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mnemeI've been seeing some hilariously bad takes being pointed to on Bluesky or otherwise on the blogosphere.
Ok, so for anyone getting to the news late, the Chengdu Worldcon's Hugos (that is, the 2023 Hugos) were fsked in multiple ways at the nomination stage, throwing entirely reasonable doubt onto the finalist's rights to be there for multiple categories:
1. A "slate" of about 1000 ballots, for a mix of works, but mostly Chinese works, were thrown out. Most notably, this doesn't appear to be an organized slate, but 1000 genuine Chinese fans who seem to have mostly voted for works published in a magazine (that said, if the data that seems to match the "slate" is matches the data from the supposedly slated works, their votes -were- highly coordinated in suspicious ways). This was never publicly announced, but leaked.
2. Numerous works were disqualified with no explanation (later leaks indicate that the normal "vetting" process that usually verifies that top potential finalists are qualified was abused to instead, or additionally, collect political information about the works and their creators, presumably so it could be used to determine which to disqualify them; some of this information is shockingly inaccurate).
3. Many of the unexplained DQs can be sourced to the "vetting". Others (most notably, the Sandman TV show) cannot.
Ok, so, I'm not going to repeat the excellent research done on this, and because I'm lazy I'm not going to track down links for it today. If someone comments with them in I can throw stuff in I think belongs.
But I've seen some terrible takes on this. Ones that claim that this was a concerted attempt to make sure Chinese writers didn't get nominated for major Hugos, or that it could have been HAPPENING FOR YEARS. Or that it was One Lone Rogue Admin.
But the evidence doesn't support this. No convention's nominations show the kind of data that indicate major tampering with the nominations this way (and none, including Chengdu, have anything showing major tampering with the votes themselves).
Instead, the evidence seems to point to the following:
1. Chengdu won the Worldcon.
2. At this point, long-time con volunteers who had offered their help to Chengdu (or been recruited) -- Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow, announced their position in the con (I may be off in timing but I know Ben was announced as a co-chair when the bid did their presentation and thus must have volunteered to help significantly earlier; Dave might for all I know have joined as Hugo administrator somewhat later).
3. Among other things, in advance of nominations going up, a competing magazine to the one primarily sponsoring the con posted a recommendation list with around 8 entries per category for major categories (a category can only have 6 (or fewer) finalists except in very strange, unlikely situations)
4. The con setup happened, stuff happened, eventually nominations happened and works were nominated for Hugos.
5. In particular, around 1000 or so people voted for things exclusively from the recommendation list in the magazine, forming an informal (apparently) but very effective slate that would likely have gotten ~4 items onto major categories with only 2 entries not from the list.
6. Nominations closed.
7. At this point, con staff (and other volunteers) attempted to handle multiple issues. First, they had noticed the "slate," and probably wanted to know what could be done about it. Second, there seems to have been an expectation that works that didn't accord with Chinese law would be removed from nomination.
8. Ok, so this brings us to the elephant in the room: Dave McCarty. Dave seems to have long been under the opinion that a Hugo committee could rule a work ineligible for the award at any time and for any reason. He has some cover in that The World Science Fiction Society constitution (which governs Worldcon and its Hugos) includes the phrase: "3.8.2: The Worldcon Committee shall determine the eligibility of nominees and
assignment to the proper category of works nominated in more than one category." A reasonable person would look at that phrase and assume it means that the committee should apply the -other rules- in the constitution (and there are a number of them) to determine which nominees are eligible for which awards, disqualify any that aren't eligible for any and move nominations to the right category if they were split between multiple categories. Dave's interpretation seems to, however, be that they can basically disqualify -any- works for any reason they choose, and also incidentally do the other stuff. After all, that's the rules (as we've seen from the controversy, Dave was kinda discounting the clear fact that rules aren't the only thing constraining a Worldcon committee -- public opinion and general assumptions of good practice are, but then, he according to good report tried to do this in 2016 (the second year a group ran an organized slate in order to push their own picks onto the Hugo ballot in opposition to the people who usually vote for these things, before we changed the rules to make this much harder) and was basically yelled at by multiple people on the concom (convention committee) until he backed off...for that year.
9. At this point, we have a mix of conjecture and what we actually know. We know that the "slate" was disqualified because that was leaked from internal memos. We know that volunteers sent emails asking for clarifications on vague vetting instructions (including stuff like "has been to Tibet", "mentions Taiwan", and "talks about Chinese history"). We don't actually know how big the slate is, but the numbers in the nomination report are sufficiently wonky that it's been theorized that the report was complied by just removing the "slated" works and advancing everything else up, leaving the traces of a 1000 ballot slate assigned to the wrong work. We also, from internal (leaked) memos have lists that list around 6-8 works with "1s" (indicating that they were at the top of the ballot--but if we combine that with the numbers on the statistics, that would probably mean they'd have dominated 4-5 entries on the ballot, not all 6 because the "EPH" system dilutes the effect of a slate, but that's a qualified deduction) that don't appear on the final ballot, all or most of them written in Chinese. And, of course, we know the released Nomination statistics, which include really numeric clustering, with unexplained disqualification and ballots that seem to be heavily clustered at the top, including ballots that would have to be believed to be heavily coordinated and supporting both English and Chinese works. And we have Dave's statements -- including that he was "following the rules that we must follow" and that the inconsistencies in the nomination statistics were (at least partially) because of coding issues.
