Hugo Voting Membership
September 17th, 2007 by Editors
As announced yesterday, we have closed the poll on onsite voting and opened a new one. This asks you what you think is a reasonable cost for the right to vote in the Hugo Awards. We’ve included $0 as an option for those of you who think it should be free, and a notional $100 for those who think it ought to be more expensive that it already is. But any decision of this type is bound to impinge on Worldcon economics so here is a short essay on the concept of Hugo Voting Memberships.
We’d like to start by saying that we do not believe that voting for the Hugos should be free. There are several reasons for this.
To begin with, the Hugos are not, and have never been, a pure popular vote award. If we want to know what the most popular books of the year are, all we have to do is look at the best seller lists. Sometimes Hugos do go to books that sell well – Harry Potter, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – but most years they don’t go to best sellers. This is because the Hugos are not voted on by everyone; they are voted on by the members of the World Science Fiction Society who, at least in theory, are passionate about and knowledgeable about science fiction. In order to vote in the Hugos, you have to care enough about SF to be a member of WSFS.
Requiring WSFS membership is also a good way of tackling ballot stuffing. It isn’t just the cost. The mere fact that in order to vote you have to pay money and give contact details makes the whole process of ballot fraud much more difficult. It isn’t impossible, and with the current low numbers of voters it is still feasible for someone to have enough generous friends to “buy” a nomination legally, but for the most part the memberships requirement keeps fraud at bay.
Finally, it takes money to run a set of awards. WSFS has a huge pool of volunteer workers, but even so they can’t do everything for free. There are trophies to be made, ballots to be mailed, an award ceremony to be staged. If the Hugos had no revenue then sooner or later they would have to look for sponsorship. Having a source of income (albeit currently disguised in Worldcon budgets) means that we can keep the Hugos independent.
But does it have to cost $40-$50 to vote? And does voting have to be tied in to Worldcon membership? We think not.
One of the real problems with the Hugos is that the current system sends all of the wrong messages to the people who want to participate. Because voting rights are something you get “for free” with a Worldcon membership, that’s how people think of them. To many Worldcon members the right to vote in the Hugos is something they don’t think about because they joined Worldcon to go to the convention, not to get a vote. And for people who want to vote, there is an apparent barrier of having to buy a membership in a convention that they either don’t want to, or cannot afford to, attend.
For many people, of course, this is what they want. For them participation in the Hugos requires not just membership of WSFS, but participation in Worldcon. That is how it always has been, and that is why it is mostly the people who attend Worldcon regularly who bother to vote. Unfortunately that means that WSFS is not just a club of people who care about science fiction, it is club of people who are rich enough to attend Worldcon regularly and who happen to live in the right part of the world for this not to be prohibitively expensive. And that is why the wider science fiction community can often be heard muttering that the Hugos are under the control of an exclusive cabal.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is no reason why WSFS can’t simply sell memberships that have nothing to do with Worldcon, and simply bestow the right to vote in the Hugos. Obviously they would have to rely on Worldcons to sell those memberships for them, but we think those Worldcons would find it in their interests to do so. Here’s why.
Currently the only way to get a vote in the Hugos without attending Worldcon is to buy a supporting membership. For next year that will cost you $40. But a supporting membership has costs. Supporting members are entitled a copy of the Worldcon souvenir book, and to a number of Progress Reports. Based on Worldcon budgets we have seen, we estimate the cost of servicing a supporting member to be around $25. The other $15 is used by the Worldcon to help put on the convention; and at least part of that money will go to paying the costs of running the Hugos.
But suppose you had a type of membership that entitled you to nothing but Hugo voting, and suppose it cost only $20? What then?
An obvious objection is that Hugo voters need to get Progress Reports because they contain the ballots, but in these days of electronic communication that is no longer the case. The vast majority of members already vote online. It seems entirely reasonable to say to potential members that they can have a voting membership for $20 rather than $40 if they agree to electronic communication, thereby saving the convention printing and postage costs. And you know, Worldcon committees really hate doing mailings. These days most of what goes into Progress Reports also appears on the convention’s web site. It would be better if we didn’t have to bother with them.
