membership for one year they get a second bite at the cherry for free with the second year??????
(Or is this a mis-reading of the proposal???)
So as it stands now, to propose and then next year ratify, they’d need two memberships.
I would generalize your question to, “What if the ‘wrong sort of people’ vote?”
I wouldn’t.
Jonathan C on July 23, 2024 at 3:20 am said:
No. In order to vote on ratification, you have to be at least a WSFS (old supporting) member of the following year’s convention. Being a WSFS member of this year’s convention does not make you a WSFS member of next year’s convention.
Yes, and I wish I knew where you got it, because I tried really hard to make this clear.
That is correct. As it stands now, to vote for something in its first year, they would have to have an attending membership (WSFS+Attending supplement) and attend the Business Meeting in year 1, just like right now.
In order to vote on ratification, they would have to have at least a WSFS (old supporting) membership in the convention in years 2. Being a member of year 1 doesn’t give you the right to vote on the ratification in year 2, just like being a member of year 1 doesn’t give you the right to vote on the Final Hugo Award ballot or the Site Selection in year 2.