But we can draw some plausible conclusions from this data:
Dave's ruling on the "slate" was that they should just eliminate it. Since he was the designated expert in Worldcon rules, it seems likely he got little if any pushback on this like he did in 2016. This happens to have eliminated numerous popular Chinese works from consideration (particularly for Novel), but that doesn't appear to be the intended aim; instead, Occam's razor indicates that the aim was going forwards with Dave's preferred way of handling slates (as it happens, he has campaigned against the -current- way of handling slates, that being the EPH system of reducing the power of highly coordinated unranked ballots, which I had some hand in designing, so applying his thoughts here when he had the power might have been part of his attempt to prove we didn't need EPH) as he wanted to do in 2016, not a conspiracy against Chinese works.
The volunteers who did "vetting" did point out (sometimes erroneous) political issues with some of the nominees. We don't know how their reports were used, but we know the results -- some of the nominees flagged were seated as nominees; others were DQed without explanation. Additionally, some other works were also DQed -- most notably the Sandman series and episode (one without explanation, one with the explanation that it was moved to the other category, but one can deduce that in fact they were both censored). We also know that a now-deleted Chinese website (government, I think)? talked about how "three teams" had vetted the Hugo nominees. From this, we can draw the conclusion that multiple teams associated with the 2023 Worldcon were working on political vetting -- the team we had a leak from (English speaking) and two other teams. (presumably one Chinese and looking at Chinese works, and one dealing with wider issues and probably LGBT, which probably was where the DQ research on Sandman came from, but this is speculation).
So, all this data was compiled, and the team (with Dave as the final call--but leaning on whoever in the convention was interpreting "the rules we must follow" -- that is, the often vague rules people use to avoid being externally and officially censored) determined what to DQ. And this included a combination of European authors and works--but also several authors of Chinese ancestry and family living outside of China. One could, of course, draw a conspiracy-theory explanation (ignoring, of course, the several creators DQed with no links to China at all, other than a trip to Nepal that a vetter confused for a trip to Tibet) that this was intended to hurt authors of Chinese ancestry (and it did, systemically), but a more plausible explanation presents itself: Authors of Chinese ancestry are quite likely to address topics of Chinese history, or have made blog posts about Chinese politics -- or other things that would have concerned the English-speaking vetters (and did). Yes, this includes Babel -- a work that was, during 2023, published in China with existent but minimal censorship and did extremely well there. But again, what is more plausible? That this was part of a conspiracy to remove Chinese works from the ballot? Or that the already-known guidelines the committee were much more likely to target people of Chinese ancestry and family history?
So, basically: A Chinese committee won a Worldcon. They recruited some folks (including Dave, who has some views about administrative power that don't match the rest of fandom's views about how such power and responsibility should be exercised). They then attempted to (with the help of volunteers) run the Hugos in a uniquely Chinese way, including self-censorship (the decision to remove an informal slate, however, seems likely to have been all Dave).
The result hit a lot of Chinese works (fortunately, there were still a lot of Chinese works on the shorter fiction categories), but we don't have a lot of evidence that this was intentional. Which isn't to say that none of it was! It -is- notable that the short fiction works had more Chinese works than the longer fiction categories, which may mean some of the "slated" works were allowed in the shorter fiction categories to produce a balance of western and eastern works. Or it might be that there were enough independent nominations of such works for them to make the ballot (for the shorter fiction works, the organic nominations are often quite small and so it's totally plausible that there would have been both coordinated nominations and non-coordinated nominations for such works in sufficient quantity to make the final ballot).
There's more, but that's enough; the result is a mess. As to what fandom in general (and specifically, Worldcon Business Meeting fandom which meets for 12 hours in most years to pass rules changes to the above-mentioned constitution and of which I for better or worse am a member but anyone who attends a Worldcon can join) should do about the situation to prevent it happening again in the future.
My take on things is that this was a bunch of issues:
1. A rogue convention concom with some odd loyalty (for one thing, it was dominated by the staff of a specific Chinese SF company).
2. A convention that was inside an autocratic state which understandably thought (likely correctly in concept, if not in execution) that they were legally obligated to curate the nominees of their awards to match government guidance.
3. A rogue Hugo admin who had some expansive ideas of his power and how he could responsibly exercise it (different things).
4. An attitude among Western con-runners and volunteers that "the show must go on" even if the result would be repugnant to Chinese and western fandom alike.