The next concern is likely to be that the convention will somehow lose money. But how? Suppose every existing supporting member opted to be a voting member instead. That just means that instead of their being the source of $40 income and $25 costs, they become the source of $20 income and $0 costs. It is a win.
And actually we suspect that most supporting members will not convert. Most of the people who buy supporting memberships are either people who attend Worldcon most years but for some reason are having to give the current one a miss, or they are people who voted in site selection but are unable to make the convention. (This year, for example, a lot who people who voted for Kansas and Columbus were unable to go to Yokohama). The former group will probably still buy a supporting membership because they won’t want their collection of Worldcon souvenir books to have a gap in it, and they will want to vote in site selection. The latter group will still exist, because Hugo Voting Memberships will not get you a vote in site selection.
So actually we think that the number of supporting members won’t be drastically affected by the availability of voting memberships. But we do think that $20 will prove a much less off-putting proposition to potential voters than $40. This will be even more the case if the $20 is presented to the community as a WSFS membership (with associated Hugo voting rights) rather than as a Worldcon Membership (which looks like something potential voters don’t want but have to buy to get voting rights).
The cost to Worldcon? Very little. Obviously they will have to process any additional memberships that come in, and the Hugo Administrators may have to work a bit harder because of the extra voters, but basically a Worldcon will be able to see Voting Memberships as money that comes in to help finance the running of the Hugos, and that will make Events Directors very happy people indeed.
Will cheaper voting make attempts at ballot stuffing more likely? Probably, but if such attempts happen they will probably be easily spotted. Also having more voters will raise the number of memberships you have to buy in order to “buy” a nomination.
And the benefit to the community? We think it will be substantial. It will transform WSFS from being an organization that says, “in order to be part of our club you have to come to our very expensive convention,” into an organization that says, “you can be a member for just $20; and get to vote in our famous Hugo Awards”. We think that this will cause a lot more people to pay attention to WSFS, and care about what it does. And that, in the longer term will transform into a desire to attend Worldcon one day.
If nothing else, voting memberships will give an opportunity to people who care about the Hugos, but who currently feel excluded, to participate in the process. At present WSFS has around 5000 members each year, of whom 70%-80% don’t care that they are members and don’t participate in any WSFS activity, even though they have the right to do so. If there are people out there who would like to be part of WSFS, but who are unable to get to the convention, it would be wonderful to be able to reach out to them and involve them in the Society.
“Will cheaper voting make attempts at ballot stuffing more likely? Probably, but if such attempts happen they will probably be easily spotted.”
My question on that is … well, what does spotting ballot stuffing do? Is there anything the administrators _can_ do if it recognizes ballot stuffing, if the ballots are verified as coming from legitimate voting members? I’m not sure what the constitution says on that. Obviously, the committee could pressure a person who benefitted from obvious ballot to decline the award (actually, can one even decline the award?), or afterwards let it be known that they won thanks to ballot stuffing. But can they actually invalidate votes for that person?
A cost of $10 strikes me as the best bet. $20 starts to strike me as marginal, although I just realized that if certain authors were nominees, then I’d be likelier to spend $20. $10 is a figure I’m pretty sure I’d be willing to pay almost every year to vote, regardless of who’s nominated. $20 … I’d have to think about it, anyways, if I haven’t already planned to go or haven’t gotten a supporting membership for other reasons than the voting.
Optimally, some Worldcon offers a $10 voting membership, which brings in at least a measurable increase in total voting members — say a 20% increase — and that might encourage others to do the same, especially if the winners of that year’s Hugos are not in any way tinged by controversy connected to the voting membership. More of an increase would be better, but probably the most important thing is that people don’t get it into their heads that certain people won only because of the voting membership. This would probably lead to the more conservative and, frankly, clannish tendencies in con-regulars to come out and put the kibosh on future such attempts by means of nagging future Worldcon committees about how terrible a thing it was.
And, you know, maybe they’d be right. If a $10 or $20 voting membership leads to widely-known ballot stuffing, it’s probably not a great idea.
Voting alone should cost nothing. I’m tired of seeing whingeing about the “greying of fandom” coupled with nonrecognition that kids — particularly some of the most enthusiastic protofen — don’t have easy access to things like credit cards and checkbooks, at least not without parental knowledge and approval. (PayPal requires a checking account, so that’s not a solution.)
