INTRODUCTION. The deadline to submit proposals to the Glasgow 2024 Business Meeting was July 10. The formal agenda will be out soon, but in the meantime the movers of 15 submitted items have provided copies for publication and discussion on File 770.
“And The Horse You Rode In On” proposes to permanently bar any Hugo Administrator who disqualifies a nominee for a reason outside those in the Constitution and allows the category to be run without them shall be barred thereafter from participating in the award administration. There also are sanctions provided against a Worldcon committee that keeps such a person in the administrative role.
SHORT TITLE: AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON
Add Section 3.14 as follows:
Section 3.14: Disqualification of Administrator. Any Hugo Administrator, or other person ultimately responsible for administering the Hugo Awards, who disqualifies an otherwise-eligible nominee for a reason other than one found in this Constitution and who thereafter allows the category to be run without them shall thereafter be barred from participating in the administration of the Hugo Awards. Any Worldcon Committee which appoints such a person to a role administering the Hugo Awards and does not remove them upon being informed of their ineligibility shall be deemed to have declared themselves incapable under Section 2.6 of this Constitution. Should a Worldcon Committee decline to delegate authority to a Subcommittee under Section 3.13, the Convention Chair(s) shall be considered responsible under this section alongside the Hugo Administrator and be sanctioned accordingly.
SPONSORS: Cliff Dunn, Kevin Sonney, and Kristina Forsyth
DISCUSSION: As things stand, there are a lot of proposed rules restricting a Hugo Administrator from throwing things off the ballot. However, most of these lack consequences for the party responsible for the problem. With this proposal, we aim to change that.
Bluntly, if we could bar the person(s) responsible for the 2023 fiasco from being involved in the Hugo Awards for the rest of time, we would do so. However, ex post facto laws are a bad thing and we’re not willing to open up that can of worms. So we’ve settled on proposing this going forward: If anything like what happened with the 2023 Hugo Awards happens again, the Hugo Administrator is done with the Hugo Awards and future conventions are on notice that they are to be barred, on pain of being unseated. If a convention fails to delegate authority to a subcommittee under Section 3.13 of the Constitution (we would suggest that any direct interference on their part would constitute not having delegated that authority), then the Convention Chair is also deemed to have had the authority to intervene and to have failed to do so. We don’t expect this to come up – this has, to our knowledge, been done every year for many years – but we felt it important to address this possibility.
We don’t want to go further than this – there are people who will serve on the relevant committee in a ministerial role but make no formal decisions, and we don’t want to get into the question of who had what power and who didn’t. However, the head of the committee/Hugo Administrator, regardless of their title, should be deemed to have that power and thus if this decision is made, they own it. If they have an underling who they cannot stop from doing so, then they need to resign rather than permit such an abuse of the process continue in their name.
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Yup
Yes, but why pick on the horse? Everyone always picks on the horse, who did nothing. 🙂
(Pixel Scroll title: “and the pixel you scrolled in on” )
Question: should the committee head/administrator be held resposible if the underling disqualifies a nominee for an invalid reason and then falsifies a valid one to cover their tracks?
I’m cool with that.
@Stuart:
So, if it is an erroneous disqualification it’s still under a section of the Constitution. It’s just incorrectly there, and I’d say that the admin should be fine.
If an underling DQs something “because reasons” (essentially what Dave did in Chengdu) then the Hugo Admin needs to fire them or quit. If they sign off on that from someone below them, they own it.
Now, if there’s a blatantly spurious DQ nominally invoking a clause of the Constitution but which cannot plausibly be legitimate? We can deal with that when we come to it, but I suspect that the BM would promptly pass a resolution to the effect of “Ha ha, nice try”. It would probably depend on how utterly absurd the disqualification was.
But at a minimum the Hugo Admin would /have/ to point to /something/ or it’s automatically game over for them.
@Gray:
My concern is not for either the genuine errors or the blatantly spurious disqualifications. My concern is for plausible disqualifications that only emerge later as being deliberate falsifications by the underling. For the admin to catch these they would have double check everything and might as well do away with underlings and do all the work themselves.
Another case where I think we’re overlapping too much. The Censure = Ice Floe should do what this aims to do. If we’re not willing to vote for censure on a case of bad DQs, then we’re in bigger trouble. Plus, if it’s clear the chairs were equally responsible, you can package them
@Christopher J. Garcia:
Is “The Censure = Ice Floe” “When we censure you, we mean it”? Or is it another item on the table? Your phrasing is a perfectly viable name for a business item, so I’m not sure.
There is definitely overlap – credit/blame not knowing what the BM will stomach or where people will want things to go.