5. The utter lack of anyone outside of this concom who could provide a check on all of this (or, in fact, inside the concom, but that's not something one can make rules about).
So, then, what should we do about this? Well, different issues involve different solutions. But I can walk through a few:
Some issues were directly related to a Hugo admin with no oversight. As such, ideally there should be an observer of Hugo tabulation who does NOT report to the same authority as the admin who can flag issues that seem likely to affect the integrity of the award (thus acting as a check on the otherwise unchecked authority of the committee--particularly in confidential matters where normally the data is not exposed to the public).
What we don't need to do is pay someone to do this observation. The issue here wasn't bad tabulation (mostly); it was bad practice and a single source of authority, and having a check on it is the important thing. Fandom is a volunteer organization and this, too, can be handled with volunteers.
Some issues related to the country under whose authority the con was being run. If we don't want that happening again, we need to back away from the awards -- not just the convention -- being ultimately under the authority of whatever committee wins the bid to run Worldcon. Instead, we can rest ultimate authority over the awards (which should be run consistently and fairly) on an organization that's situated in a place with stable laws and rules (and yes, some parts of the US qualify) that would support such an organization. This wouldn't mean that Worldcon would stop being associated with the Hugos -- it would still be voted on by members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS), and we'd want to have the organization be elected by, again, members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS). There is some discussion to be had on how technically, the baseline membership of Worldcon that enables voting is now called "WSFS Member", but unless other steps are made, that's still functionally a kind of Worldcon membership and not a different thing, and this isn't the place to debate that. But no organization can stop a country ultimately being able to coerce an organization within its borders from doing basically anything with these awards...except making that organization not the ultimate authority over said awards.
Some issues related to the individuals involved. Yeah, sure, we probably shouldn't hire them again.
And finally, some issues related to the specific place the Worldcon was held. It might be better to make it much less likely that the Worldcon would be held in an unfree country again. That said, there are actually two ways of doing this:
1. We can trust to the voters (this didn't work this time because the Chinese voters outnumbered all other voters combined).
2. We can make rules saying that Worldcons shouldn't be held in unfree countries.
#2 is the thing mostly getting talked about, and it's both controversial and fairly easy to implement -- there are multiple organizations that specialize in rating countries by freedom. Peg our ratings to some of them and we're done.
That said, #1 has an appeal. There are many bad takes here (mostly involved in making it harder to vote) and I don't like them. The one approach I do like is to make it easier to vote -- it currently costs quite a bit to vote ($50 to the hosting convention and another $50 to the convention you're voting on the location of/leadership over, although that number can fluctuate) and making that number cheaper would likely significantly increase the number of voters each year (it would also make it cheaper for people to rally a bunch of people to vote in favor of a place, but...probably not as much). I'm sure others can mull over proposals for this, but mine would be:
1. Kill the rule saying that a Worldcon cannot charge more than 5x the voting fee / WSFS Membership Fee/ Supporting Membership Fee for their initial attending fees, and replace it with a rule that they must disclose the upper bound of their attending membership fees in their bid filing so we don't get surprises.
2. Additionally, kill the voting fee entirely and replace it with measures intended to help fund newly seated Worldcons other ways (they do really need the money to pay hotel deposits, but it doesn't need to come from voters) and a suggested discount for voters buying WSFS Memberships/Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships to encourage people to vote (this would ALSO remove the current hack that someone attempting to "buy" a Worldcon by buying votes would get half the money involved back and all the money spent against them; now they'd get none of the money back). The combination would likely more than double the number of Site Selection voters in a typical year, resulting in a more democratic, more resilient process mostly supported by the votes of fans, whether or not we put in place a "must be in a free country" clause.
Hopefully, in this way, the process can become better, -and- we can restore trust that the nominees most supported by the most Worldcon-member fans will be the Hugo winners for that year.
Ok, so for anyone getting to the news late, the Chengdu Worldcon's Hugos (that is, the 2023 Hugos) were fsked in multiple ways at the nomination stage, throwing entirely reasonable doubt onto the finalist's rights to be there for multiple categories:
1. A "slate" of about 1000 ballots, for a mix of works, but mostly Chinese works, were thrown out. Most notably, this doesn't appear to be an organized slate, but 1000 genuine Chinese fans who seem to have mostly voted for works published in a magazine (that said, if the data that seems to match the "slate" is matches the data from the supposedly slated works, their votes -were- highly coordinated in suspicious ways). This was never publicly announced, but leaked.
2. Numerous works were disqualified with no explanation (later leaks indicate that the normal "vetting" process that usually verifies that top potential finalists are qualified was abused to instead, or additionally, collect political information about the works and their creators, presumably so it could be used to determine which to disqualify them; some of this information is shockingly inaccurate).
3. Many of the unexplained DQs can be sourced to the "vetting". Others (most notably, the Sandman TV show) cannot.
Ok, so, I'm not going to repeat the excellent research done on this, and because I'm lazy I'm not going to track down links for it today. If someone comments with them in I can throw stuff in I think belongs.