The problem I see with this question, though, is that it’s the equivalent of selecting a single part to help fix a badly damaged car. The appropriate cost of “voting rights” depends a great deal on how the ballot is constructed, both in terms of categories and what gets nominated; with the timing; with the method of voting; and so on. Thus, I don’t see this question as meaningful, unless it is reworded as:
Presuming no other changes of any kind to the Hugo Award system, what is a reasonable fee for Hugo Award voting rights?
which, because it is so patently ridiculous on its face, exposes that the question really doesn’t help much. Yes, a good scientist tries to design experiments to test only a single variable at once. No, there’s nothing scientific about Hugo Award selection.
Mister Garcia makes a fair point, one that occurred to me while reading the argument, but I assume it can be rectified. I would be interested in knowing what procedures are in place to remedy a case of detected voter fraud and how we can define voter fraud in that sense.
That said, on balance I am persuaded.
Free voting would devalue the Hugos down to nothing, IMHO.
Is there anything unfeasible about having a $xx voting-only WSFS membership that includes all voting rights that don’t require a physical presence–i.e., site selection (which costs $40 to do in addition, so it’s not like there’s much risk of extra ballot-stuffing there, methinks)? (Yes, I know the POLL is just about the Hugos.)
I’d like to concur with the concern of financial barriers aiding and abetting the functional greying of fandom, but I think I’ll dissent from the poster’s other points.
It seems to me increasing the participation of fans in the Hugos is a independent variable insofar as even if social forces favor clannish decision-making about the Hugos, the WSFS, Worldcon, these are clearly results that I doubt a majority would declare support for, but rather consequences of other opinions and choices made without thought to the overall consequence.
C.E. Petit writes: “Voting alone should cost nothing.”
Okay, then who pays? TANSTAAFL. You’re saying that the members of the World Science Fiction Society who do pay for their memberships should foot the bills for the awards but let anyone who can work a web browser vote? I have to agree with Kendall saying that this would devalue the awards substantially. I also note that the Locus Awards, which are free, are starting to get nervous about their anyone-with-a-browser system and seem to be contemplating barriers of some sort in the future.
Remember, the Hugo Awards are not and never have been a “what are the most popular works in the field.” They are awards presented by a club, and you have to join that club to vote for them. Now I think the entry barriers aren’t that high, but your mileage may vary.
In the 1960s, a Worldcon attending membership cost only $2 (about $14 currently). I don’t know what a supporting membership cost back then, but certainly $10 shouldn’t be a significant barrier to entry while still showing that people are willing to think of more than just a couple of mouse clicks for a lark.
People have been asking what measures exist to penalize ballot fraud if it is detected. I’ve never been a Hugo Administrator, so I’ve not been too closely involved in the process, but this is my understanding of the situation.
1. The most likely form of ballot fraud is for someone to buy a whole load of memberships in assumed names. The WSFS Constitution talks about members having to be “people” and a vote from someone who does not exist can therefore presumably be excluded.
2. You can stuff the ballot legally if you can persuade a whole lot of your friends to join and vote for you. This is much harder, and may prompt investigations if, for example, a whole pile of ballots were to arrive at once just nominating one person or work. It takes a lot more chutzpah to go ahead with a ballot-stuffing scheme if you think you have been rumbled, although it could still happen.
3. Lowering the cost of voting won’t necessarily make it cheaper to stuff the ballot, because if cheaper voting means more voters then you will have to buy more memberships to “buy” a nomination. Of course more people may be tempted to try, but if they try and fail that’s free money for the Worldcon.
4. Hugo voting has two stages. It is possible for people to “buy” a nomination. Indeed, whenever a name from outside the community appears on the ballot someone always raises the suspicion that a ballot stuffing operation has taken place. But buying a Hugo requires that you win majority support in the preferential voting system. That takes a lot more votes, and if there is a suspicion that a nominee got on the ballot unfairly the chances are that the nominee in question will appear below No Award on many voters’ preferences.
Kevin Standlee writes: “They are awards presented by a club, and you have to join that club to vote for them.”
