Joshua Kronengold

Having an outside person on the Hugo subcommittee - someone who is not responsible for making decisions but is privy to the confidential information - who can act as a double-check on any questionable administrative decisions: that -might- be a good idea, if it can be made consonant with the security of voting secrecy.

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.