But I've seen some terrible takes on this. Ones that claim that this was a concerted attempt to make sure Chinese writers didn't get nominated for major Hugos, or that it could have been HAPPENING FOR YEARS. Or that it was One Lone Rogue Admin.
But the evidence doesn't support this. No convention's nominations show the kind of data that indicate major tampering with the nominations this way (and none, including Chengdu, have anything showing major tampering with the votes themselves).
Instead, the evidence seems to point to the following:
1. Chengdu won the Worldcon.
2. At this point, long-time con volunteers who had offered their help to Chengdu (or been recruited) -- Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow, announced their position in the con (I may be off in timing but I know Ben was announced as a co-chair when the bid did their presentation and thus must have volunteered to help significantly earlier; Dave might for all I know have joined as Hugo administrator somewhat later).
3. Among other things, in advance of nominations going up, a competing magazine to the one primarily sponsoring the con posted a recommendation list with around 8 entries per category for major categories (a category can only have 6 (or fewer) finalists except in very strange, unlikely situations)
4. The con setup happened, stuff happened, eventually nominations happened and works were nominated for Hugos.
5. In particular, around 1000 or so people voted for things exclusively from the recommendation list in the magazine, forming an informal (apparently) but very effective slate that would likely have gotten ~4 items onto major categories with only 2 entries not from the list.
6. Nominations closed.
7. At this point, con staff (and other volunteers) attempted to handle multiple issues. First, they had noticed the "slate," and probably wanted to know what could be done about it. Second, there seems to have been an expectation that works that didn't accord with Chinese law would be removed from nomination.
8. Ok, so this brings us to the elephant in the room: Dave McCarty. Dave seems to have long been under the opinion that a Hugo committee could rule a work ineligible for the award at any time and for any reason. He has some cover in that The World Science Fiction Society constitution (which governs Worldcon and its Hugos) includes the phrase: "3.8.2: The Worldcon Committee shall determine the eligibility of nominees and
assignment to the proper category of works nominated in more than one category." A reasonable person would look at that phrase and assume it means that the committee should apply the -other rules- in the constitution (and there are a number of them) to determine which nominees are eligible for which awards, disqualify any that aren't eligible for any and move nominations to the right category if they were split between multiple categories. Dave's interpretation seems to, however, be that they can basically disqualify -any- works for any reason they choose, and also incidentally do the other stuff. After all, that's the rules (as we've seen from the controversy, Dave was kinda discounting the clear fact that rules aren't the only thing constraining a Worldcon committee -- public opinion and general assumptions of good practice are, but then, he according to good report tried to do this in 2016 (the second year a group ran an organized slate in order to push their own picks onto the Hugo ballot in opposition to the people who usually vote for these things, before we changed the rules to make this much harder) and was basically yelled at by multiple people on the concom (convention committee) until he backed off...for that year.
9. At this point, we have a mix of conjecture and what we actually know. We know that the "slate" was disqualified because that was leaked from internal memos. We know that volunteers sent emails asking for clarifications on vague vetting instructions (including stuff like "has been to Tibet", "mentions Taiwan", and "talks about Chinese history"). We don't actually know how big the slate is, but the numbers in the nomination report are sufficiently wonky that it's been theorized that the report was complied by just removing the "slated" works and advancing everything else up, leaving the traces of a 1000 ballot slate assigned to the wrong work. We also, from internal (leaked) memos have lists that list around 6-8 works with "1s" (indicating that they were at the top of the ballot--but if we combine that with the numbers on the statistics, that would probably mean they'd have dominated 4-5 entries on the ballot, not all 6 because the "EPH" system dilutes the effect of a slate, but that's a qualified deduction) that don't appear on the final ballot, all or most of them written in Chinese. And, of course, we know the released Nomination statistics, which include really numeric clustering, with unexplained disqualification and ballots that seem to be heavily clustered at the top, including ballots that would have to be believed to be heavily coordinated and supporting both English and Chinese works. And we have Dave's statements -- including that he was "following the rules that we must follow" and that the inconsistencies in the nomination statistics were (at least partially) because of coding issues.
But we can draw some plausible conclusions from this data:
Dave's ruling on the "slate" was that they should just eliminate it. Since he was the designated expert in Worldcon rules, it seems likely he got little if any pushback on this like he did in 2016. This happens to have eliminated numerous popular Chinese works from consideration (particularly for Novel), but that doesn't appear to be the intended aim; instead, Occam's razor indicates that the aim was going forwards with Dave's preferred way of handling slates (as it happens, he has campaigned against the -current- way of handling slates, that being the EPH system of reducing the power of highly coordinated unranked ballots, which I had some hand in designing, so applying his thoughts here when he had the power might have been part of his attempt to prove we didn't need EPH) as he wanted to do in 2016, not a conspiracy against Chinese works.