If this is your view (and I certainly agree with the analogy) then the purpose of your poll suddenly seems unclear.
For example, your local club, BASFA, wouldn’t sell “voting-for-president-only” memberships at some deep discount from ordinary dues.
Mike: BASFA doesn’t run an annual convention, but if it did I very much doubt that it would require fans to buy a membership in the convention in order to be members of the club. WSFS, on the other hand, makes membership of its annual convention a necessary condition of membership in the society.
Do LASFS members have to buy a LosCon membership in order to remain members of the society?
Cheryl writes “People have been asking what measures exist to penalize ballot fraud if it is detected,” and discusses some related thoughts.
You have hit on the central principle — a Worldcon member is free to cast a Hugo/nominating vote on any basis whatever. This includes voters who join in an orchestrated bloc vote (like the one that made Jacqueline Lichtenberg a Best Fan Writer nominee 30 years ago), whether you or I would agree with the voters’ reasons.
And so, the violation of the principle is whatever permits a person to exercise the voting rights of several or many other Worldcon members. I know from experience four different times this was actually done and detected, and it would not be difficult to think up other ways too.
These experiences made painfully transparent that Hugo Administrators and Worldcon committees are not effective investigators, and rather ambivalent about taking action even when presented with a clear abuse.
So I much prefer to protect the integrity of the award by depending on the membership process, which requires identification, and has a nontrivial cost.
Cheryl: What relation has the WSFS/Hugo analogy to your club/proprietary convention analogy? The club and convention are two different activities. The only constitutional purposes of the WSFS are to present the Hugos and hold site selection voting.
Admittedly it’s not a complete coincidence that there’s a Worldcon going on around the WSFS meeting. But your comparison is not on point.
Mike: I don’t see your problem. The only way in which you can (currently) become a member of WSFS is to become a member of the current year’s Worldcon. That’s the entire issue in a nutshell.
Meanwhile, back with ballot stuffing, Mike makes some very valid points.
1. It is very difficult to stop people from trying to buy nominations.
2. It has apparently happened several times in the past, despite the current high cost of voting.
3. If you can find enough real people willing to let you pay for them to vote for you (or even pay themselves) then ballot stuffing is perfectly legal.
Short of having a system like political elections where people have to turn up and cast their ballots in person there are only two obvious ways of preventing this.
Either you have a high cost for being a member of WSFS so that is costs a lot to buy a nomination,
Or you have so many people voting that the cost becomes equally or more prohibitive.
I note is passing that the more people you have to find to participate in a ballot stuffing operation the more unethical people you have to know, and that may be a major barrier.
Cheryl writes: “Mike: I don’t see your problem. The only way in which you can (currently) become a member of WSFS is to become a member of the current year’s Worldcon. That’s the entire issue in a nutshell.”
We certainly agree about that.
What I disagree with is selling a privilege now enjoyed by the Worldcon community to people who will not become participants in the Worldcon in any other way.
(Participation is the gold standard here — I’m sure you’ve heard Kevin hold forth on the difference between tickets and memberships more times than we can count….)
Mike says: “Participation is the gold standard here”
Absolutely, but participation in what?. What happens right now is that Worldcon members get the right to participate in the Hugos “for free” with their Worldcon membership. The vast majority of them apparently don’t value those rights, and don’t want to participate in the Hugos (or in Site Selection or the Business Meeting). In the meantime we apparently have a whole pile of people who would like to participate in the process, but are put off by the need to buy a membership in a convention they have no hope of attending. What we are looking for here is a way to get more people to participate in WSFS. And (as we said originally) allowing them to do so might encourage them to plan to try to attend Worldcon.
Remember that we are an international community. We have people in Europe and Australia who can only afford to attend Worldcon one year in ten (when it is on their continent). Maybe now there are Japanese people like that too. I’d like to help them feel more part of WSFS for those other 9 years as well.
“but are put off by the need to buy a membership in a convention they have no hope of attending. What we are looking for here is a way to get more people to participate in WSFS. ”
So, what we’re talking about is essentially altering the “supporting membership” rate.
Going to web, Denvention’s “supporting” rate is $40.00 “until further notice” (as are all of their rates).
