58 thoughts on “Worldcon 76 Open Post for August 19”

1. Thanks to Dougtron3030 on August 19, 2018 at 3:50 pm for jumping in to clarify the nature of the Goblin Emperor sequel. In the same world. Not a direct sequel. Set in Maia’s reign. Still unbearably cool.

2. I’m kinda hoping for Maia’s astronomer-sister (can’t recall her name, alas) to be the viewpoint. But, honestly, anything would be good!

   (I’d thought I’d posted this yesterday, but I guess the non-autofill issue kept it from going up)

3. If was “Evil Kevin” Roche in the mirror-universe Star Trek outfit, not me. I was (during Opening Ceremony and the Retro-Hugo Awards) in my WSFS Captain’s uniform.

   A better way to get called upon to speak before the Business Meeting is to sit in the forward section, rather than to lurk in the back. The stage lighting was such that the Chair of the meeting, Tim Illingworth, simply couldn’t see anyone much farther back in the room than the people upon which he called. In fact, I ended up removing a chair in which I’d been sitting when he told me that I was invisible in that seat.

   I noticed in Kansas City that Jared Dashoff went out of his way to call upon more than the Usual Suspects. I understood why he was doing it even if I was frustrated to not be able to speak to certain substantive issues.

   The one really complex piece of business there on the last day was really not that complex if the people involved would have been a bit more precise upon what happened. Here’s the sequence, in the order made, with all of the extraneous material removed so you can see what happened:

   1. Main Motion (motion to amend the WSFS Constitution to change the Artist Hugos).

   2. Amendment to Main Motion (motion to amend the main motion by changing the wording regarding the Fan Artist Hugo Award).

   3. Motion to Refer all pending business to the Hugo Awards Study Committee with instructions to report back to next year’s Business Meeting with better wording.

   4. Motion to amend the motion to Refer by striking out “Hugo Awards Study Committee” and inserting “a committee for this sole purpose to be appointed by the Chair of the meeting.”

   Now all of these motions were made in the correct order, because each of them takes precedence over the others. You then have to take them up in the reverse order they were made, by the principle of one question at a time. The real problem here — and why I got involved — is that if you don’t make it very clear what’s happening on item 4, you make it sound like voting for it sends the pile to the special committee, and that’s the end. Item 4 did not send anything to committee; all it did was decide to which committee it would be referred if it was sent to committee at all. You could be in favor of a special committee over the HASC, but opposed to the concept of sending to committee. Thus you have to use precise wording so people know what they’re voting on.

   The meeting voted to adopt the amendment at item 4. That didn’t send anything to committee. It just changed item 3 to be to refer to a special committee. Item 3, as amended, then passed, and that ended the debate, because when the material gets referred to committee, the meeting has dispensed with further consideration.

   Now as far as simplifying things goes, I’m not sure how you make this much simpler. Surely we need to be able to change motions up for consideration, and to refer them to committees, and possibly to change which committee we mean to refer them to.

   You’re probably right that “Business Meeting” isn’t a great description. It’s not a meeting of a business; however, in parliamentary procedure, the items that a deliberative assembly considers are known as “business” and thus we have a Business Meeting. It’s really the Town Meeting of WSFS.

   As long as we want every single attending member of WSFS To have the right to debate and vote upon every proposal, we have to have rules, and fairly complex ones. Anyone who thinks I’m overly formal should have seen what I’d planned if the 2015 meeting had ballooned up to 1000 people, as seemed possible at the time and for which I had Plan C — the room where we met was already Plan B as we would clearly have overflowed Plan A — ready to go if necessary.

   I do agree that our current implementation of Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised has accumulated a lot of parliamentary barnacles. Ironically, what we’ve done for the most part has been to push us closer to the other rival manual, the Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure (previously known as Sturgis’ Rules for the name of the original author). However, the one attempt I made to get Westercon to adopt the simpler rules foundered because the members are familiar with the RONR “brand name” even if they don’t really want the substance of it.

   And I can’t and should not preside over every WSFS meeting, even though it’s the only job in the entire convention that I actually enjoy doing. (I do not enjoy running the WSFS Division. I do it because it needs doing and I’m a good fit for it.) We need a cadre of people who can all do it. I’m the youngest member of the “old guard” and I turn 53 years old tomorrow. I’ve been working for some years to help develop some people who will take over. I’m very happy that Jared Dashoff and Jesi Lipp are stepping up to take the gavel from us Old Fogies. But in order for them to do it, they need experience, and other than Westercon, there aren’t a lot of other places they can get it other than by doing it. If that means they need to stumble a few times while they figure out what needs doing, then so be it. I made plenty of mistakes when I first presided in 1995. Heck, I made mistakes when I presided last year in 2017!

   I’ve told Jared and Jesi that they need to develop some other people in their generation, because nobody lives forever. I trust them to carry the gavel forward to the next generation of WSFS members, because Worldcon is as important to them as it is to me.

4. Happy birthday, Kevin Standlee!

   And I’m sorry I couldn’t be there this year to sit on the front row and h/e/c/k/l/e/ remind people with my sign to use the mic.

5. Thanks, Lenore. As it happens, this year’s microphones were very “hot” and the Sergeants-at-Arms were deployed to adjust the mics to the correct height/orientation of each speaker, so there were relatively few calls of “use the mic!” If anything, the head-table microphones were too hot, as you could hear lots of side conversations. Lisa tells me that she could hear the Secretary’s keyboard in her headphones (the sound fed to her camera, which is why the recordings are so good) until I went up to the head table and moved Linda Deneroff’s microphone away from the computer.

6. That’s good to hear! And was there captioning? None on the video, I imagine?

7. Lenore Jones / jonesnori on August 27, 2018 at 8:12 am said:

   And was there captioning? None on the video, I imagine?

   The live show had CART (real-time captioning) visible on one of the two screens in the room (but not on the screen in Callahan’s Place); however, the Tech Team told me afterwards that the version with the captions wouldn’t feed to the live-stream properly, so they had to send the non-captioned version.

8. Someday we’ll figure out the tech to make that work more easily, I hope. I know it’s possible to send captions over an internet feed separately from pictures, to a screen or people’s devices, so that might be a workaround. But same screen is terrific when it can be made to work. Anyway, thanks for having them in the room again!

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