The volunteers who did "vetting" did point out (sometimes erroneous) political issues with some of the nominees. We don't know how their reports were used, but we know the results -- some of the nominees flagged were seated as nominees; others were DQed without explanation. Additionally, some other works were also DQed -- most notably the Sandman series and episode (one without explanation, one with the explanation that it was moved to the other category, but one can deduce that in fact they were both censored). We also know that a now-deleted Chinese website (government, I think)? talked about how "three teams" had vetted the Hugo nominees. From this, we can draw the conclusion that multiple teams associated with the 2023 Worldcon were working on political vetting -- the team we had a leak from (English speaking) and two other teams. (presumably one Chinese and looking at Chinese works, and one dealing with wider issues and probably LGBT, which probably was where the DQ research on Sandman came from, but this is speculation).
So, all this data was compiled, and the team (with Dave as the final call--but leaning on whoever in the convention was interpreting "the rules we must follow" -- that is, the often vague rules people use to avoid being externally and officially censored) determined what to DQ. And this included a combination of European authors and works--but also several authors of Chinese ancestry and family living outside of China. One could, of course, draw a conspiracy-theory explanation (ignoring, of course, the several creators DQed with no links to China at all, other than a trip to Nepal that a vetter confused for a trip to Tibet) that this was intended to hurt authors of Chinese ancestry (and it did, systemically), but a more plausible explanation presents itself: Authors of Chinese ancestry are quite likely to address topics of Chinese history, or have made blog posts about Chinese politics -- or other things that would have concerned the English-speaking vetters (and did). Yes, this includes Babel -- a work that was, during 2023, published in China with existent but minimal censorship and did extremely well there. But again, what is more plausible? That this was part of a conspiracy to remove Chinese works from the ballot? Or that the already-known guidelines the committee were much more likely to target people of Chinese ancestry and family history?
So, basically: A Chinese committee won a Worldcon. They recruited some folks (including Dave, who has some views about administrative power that don't match the rest of fandom's views about how such power and responsibility should be exercised). They then attempted to (with the help of volunteers) run the Hugos in a uniquely Chinese way, including self-censorship (the decision to remove an informal slate, however, seems likely to have been all Dave).
The result hit a lot of Chinese works (fortunately, there were still a lot of Chinese works on the shorter fiction categories), but we don't have a lot of evidence that this was intentional. Which isn't to say that none of it was! It -is- notable that the short fiction works had more Chinese works than the longer fiction categories, which may mean some of the "slated" works were allowed in the shorter fiction categories to produce a balance of western and eastern works. Or it might be that there were enough independent nominations of such works for them to make the ballot (for the shorter fiction works, the organic nominations are often quite small and so it's totally plausible that there would have been both coordinated nominations and non-coordinated nominations for such works in sufficient quantity to make the final ballot).
There's more, but that's enough; the result is a mess. As to what fandom in general (and specifically, Worldcon Business Meeting fandom which meets for 12 hours in most years to pass rules changes to the above-mentioned constitution and of which I for better or worse am a member but anyone who attends a Worldcon can join) should do about the situation to prevent it happening again in the future.
My take on things is that this was a bunch of issues:
1. A rogue convention concom with some odd loyalty (for one thing, it was dominated by the staff of a specific Chinese SF company).
2. A convention that was inside an autocratic state which understandably thought (likely correctly in concept, if not in execution) that they were legally obligated to curate the nominees of their awards to match government guidance.
3. A rogue Hugo admin who had some expansive ideas of his power and how he could responsibly exercise it (different things).
4. An attitude among Western con-runners and volunteers that "the show must go on" even if the result would be repugnant to Chinese and western fandom alike.
5. The utter lack of anyone outside of this concom who could provide a check on all of this (or, in fact, inside the concom, but that's not something one can make rules about).
So, then, what should we do about this? Well, different issues involve different solutions. But I can walk through a few:
Some issues were directly related to a Hugo admin with no oversight. As such, ideally there should be an observer of Hugo tabulation who does NOT report to the same authority as the admin who can flag issues that seem likely to affect the integrity of the award (thus acting as a check on the otherwise unchecked authority of the committee--particularly in confidential matters where normally the data is not exposed to the public).
What we don't need to do is pay someone to do this observation. The issue here wasn't bad tabulation (mostly); it was bad practice and a single source of authority, and having a check on it is the important thing. Fandom is a volunteer organization and this, too, can be handled with volunteers.
Some issues related to the country under whose authority the con was being run. If we don't want that happening again, we need to back away from the awards -- not just the convention -- being ultimately under the authority of whatever committee wins the bid to run Worldcon. Instead, we can rest ultimate authority over the awards (which should be run consistently and fairly) on an organization that's situated in a place with stable laws and rules (and yes, some parts of the US qualify) that would support such an organization. This wouldn't mean that Worldcon would stop being associated with the Hugos -- it would still be voted on by members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS), and we'd want to have the organization be elected by, again, members of Worldcon (as members of WSFS). There is some discussion to be had on how technically, the baseline membership of Worldcon that enables voting is now called "WSFS Member", but unless other steps are made, that's still functionally a kind of Worldcon membership and not a different thing, and this isn't the place to debate that. But no organization can stop a country ultimately being able to coerce an organization within its borders from doing basically anything with these awards...except making that organization not the ultimate authority over said awards.