Montreal has a rate of $50.00 for supporting, with no cut off dates listed for any of the rates, though that will almost certainly change.
Perhaps a lower Supporting rate could be offered if the individual were to be agreeable to receiving the Progress Reports in some sort of electronic format? Cutting down on printing and mailing costs should be worth something. How much I’ll let others gnaw over.
Mike: “What relation has the WSFS/Hugo analogy to your club/proprietary convention analogy? The club and convention are two different activities. The only constitutional purposes of the WSFS are to present the Hugos and hold site selection voting.”
I used to be a member of the National Association of Parliamentarians, to whom I paid annual membership dues. If I wanted to attend NAP’s annual convention, I had to pay an additional, larger, convention supplement fee. WSFS actually does the same thing, but the way in which we do it obscures the distinction to the members. We have WSFS memberships (Worldcon supporting memberships) and convention supplements (the cost difference between Attending and Supporting memberships), but both are styled as a kind of convention membership, and both are administered by the individual Worldcon. Thus people don’t really see that supporting membership as being a WSFS membership, but something to do with the individual convention.
And we can’t easily separate the two, because of WSFS’s governmental structure. We don’t and are unlikely to ever have a centralized WSFS who would collect WSFS membership dues.
And yes, I reckon that I’m arguing that supporting memberships are too expensive. I’ll address that in my next comment.
Mike Walsh writes: “Perhaps a lower Supporting rate could be offered if the individual were to be agreeable to receiving the Progress Reports in some sort of electronic format?”
The supporting membership rate is set to help fund the overall costs of putting on the Worldcon, not just to allow the con break even on the expense of what it must provide to those members.
Right now, I expect the vast majority of supporting members are site selection voters who didn’t convert — because they can’t go to the con. Would you feel differently if someone suggested dropping site selection voting memberships to (say) $10?
However, my objection is to treating Hugo voting rights as a stand-alone product. So there is no “right price” for doing the wrong thing.
Worldcon supporting memberships currently cost between $40 and $50, the actual amount set by each Worldcon but also driven by how much they were obliged to charge as the Advance Supporting Membership (Voting) Fee in their site selection election. They aren’t allowed to charge less than their ASM for a supporting membership, although they can establish other types of memberships and fees at their own discretion. Hugo-voting-only memberships would be a sort of “Sub-Supporting Membership.”
Worldcons have no incentive at all to keep their ASM down, because there is a price cap on their initial membership rates that is a function of their ASM. If they have a low ASM, they end up being forced to sell memberships at a loss for at least 90 days after their election.
(Back in 1993, I calculated that based on the average cost of serving each membership — admittedly that included fixed charges — ConFrancisco lost about $35 on each membership sold before the cap expired, and had to make that up on memberships sold later.)
Supporting memberships have an element of “support” of the current Worldcon in them, but I think the amount of such support is getting out of hand. The marginal cost of a Worldcon supporting membership is the cost of the publications (including postage), and I seem to recall calculating that this is on the order of $20/member. It could be made lower if members took electronic publications, too.
I’d be in favor of reducing the cost of supporting memberships closer to their marginal cost, or possibly decoupling the ASM from the initial attending membership cost.
Note that I don’t want to reduce the membership cost down to zero. I think $10-$20 would discourage casual vote-stuffing while still encouraging people to get involved who are currently put off by paying $50 for a bunch of things for which they do not perceive they are getting sufficient value.
Mike W: while a Hugo Voting Membership is very similar to a supporting membership with reduced cost and no (or electronic) publications, it isn’t identical. Specifically it does not include site selection voting rights. If we are going to adhere to the participation principle, then you should only be allowed to vote in site selection if you express a firm interest in attending the selected Worldcon.
Also I suspect that, even if you could get a “supporting membership” for $20, fewer people would buy it than would buy a “Hugo voting membership” at the same price, simply because they would perceive it as having to pay for something that they didn’t want.
Mike G: I’m be interested to know if you are also opposed on principle to supporting memberships. A supporting member does nothing for the Worldcon except provide money, and adds administrative burdens – in particular the need to mail out souvenir books after the convention has finished, something a lot of Worldcon committees have great difficulty in rousing themselves to do. By our calculations above, a $20 voting membership would provide more economic support for a Worldcon than a supporting membership, and it would result in very little additional work.
