WSFS Business Appears

[kevin_standlee]

The first release of the agenda for this year's WSFS Business Meeting is now online at the LoneStarCon 3 web site.

The constitutional items are:

• A minimum price cap on supporting memberships, prohibiting Worldcons from selling memberships that have voting rights for less than the cost of a supporting membership
• Add a new Hugo Award category: Best

Comments

[billroper]

Hmm. That's fascinating, he said, as he read the proposals.

As someone who has a lot of trouble making it to Worldcon lately (two small children will do that -- I'd have taken the family down to San Antonio, as I have relatives in the area, but school starts here before Labor Day), I must say that the "No Cheap Voting" proposal is largely the opposite of what I would hope to see the Worldcon doing.

I understand the inclination to prevent people from buying a lot of cheap memberships to vote for their friends, but I'm not sure that making voting expensive is necessarily a good thing for the Hugo Awards, or for site selection, or for a lot of things.

My first thought is that it would be better to revise the WSFS constitution so that Supporting Memberships were cheaper, but included only electronic copies of communications, and if you wanted the Cadillac printed version of Supporting Membership, it would cost more. And then, of course, you end up bashing on the relationship between site selection voting fees and attending membership

[kevin_standlee]

There is a fairly easy way to do what you say (not require paper publications to be included in a supporting membership): Delete section 1.5.3:

1.5.3: Electronic distribution of publications, if offered, shall be opt-in.

This would leave it up to the individual Worldcon whether or not their supporting membership would include those expensive paper publications.

The mechanism to combine this with what's been proposed is to amend the proposal to include striking 1.5.3. If that passes, then the combined proposal (strike 1.5.3 and set a floor limit on supporting memberships) would be the constitutional amendment.

I am considering proposing this as an amendment to the proposal at the Preliminary Business Meeting. I, like you, think it's a bad idea, and is an ill-advised attempt to prevent the Wrong Sort of Fan from voting by keeping it expensive.

[billroper]

Striking 1.5.3 makes sense, but the cost of a supporting membership is linked to the cost of site-selection voting by 1.5.7 and the cost of an attending membership is also linked to the cost of site-selection voting by 1.5.6. If the objective is to make the supporting membership cheaper by making distribution of paper optional -- well, I suppose that 1.5.7 only sets a cap on the cost of the supporting membership for voters, so anything less is ok. But then you could sell a supporting membership for less than the site-selection voting fee, which doesn't seem like a good idea (save, of course, for the proposed amendment) -- I'd be tempted to pull the voting fee down to match, except that interacts with 1.5.6 to pull down the initial cost of an attending membership which has some potentially serious budget impacts on the Worldcon

[kevin_standlee]

Beware of too many changes at once. We only recently raised the 1.5.6 conversion cap to 4x the voting fee. The voting fee is set by the agreement of the voters and the administering convention (with a default if they can't agree). Let's suggest that a bid thinks that $25 (not $50 as has been recent practice) is a good supporting membership cost. They would have a maximum starting membership price of $125 ($100 conversion fee) for voters. There's no cap on non-voters.

Another suggestion I've heard is to require that any membership class that costs at least as much as a supporting membership must include the rights of a supporting membership. Thus the people paying $75-$100 for a single day's admission would be given supporting memberships. I expect that frosts the "only my friends should be allowed to vote, and not all of them" crowd, but I think it would be a good idea.

[billroper]

I agree that you don't want to shake the tree too hard at any one time. :)

The last Worldcon budget that I was involved with was Chicon 2000 and I think we started out with a $100 membership (total, after conversion, although we had a certain number of discounted memberships from card collectors who had voted). It's sixteen years later and I'm not sure $125 covers the increased costs since then. Or perhaps it does. I just didn't want to have the voting / supporting membership fee propped up unnecessarily, because it had to be kept up to allow the attending membership fee to be kept up.

And I like the last proposal you make above, although I'm not sure how much impact it would actually have. Probably less than some folks would expect fear. :)

[kevin_standlee]

OTOH, if one has the mind to try and load a proposal down with so many changes that not even its own backers can vote for it, adding more and more "wrecking amendments" - assuming you can get people to vote for the individual amendments - is a good way to defeat a proposal.

$100 in 2000 is about $130 today.

I think the most important thing when setting prices is that you shouldn't set the price below the variable cost of provision of the membership. Not "average cost per member, which is simplistic and can't be calculated until long after the event, but what you calculate each membership of a given type costs to service. Taking paper publications out of the required materials reduces your variable cost per member substantially, I think. If attending members (at the base price) also don't get paper publications, it works out.

[billroper]

Wrecking amendments: Yup. In fact, your first amendment to the original proposal might be considered a wrecking amendment by the proponents, since the objective was to prevent low-cost Hugo voting.

On budgeting: it's a tricky thing, because you eventually need to cover both your fixed costs and your variable costs. But cutting out paper pubs for the attending members would probably help, although then the cost of a paper pub membership is going to go way up, because the number of copies printed will go way down and the marginal cost of additional copies is lower.

There are a lot of moving parts here...

[buddykat]

Another suggestion I've heard is to require that any membership class that costs at least as much as a supporting membership must include the rights of a supporting membership. Thus the people paying $75-$100 for a single day's admission would be given supporting memberships. I expect that frosts the "only my friends should be allowed to vote, and not all of them" crowd, but I think it would be a good idea.

If the proposed amendment passes this year, I plan to propose this very thing at next year's BM. Unfortunately, I can't make it to this year's Worldcon to vote against the proposal this year.

[totient]

the cost of a supporting membership is linked to the cost of site-selection voting by 1.5.7 and the cost of an attending membership is also linked to the cost of site-selection voting by 1.5.6Yes on 2, but no on 1: 1.5.7 only places an *upper* bound on supporting membership cost. A Worldcon bid could (even with no changes to the constitution) offer a supporting membership for less than the site selection fee. This sounds insane, unless you have a $0 conversion to *attending* from voting. If the site selection fee negotiations for 2015 had failed (resulting in a $50 voting fee) Orlando would probably have done this. And it might not even have been a terrible idea, considering the likely number of no-shows from all of the Europeans who joined to vote for Helsinki and would have gotten attending memberships that way. Remember that Orlando's hotel contract means they have to shoot for a very large convention or be stuck holding an enormous hotel bill. They'd have had to make the memberships non-transferable but nothing in the