Some issues related to the individuals involved. Yeah, sure, we probably shouldn't hire them again.
And finally, some issues related to the specific place the Worldcon was held. It might be better to make it much less likely that the Worldcon would be held in an unfree country again. That said, there are actually two ways of doing this:
1. We can trust to the voters (this didn't work this time because the Chinese voters outnumbered all other voters combined).
2. We can make rules saying that Worldcons shouldn't be held in unfree countries.
#2 is the thing mostly getting talked about, and it's both controversial and fairly easy to implement -- there are multiple organizations that specialize in rating countries by freedom. Peg our ratings to some of them and we're done.
That said, #1 has an appeal. There are many bad takes here (mostly involved in making it harder to vote) and I don't like them. The one approach I do like is to make it easier to vote -- it currently costs quite a bit to vote ($50 to the hosting convention and another $50 to the convention you're voting on the location of/leadership over, although that number can fluctuate) and making that number cheaper would likely significantly increase the number of voters each year (it would also make it cheaper for people to rally a bunch of people to vote in favor of a place, but...probably not as much). I'm sure others can mull over proposals for this, but mine would be:
1. Kill the rule saying that a Worldcon cannot charge more than 5x the voting fee / WSFS Membership Fee/ Supporting Membership Fee for their initial attending fees, and replace it with a rule that they must disclose the upper bound of their attending membership fees in their bid filing so we don't get surprises.
2. Additionally, kill the voting fee entirely and replace it with measures intended to help fund newly seated Worldcons other ways (they do really need the money to pay hotel deposits, but it doesn't need to come from voters) and a suggested discount for voters buying WSFS Memberships/Supporting Memberships and Attending Memberships to encourage people to vote (this would ALSO remove the current hack that someone attempting to "buy" a Worldcon by buying votes would get half the money involved back and all the money spent against them; now they'd get none of the money back). The combination would likely more than double the number of Site Selection voters in a typical year, resulting in a more democratic, more resilient process mostly supported by the votes of fans, whether or not we put in place a "must be in a free country" clause.
Hopefully, in this way, the process can become better, -and- we can restore trust that the nominees most supported by the most Worldcon-member fans will be the Hugo winners for that year.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-26 11:55 am (UTC)However, taking control of the Hugos away from the individual Worldcons and placing it in the hands of a permanent or continuing body strikes me as a very bad idea. Partly because if any corruption or maladministration strikes that body, we'd be stuck with it. With Worldcons being separate, any problems with Chengdu don't affect its successors, except for the solvable problem of overlapping personnel.
But mostly because of the question, who would choose this permanent body, and how would you keep its head from swelling with its authority? The WSFS is deliberately a decentralized organization with no body of continuing authority, because we saw what happened in the 1950s when we tried doing it the other way. Human nature hasn't changed since then.* The only continuing bodies we have are committees that have no substantive power, but deal only with details and paperwork, and are responsible to the Worldcon BM. A body with substantive administrative power would be a different thing entirely.
*Indeed, outside of fandom, when I see the rampaging billionaire capitalists of today, it's clear that human nature hasn't changed since the robber barons of the 19th century.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-27 12:15 am (UTC)Obviously we'd want to put in place methods of governace that acted to avoid entrenched and corrupt power. First, we'd want the seated worldcon and WSFS.org (because let's face it, by whatever name that's what we'd be resurecting) to act as checks on one another.
Second, we'd want them to have different but democratic forms of appointment. The way the MPC is appointed sets up a decent enough pattern (3 set of delegates, each elected in successive years and removed on the same schedule) but it's flawed in numerous ways -- the same people tend to be elected again and again (not least because it's lots of work with very little upside, and because until recently fandom was relatively happy with the people elected), only the BM and the conventions have a say in who is elected, and there can be a large overlap in the membership of the MPC and the seated worldcon.
But all of those are fixable problems. WSFS can be elected in 3 year terms by the membership of WSFS (not the BM), so no single year can overturn and corrupt its membership; it can have strict rules about conflict of interest, requiring that members elected not be also staff members of the seated worldcon (and recuse themselves if they wish to volunteer for same; a process can be set up to select alternative deligates), and we can have voting rules (proportional tabulation with ranked ballots, mostly) that avoid favoring one segment of fandom strictly over the rest. And, of course, we can strictly enumerate the powers that WSFS will have, such that it -is- signficant enough that people actually want positions on its board, but isn't significant enough that it becomes the tail trying to wag the dog of fandom -- our professional niblings in arms, SFWA, handle just fine with a centralized org; surely we can do as well.