Cheryl, I guess I don’t see supporting memberships as doing nothing for the Worldcon. Look at where most of them come from.
Nearly all supporting members are people who wanted a voice in picking the next Worldcon. As you know, the WSFS rule is — if you want to help decide where the next Worldcon is going to be, you have to help pay for the party. You have to buy a membership in that future convention. Those voters automatically receive a supporting membership in the Worldcon.
There may also be people who come along later and buy supporting memberships to vote in the Hugos, or just out of altruism, but there are far fewer or them.
Worldcons focus on the people who want to show up, enjoy the programming and events, and (with any luck) help in some way to do the work of putting on the convention. Most supporting members became so from an interest in these things, whether or not they ultimately could afford to come (like people who voted for domestic alternatives to Japan).
No distinction is drawn if somebody buys a supporting membership for any other motive — to vote in the Hugos, or just out of altruism.
On the other hand, selling discounted Hugo voting rights is an example of unbundling and selling bits of the Worldcon experience. I disagree with the idea for the same reason I disagree with selling tickets to people who only want to go into the dealer’s room, or only see the masquerade.
That’s interesting, Mike, because I tend to see a lot of supporting members as people who voted in site selection and then lost interest in the convention once their preferred site lost. I’d be fascinated to see how many such people actually vote in the Hugos. In contrast someone from, say, South Africa, who can’t ever afford to attend Worldcon but who would vote in the Hugos given the chance, is someone who clearly does want to contribute.
The unbundling question is an interesting one (and perhaps not one we should get too sidetracked onto here). My general view is that it is wrong for us to take a hardline stand and say, “if you want to have any part of our community you must sign up for the whole package”. Unbundling individual program items would be unworkable, and I’d happily argue that full attending members should get priority for seats at the major events. But I’d also happily open up the Dealers’ Room and Art Show to the general public if we could solve the access issues because I’m sure we’d get more dealers and more artists as a result, and they’d sell a lot more.
Cheryl writes: “That’s interesting, Mike, because I tend to see a lot of supporting members as people who voted in site selection and then lost interest in the convention once their preferred site lost.”
I doubt that’s correct. Considering that the defeated Columbus, Kansas City and Chicago bids of recent vintage all rolled over and kept on campaigning, it seems many of these supporting members demonstrably did not “lose interest.”
Cheryl also writes: “In contrast someone from, say, South Africa, who can’t ever afford to attend Worldcon but who would vote in the Hugos given the chance, is someone who clearly does want to contribute.”
That person is not excluded from voting. That person can join and vote NOW.
To which the predictable comeback must be, “Aha! Then we’re just arguing over the price!” But my answer to that is — no, some people are arguing about the price, I am arguing that the right should not be spun off and marketed separately.
I have been interested in the Hugos since buying Franson and DeVore’s book on the awards back in 1974 or so at the Science Fction Shop in Greenwich Village. I have always wanted to participate. I do not come from a high income bracket and $40.00 is too high a price for me just to vote (I did do it once in 1984 and it was fun but was a splurge that I have not been able to afford since then. Or, I guess I felt I would rather spend $40.00 on books to read than $40.00 on the chance to vote for my favorite.)
But the Hugos have been a major part of my reading. I have read every nominated short story, novellete, novella (and all the variations of such) as well as every novel but one (I still have Eifelheim to read). I have done the same with the Nebulas and the top five nominees of the Locus awards and others. Reading all these is great because it constantly brings me to startling works that I might have overlooked otherwise, or led me to read more of a specific auther because of a nominaton.
All this to say that the Hugos are a large part of my life. The world of conventions is not. I would feel lost at one of them. At least I think I would. Also it’s a bit beyond my budget. I agree that Hugo voting should not be free but $20.00 sounds possible (and even helpful to the con organizers). This would become an annual thing for me and it would make me very happy.
Anyway, that was a long-winded version to say that the Hugos matter and I would love to be a part of that after over 35 years of reading SF.
