Final online 2025 WSFS Business Meeting tomorrow

Tomorrow (July 25) is the last of the online 2025 Worldcon Business Meetings.

In the previous session (July 19), we got through all but one of the ratifying-last-year’s-decisions items (section E of the agenda), plus the first eight of the new proposals (section F of the agenda). That was a lot more than I expected us to get through in one session.

So there are now 14 items left to be addressed tomorrow (if we move fast enough to get through them all): E.9, F.9-F.20, and F.22.

Those include, among other things:

  • The one remaining ratification item: the rework-the-artist-categories change (E.9). Also another proposal to rework the artist categories (F.22). I expect these to be hugely contentious, because different people have at least three incompatible ideas about what it means for someone to be a fan or pro artist and about how the Hugos should reward such work.
  • Making Best Poem permanent (F.12). I’ve seen some strong resistance to this on social media. For anyone interested in a writeup by the proponents, see Speculative Poetry Initiative.
  • Ending the NASFIC convention as a WSFS-run convention (F.13).
  • Avoiding human-rights-abusing countries (F.20).

I also expect that we’ll reconsider (and probably reject) the decision we previously made to go back to the old language of Worldcons having “Supporting Membership” and “Attending Membership” (E.2 on the agenda), because it turns out that the way the proposal was phrased has some major unintended consequences. For details, see Nicholas’s post.

Note: I’m mostly off social media today, so I may not see any comments on this post. Please try to be kind to each other if possible.

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