We can even have term limits, if fandom desires it.
I'm leaving out the other extremely important reasons that some amount of (limited) centralization are crucial because they're secondary to the issues I discussed in this blog -- not least that leaving WSFS as an unencorporated association that owns real, substntial property (the marks) worth millions of dollars leaves it open to rather extreme sorts of liability without the corporate shield that lawyers traditionally reccomend fro such things. There's a reason that the MPC recently reorganized its marketing subcommittee to be -under- its corporate sub-entittiy rather than, as before, outside it, and it's not that the fears bandied about regarding this on bluesky a few weeks ago are without merit.
This all, of course, leaves aside the point that fandom as nearly hundred-year old entity is dying, being replaced by a generational divide that isn't easily making the jump to new ways to do fandom and new fans who feel (justly) excluded by existing practices. It's important that the Hugos and WSFS remain tied to the worldwide community of active fans -- but as the community changes and mutates, that can also require changes no our part -- and an active WSFS that does more than "be the membership of Worldcon and vote on the Hugos" could be part of this.
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Date: 2024-02-26 01:31 pm (UTC)Also, McCarty's public statements are both vague and unconvincing: "'We followed the rules.' 'OK, Dave, what are those rules?' 'I already said, the rules that applied here.' 'Be specific, please.' 'The rules that applied to the Hugos.'" Except the rules do not allow admins to remove ballots that they know or suspect were part of a slate.
That's separate from the Tammany Hall (political machine) idea that "I don't care who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating."
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Date: 2024-02-26 11:56 pm (UTC)I know Dave, and I've had -long- substantial arguments with him. That's why I'm not willing to ascribe 5-dimensional chess to him and instead think that the simpler solution (that the "slate" in the data matches the numbers of the "slate" in internal comms even though those seem to point to different works) is correct and that other discrepancies are flat-out error. Bu there are obvioulsy multiple conjectures possible (albiet many with much less likelyhood of being true).
I do outline up above what seems to be McCarty's reasoning, however fallacious -- which does accord with his statements. We -know- he believed that the above-mentioned phrase allows admins, as reps of the con committee to disqualify literally anything, and the con committee to add extra rules about disqualification. So while there may have been other "rules" he was following (other than the published "the team should remove illegal-by-Chinese-law works" and the known, internally announced, but not published "admins can and should remove
slated ballots" 'rule'), non--other than human error, seem to be needed to account for the data we have so far.
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Date: 2024-02-26 07:25 pm (UTC)their votes -were- highly coordinated in suspicious ways
1) I haven't seen anything about suspicious coordination beyond people just angry that there were ~1000 Chinese voters and/or people still saying slate voting shouldn't be allowed at all. Maybe that got lost in the noise. I've read a fair bit on the 2023 Hugos, though admittedly not the 50-page PDF numbers analysis from Heather Rose Jones and Camestros Felaptoon https://file770.com/charting-the-cliff-an-investigation-into-the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-by-camestros-felapton-and-heather-rose-jones/ has the intro, high level discussion, and conclusions).
2) A magazine posting a suggestion of 8 works/creators for categories when only 6 people can even be nominated for each category sounds like a *feature*, not a bug. If the magazine had been trying to create a slate, they'd have put down 6 names each.
Separating the Hugos from the individual Worldcons sounds good at first, except, hey wait, what centralized group would that have gone to in previous years when that was being proposed? Why, people like Dave McCarty. And Ben Yalow. Centralization is no guarantee at all of fairness, it seems.
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Date: 2024-02-27 12:32 am (UTC)I'm upset about the 1000 disenfranchised voters, although I have mixed feelings as well because of how their votes might have (unfairly) affected candidates that deserved to be on the ballot. Ultimately, nomination only really serves one purpose: To agree upon a list of finalists that is small enough that the Hugo-voting worldcon community can consume all of it, judge it, and agree, at least in concept, that the winner actually was the best X in the previous year.
Slate voting (intentional -or- unintentional) tends to violate that principle, as the slate voters punch above their weight class, and can easily push works that would be preferred by the larger voting pool off the ballot entirely.
But, of course, the practice of simply removing all slate (non-fraudulent) votes is even worse. If a non-fraudulent slate represents 1/5 of the voting pool but is 6x larger than the number of votes given to the largest non-slate nominee, it might be unfair to give the slate the 4 slots on the ballot that EPH will give it(1). But similarly, it's -also- unfair to not give it at least the 2 slots that the people within it deserve by right of numbers; they seem to be real people who are Worldcon members just like everyone else.
So while MCarty's and Chendu's actions were unacceptable (if not nearly as -unpredicented- as the censorship), they were trying to solve a legitimate problem and did so with a hammer where a scalpel was needed. A MUCH better solution to the unfairness of coordinated votes possibly making a ballot unrepresentative would be for the admin to (and have the ability to) just increase the number of finalists that year. Doing so doesn't throw anyone off; it just means that the voters have a bit more work they have to consume and rank, and the result will geenrally be that the best/most favored work wins whether the admin was correct that the slate was unrepresentative or whether they were incorrect.
