This Could Get Interesting
Chengdu has won the bid for the 2023 World Science Fiction Convention -- after some controversy because a large number of the votes for it had only an e-mail address rather than a physical address. There was a motion to disallow them on the grounds that an e-mail address was insufficient (probably due to the ease of creating e-mail addresses leading to concern that large numbers of ghost voters to swing the election), but it was rejected on the grounds that it was inappropriate to change the rules to affect an election already in progress.
Watching it from the sidelines, I'm thinking it's yet another case of something that had been understood as part of a rule, but nobody ever bothered to spell it out because nobody expected it to become an issue -- until it suddenly did, in a way that causes a great deal of upset. I thoroughly expect the question of what constitutes an adequate address to be a major Issue at the Chicago Worldcon next year, and given that this is Chicago (where the running joke is "people who don't believe in life after death should come here on election day"), I'm expecting any decision made there to be widely challenged.
Personally, it's not that huge a matter. I haven't attended a Worldcon since we lost money at MidAmericon II back in 2016, then decided to forego the San Jose Worldcon in 2018 in favor of a comic con in Detroit. We weren't planning to go to the Chicago Worldcon next year because trying to sell at a convention in Chicago proper is just too much hassle to be worth it, and I rather doubt that I'd be going to any future Worldcons anyway. Too many of them are pricing their booths more in line with the big comic cons and media cons, while getting a fraction of the attendance, making them non-starters for us.
Watching it from the sidelines, I'm thinking it's yet another case of something that had been understood as part of a rule, but nobody ever bothered to spell it out because nobody expected it to become an issue -- until it suddenly did, in a way that causes a great deal of upset. I thoroughly expect the question of what constitutes an adequate address to be a major Issue at the Chicago Worldcon next year, and given that this is Chicago (where the running joke is "people who don't believe in life after death should come here on election day"), I'm expecting any decision made there to be widely challenged.
Personally, it's not that huge a matter. I haven't attended a Worldcon since we lost money at MidAmericon II back in 2016, then decided to forego the San Jose Worldcon in 2018 in favor of a comic con in Detroit. We weren't planning to go to the Chicago Worldcon next year because trying to sell at a convention in Chicago proper is just too much hassle to be worth it, and I rather doubt that I'd be going to any future Worldcons anyway. Too many of them are pricing their booths more in line with the big comic cons and media cons, while getting a fraction of the attendance, making them non-starters for us.