Cheryl #20: I’d be happy to buy a $20 “electronic mailings only” supporting membership for a Worldcon I don’t have any realistic hopes of attending. I like those progress reports, souvenir books, and such (and wouldn’t mind having them in a format I actually have storage room for), and having them plus the Hugo nominating and voting rights would be quite a good package.
There are two reasons why I’m not so keen on simply reducing the price of Supporting Memberships. The first is that, while I’m quite happy to see Progress Reports go electronic, I would be reluctant to do anything that would encourage Worldcon souvenir books to go electronic. They are often beautiful books and I’d hate to see them disappear.
But more importantly, while I can’t see any good reason why you should have to be a member of Worldcon (as opposed to a member of WSFS) to vote in the Hugos, I can see very good reasons why voting in Site Selection should be different. People who vote in Site Selection ought to have some sort of stake in the results, which is why they are required to buy a Supporting Membership of the winning convention. I can just imagine the fuss if a tight race between, say, Kansas City and Montreal, was believed to have been decided by votes from people in Finland, New Zealand and Argentina, none of whom had any intention of attending the con.
1) Why do I see so many humans continually overcomplicating life? Whatever happened to “keep it simple,” to “simplify, simplify”?
2) I wanted to vote/nominate for the next Hugo, but then I read that WC members are publicly listed, their names and addresses available for the world to see. Is this true? If so, no thanks, and I’m just totally writing off the award. Won’t think about it, talk about it, or look at it as I’ll be unable to change the usual results of it, which I think need changing overall.
3) Re: ballot stuffing–I don’t care what system has been set up for whatever reason, there will probably always be room for fraud of some kind. If an award is judge-voted by only a few people, outsiders probably will have no idea how honest those judges really are. If an award is determined the way the Hugo is, outsiders AND other insiders who aren’t doing the actual tallying–how can anyone really know how honest the system is overall, and how honest each count was, and/or how accurate? Um, it seems to me counts are being disgustingly rigged on every level in this country, and/or they’re being done incompetently on shoddy equipment using shoddy methodologies. I basically trust nothing today. Greatly minimizing fraud and error should be the goal as eliminating them seems impossible. People should do the best they can but not expect perfection.
4) I can barely make it to the grocery store regularly; I don’t have the physical ability, time or money to travel long distances. Reading and participating in many of the events surrounding literature shouldn’t require high physical stamina and financial solvency. Minds, eyes and/or ears and fingers should be the only requirements for enjoying the writing world.
5) If the powers-that-be for a writing award must charge for the “privilege” to nominate/vote, I’d pay $10 simply for that “privilege,” with NO public listing of my private info. This could be a simple straightforward option that I think many readers would understand–and use.
6) In general, if you want more involvement in something, if you want more members, if you want more attention, stop being an exclusive club.
7) In specific, I think practically everyone should be able to pick up a science-fiction story and read it, but this seemingly isn’t happening enough in the current publishing and writing climate. The cultish atmosphere I perceive surrounding too much of the “science-fiction world” is off-putting.
8) Following the keep-it-simple maxim, my post could be summed up with: include more readers, exclude fewer readers, include more voters, exclude fewer voters. And now figure out exactly how to effectively implement all that.
Thanks for listening,
Fran
Fran: Most Worldcons maintain a list of members names online as a service to people who want to know who is attending (remember that many of those people will be authors). The usual practice is to allow members to opt out of being publicly listed and/or to allow members to be identified only by “badge name” (i.e. a pseudonym). Online membership lists do not normally include address information, though conventions may list totals of members by geographic region (country or state). Decisions as to what to list are made by individual Worldcons and are not mandated by WSFS.
To underline what Cheryl said — Worldcons have Never. Ever. listed the addresses of members in publications or on a website. Not even in the dead tree days.
Oops – I just read Kevin’s LJ. I mis-understood the meaning of this poll. Kevin’s post says it is for *selling a “Hugo Voting Only” membership*. That is not the question the poll asks, however. If this is the intended meaning of the poll, I need to change my answer. I answered $40 which is the usual price of a supporting membership that includes the right to vote for the Hugo awards. If you really do mean How much should a Hugo voting only membership cost, then I would agree with the editors’ original article that $20 is quite reasonable to cover the cost of administration while still making the right to vote mean something.