(1): Yes, I know; I helped come up with EPH and in fact argued strenuously that it -not- contain extra weighting to further discourage slating -- originally, when it was built on Making Light, and also later when EPH+ was argued in the Business Meeting that would have included harsher weighting. THe problem is, none of that would actually work. Applying extra-teratorial weight to a slate just encourages the slate dividing into a series of bullet votes -- which will be nearly as effective in dominating a voting pool, and far harder to deal with programatically. So while using multi-winner STV might be a better way to handle this, anti-slate weighting simply isn't.
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Date: 2024-02-27 04:37 am (UTC)1) The situation with the Sandman long-form nomination for the series being DQd is almost certainly a simple foul-up. It was originally DQd in favor of the single episode in short-form (which is what the rules would call for); then when the single episode was DQd from short-form (for "reasons"), the series wasn't restored to long-form, because everyone's brains had fallen out by that point of the process. This smells much more like stupidity than malice.
2) Dealing with Chinese government censorship is complex and I recommend Ada Palmer's article on the subject. Notably, the objective of such a regime is to convince people to censor themselves, occasionally making an example out of someone. Your goal then becomes not to become the example. Dave speaks in at least one email of consulting with his Chinese counterparts on the committee and I find no reason to believe that he was lying about that. The fact that we don't have the paper trail on that only indicates that the Chinese counterparts are better at not leaving a paper trail (for reasons that should be obvious to the casual observer). In any case, the justifiably maligned actions of the Western members of the Hugo committee had a laudable goal: don't get anyone arrested. If you believe that a Hugo Award is more important than someone getting tossed into a Chinese cell because of it, then I suggest that you should reexamine your priorities. You are, of course, welcome to argue that the likelihood of that was small. You might even be correct.
3) While we're on the subject, I personally do not believe that there is any jurisdiction in the United States where censorship would prevent something from being nominated for a Hugo Award, except perhaps in the case of the community managing to nominate something that was child pornography, which I would find both stupid and repulsive. Your mileage may vary and *I* am tired of hearing about your mileage on this subject.
4) EPH strikes me as having made the nominating process *much* less transparent in its attempt to eliminate slates. It may well be that giving the Hugo committee the ability to say "I know a slate when I see it" (as apparently Dave suggested; I'm trusting you on this, as I didn't follow this debate) might have been a better choice, assuming the presence of good actors (as opposed to "bad actors") on the committee.
5) It would be *really* good if the people trying to figure out ways of preventing all this from happening again *very carefully* considered the various ways that the proposed changes might accidentally make things worse. I hope that they do, but I am more than occasionally pessimistic about the wisdom of mobs.
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Date: 2024-02-27 08:00 am (UTC)2: Yeah, this is an excellent resource I've quoted multiple times, but if I didn't list it here it was because I was already running long on my own time.
3: I basically agree with you. Others clearly do not.
4: Oddly enough, EPH made the efforts here much more obvious, in a way not having EPH stats wouldn't have, because it shows cross-corellation between ballots in a very clear way. Ultimately, the main problem with Dave's assumption that an honest and fair Admin can (and should) just ignore slate ballots is that unlike fraudulent ballots, slate ballots -aren't- fraudulent -- they're problematic because of the vote-power-magnification problem, but they do represent real members really voting, who deserve a proportional share of the ballot...but not an extraproportional share.
5: Yep! This is honestly why trying to handle too much at the BM itself is a really, really bad idea which happens all too often (and why "the room's" tendency to send anything the slightest bit complicated to committee is a good thing, overall). Unintended consequences are unintended, and consequences. We can't avoid -every- unintended conseqeunce, but we can at least -try-.
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Date: 2024-02-27 10:58 pm (UTC)3) I will happily agree with you. The problem is that the group that *doesn't* agree with this proposition is going to make it much harder to deal with #5 below.
4) Of course, you *could* have slate ballots that are fraudulent, with long sequences of names tied to a single email address -- wait! That's how we got in this mess in site selection in the first place, I am told.
5) The thing that worries me here is that I don't believe that this problem is solvable. Trying to use an "outside rating agency" for freedom is fraught with possibilities for stupidity. Making individuals responsible for this simply subjects them to abuse, which is pretty much what happened to people who were looking at the Discon site selection and saying "That's a bunch of fishy ballots." I mean, how could you possibly disenfranchise the fandom of an entire nation, a nation whose government only has our best interests at heart?
I'm sorry. Am I laying that on a bit too thick? :)
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Date: 2024-02-28 03:45 pm (UTC)We're agreed on this. :-)
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Date: 2024-02-28 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-16 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-21 03:31 am (UTC)And it's great to hear from you, and well wishes to you!