This year, I decided to try to attend the Business Meetings of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) to learn more about the organization. I’ve served in numerous other governance roles, so my perspectives here are largely trying to make sense of these new experiences in those contexts. Here are some preliminary observations.

One caveat about my comments. These are simply my personal observations and should be taken with a grain of salt. If anyone has corrections or suggestions, I would welcome comments to help me learn more.

Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention (which I’m attending this year) is governed by the World Science Fiction Society. WSFS is basically an entirely volunteer organization that is constituted of the local group that is organizing to put on the Convention each year.

The business meetings use the Lumi virtual meeting platform. Another organization I belong to (the MTA) has used the same platform for their annual meeting. This platform works pretty well. It uses Zoom at the backend, but runs in a browser window, so it is a bit clunky. In practice, however, it works pretty well to provide access to the documents, let you see who is speaking, and offer a seamless voting interface.

Outside of Lumi, they also set up a Discord server for chat while the meetings are going on, with separate channels for on-topic and off-topic discussion. And the obligate channel for pictures of pets, of course.

There are five meetings scheduled: A preliminary meeting, three business meetings, and an in-person site-selection meeting to be held during Worldcon. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the preliminary meeting. But I did attend the first Business Meeting and it was rather like being thrown into the deep end.

The first business meeting was conducted entirely in executive session. The public agenda was “Report from the Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards.” Since the meeting was held in executive session, I can’t discuss the content of the proceedings. But that’s not my goal in this post.

The Presiding Officer is supported by three additional roles. A Parliamentarian advises on points of order, a Timekeeper keeps track of time used for debate for and against motions, and an assistant Presiding Officer manages the on-screen presentation. This allows the Presiding Officer to focus on running the meeting without having to refer to external documents or deal with the technology. As someone who’s served as Presiding Officer for many years (of the UMass Amherst Faculty Senate) it looked like the system worked pretty well.

The meetings are highly structured using Robert’s Rules, with very strict time limits established for debate for each of the topics. When the Presiding Officer presented a motion with the proposed time limits, they asked the body if they could be accepted without objection. With more than a hundred attendees, basically nothing could accepted without objection. The net result was that we then had to have a formulaic vote on each of the time limits. They all passed handily, of course. So objecting (as is typical) just wasted 10 or 15 minutes of time in the meeting. That’s the goal of Robert’s Rules: to allow the meeting to move forward expeditiously while giving people who object the opportunity to make their objection known, even if that objection is not shared by the majority.

One of my goals in attending the meetings is to get a sense of the key players. Some of the people I’ve heard of before. But many are new to me. You can pretty quickly get a sense for who are the people that respect the process and try to make the best of use time. And those who are there to try to derail the proceedings and gum up the works. It’s the same in every organization.

One of the most peculiar aspects of WSFS is that the organization only “exists” during Worldcon. Each year, people buy a membership in WSFS (as part of attending Worldcon or separately) and there are business meetings in the weeks leading up to the convention. The membership gives you the right to attend the business meetings, to vote in Hugo Awards, and to vote for the following years’ site selections. But there is no leadership or on-going meetings during the rest of the year. Several times (both in the meeting and on the Internet generally) I’ve seen people use this as an excuse for why problems can’t be addressed or solved.

There are typically thousands of attendees at Worldcon (~8,000 in Glasgow in 2024) and even more people who purchase memberships to be able to vote (a total of 10,000 memberships). But there are only about 150 people attending the business meetings. It’s time consuming to learn enough about any organization to understand how it works and participate meaningfully.

I currently have no plans to try to get more involved in the governance of WSFS. I’m already serving as Secretary of SFWA and that’s plenty of service, thank you very much. But I’m always interested to see other models and there are enough connections between SFWA and WSFS that learning more about the organization and the key players seems useful.