Kerry wrote:
Kevin’s post says it is for *selling a “Hugo Voting Only” membership*. That is not the question the poll asks, however.
I don’t see any difference between a “Hugo Voting Only” membership and “a reasonable cost for Hugo voting rights,” which is why I summarized it the way I did.
If this is the intended meaning of the poll, I need to change my answer. I answered $40 which is the usual price of a supporting membership that includes the right to vote for the Hugo awards. If you really do mean How much should a Hugo voting only membership cost, then I would agree with the editors’ original article that $20 is quite reasonable to cover the cost of administration while still making the right to vote mean something.
The purpose of the question is to ask “How much do you think would be a reasonable cost of a membership class that gave you the right to vote for the Hugo Awards, but no other WSFS membership rights like site selection or publications?” I summarized that as a “Hugo Voting Only” membership.
I’m only vaguely conversant with the administrative tools here, but I tried to update the poll figures with your desired vote change. Cheryl is traveling now and may have to come and repair the things I got my grubby fingerprints on.
Thank you, Kevin.
I am also assuming that if the proposal gains any momentum, that buying a supporting membership instead of a voting rights only membership would still include voting rights for Hugos as well as for site selection rather than being an additional cost.
Oh, certainly, a supporting membership would include the Hugo rights. (It would have to do so, per the WSFS Constitution.) An HVO membership would be a subset of the existing supporting membership class. And it doesn’t even require WSFS approval; Worldcons are already authorized to create additional membership classes with various membership rights.
Let me just say my comments about cheaper Hugo voting rates etc etc were more of just musing out loud.
There have a comment or two about the value of the traditional supporting membership and what one gets out of it.
I will just note that I was a supporting member of Worldcons from 1967 until I went to my first Worldcon in 1974. I wasn’t earning much back then, but none the less …
I do not think offering a cheap Hugo only voting rate is going to solve the problem of the vast majority of Worldcon members not nominating or voting.
I thought we already had this. Isn’t it called a Supporting Membership?
Yes, Johnny, but a Supporting Membership has a bunch of other things included in it that some people don’t see as worthwhile or anything that they care about, and don’t see why they should have to pay for publications from a Worldcon in which they have no interest or the right to vote for a Worldcon they’ll never be able to attend in order to vote for the Hugo Awards.
Try reading all of the comments before replying.
Anybody who wants is free to set up awards on any basis they want, including free or cheap voting.
Lots of people have done so.
None of those awards is as prestigious as the Hugo.
Connect the dots.
An obvious objection is that Hugo voters need to get Progress Reports because they contain the ballots, but in these days of electronic communication that is no longer the case. The vast majority of members already vote online. It seems entirely reasonable to say to potential members that they can have a voting membership for $20 rather than $40 if they agree to electronic communication, thereby saving the convention printing and postage costs.
I agree with most of this, however, I would argue that since not everyone is online, I would prefer that the nomination forms and ballots be mailed out as well as sent electronically. The entire PR doesn’t need to be sent, just the nomination forms and ballots could be sent to those with “Hugo Voting Only” memberships.
Mailing just the nomination forms and ballots would be a very marginal cost; probably averaging under $2 per person (of course this will vary as postage rates change).
Stacey: I suspect that nothing is more likely to kill this idea stone dead than telling Worldcon committees that it would involve additional mass mailings.
On the one hand, the idea of voting-only memberships seems worth considering, if only for it’s potential to add some funds to the coffers. I think it’s wishful thinking to imagine it will reduce the amount of complaints about the Hugo nominating/voting/results/etc, though
On the other hand, $10 seems to little to prevent ballot stuffing. Not fraud, mind you, but perfectly legitimate fan group based vote purchasing. For instance if Browncoat groups had been able to legitimately spend $10 a piece to buy Firefly a Hugo I can’t imagine they we wouldn’t have done so, nor do I see a way to make that ‘against the rules’ if they are legitimately purchased votes.
Unless my numbers are off it seems like unless the voting-only memberships added substantially to the numbers you could go a long way towards guaranteeing a win in certain categories for the price of an attending membership or two.
On the gripping hand, I would totally vote every year if it was cheap.