Great, welcome! We’re glad to have you! This article is meant to provide a handy introduction to how to get your ideas heard, and explain some of the process.
First things first:
You must be a member of WSFS. You can accomplish this by finding the current Worldcon and buying a WSFS membership from them. (You DO NOT have to actually attend the Worldcon, although it helps if you’re there to represent your motion.)
You need to have at least one friend who is also a member of WSFS to sponsor your motion with you.
You need to write your motion and its supporting statement.
You have to submit your motion at least 30 days before the Worldcon.
Your motion will now appear on the Business Meeting agenda for that Worldcon and be debated! If it passes debate at two successive Worldcons, the change will go into the WSFS Constitution and take effect. Simple, right? Well… not exactly. Read on for context, explanations, and helpful tips.
What’s WSFS?
WSFS is the World Science Fiction Society. Worldcon is technically the annual meeting of WSFS. A lot of people don’t know that, so changes have recently been made to try to make this clearer.Â
If you’ve heard of “supporting memberships” and “attending memberships,” those are now “WSFS memberships” and “the attending supplement.” This is trying to make it more clear that WSFS exists.Â
Benefits of WSFS membership include nominating and voting in the Hugos and being able to participate in site selection (which requires pre-buying your WSFS membership for next year).
What’s the Constitution?
The WSFS Constitution is the document that governs WSFS activities. These include administering the Hugos and selecting the site of Worldcon. You can find a copy here.
The Constitution is where all the Hugo awards are defined, so if you want to change the Hugos, that’s the document you need to amend.
What’s the Business Meeting?
The Business Meeting is where all amendments to the Constitution are debated and either accepted or rejected. If you did Model Congress or Debate and enjoyed it, you’ll enjoy the Business Meeting. (The common wisdom is that the Business Meeting is extremely boring, but it’s not — it’s both fascinating as an exercise in participatory democracy and fun if you like rules lawyering.)
Amendments to the Constitution take two years — they have to be passed by the first year and then ratified by the second year. This is a slow process on purpose, to make sure that people have a chance to react to things they didn’t see on the agenda the first time.
Okay, I got it. So what do I DO?
First you need to figure out what change you want to make. It’s generally better to try to make changes as small as possible, so they’re easier to understand.
Then, you need to write it up using the proper format, along with a supporting statement. You can get help with that on the SMOFS mailing list, the JOF Facebook group, the WSFS Business Meeting Facebook group, or the WSFS BM Chat Discord. (Email me at aiglet (at) gmail for an invite.) It is STRONGLY recommended to at least run your proposal by one or more of these groups to prepare for the arguments you might see at the Business Meeting. (Also, be prepared for a lot of “we tried that and it doesn’t work.” That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, just that you need to explain what’s changed since the last time it was changed.)
Once you’ve got it written up in a format that makes sense to everyone, you submit your item to the Business Meeting for the next Worldcon. That will put it on the Agenda to be considered.Â
If you aren’t going to that Worldcon, it is generally a good idea to have someone who is going as one of your co-sponsors. It’s not entirely necessary, but that does ensure that at least one person in the room will be able to speak in favor of the motion and make the arguments you want.
If you are going to that Worldcon, it’s worthwhile checking out some of the videos of prior Business Meetings so you can see what that’s all about. The Business Meeting is run on Roberts’ Rules of Order (no, that apostrophe isn’t in the wrong place), modified by the Standing Rules and Resolutions of Continuing Effect from prior meetings.
And that’s all there is to it! Have fun, and good luck!
One of the things that fan-run conventions like Worldcon do differently from corporately-run conventions (like ComicCon) is that we don’t sell tickets, we sell memberships. It sounds like a meaningless distinction, but it’s not. (Please take as read here a whole rant about cultural transmission and how we’re kind of shit at it.)
Let me explain. A *ticket* is just a piece of paper that lets you get into something. There’s no expectation that you will participate in any way in the event, and in some cases there may be an expectation that you *won’t* do so. (Think of a concert -- you’re expected to dance or clap or whatever, but you’re certainly not going to interact with the performers in any meaningful way, or hop up on stage to fix their mikes...)
A *membership* is a very different beast. Although not all conventions are actually societies (Worldcon is, but it’s the only one I know of that does it this way - I could be wrong there), they are all meant to be interactive cultural experiences where you can and in fact should participate. Even if it’s only to the level of going to a panel, there is the possibility that you could be the person that asks the question that gets the most interesting response. Pretty much every fan-run con will take volunteers on the day, to do everything from helping out at Registration to making sure the guests get fed and watered.
Someone said to me earlier this week that the entry point for fandom isn’t really this style of convention anymore, it’s through the commercial conventions that do sell tickets. That’s true, and it makes it even more vital that we communicate clearly and extensively about why a membership isn’t a ticket, and why that’s a good thing.Â
Every convention I’ve ever been to has led to at least one “holy shit, how is this my LIFE” moment (in a good way), and the ones I’ve worked average about one every 24 hours of work I do. I just want to share the ability to have that moment with everyone.
I am in Helsinki and have been working MIMO, so I’m all ready to start angry-blogging the Business Meeting ANY TIME NOW. (Thursday, Thursday is the day.)
The agenda is already live on the website and has gone off to the printers, but I won’t start ranting until at least later today, promise!
I got a portable keyboard for my iPad to take to Worldcon so that I can grumpyblog the Business Meeting while I’m there
It’s hideously clackety, so there probably won’t be any live blogging, but I’ll try to do a roundup like I did a couple of years ago. There’s a ton of stuff to get through this year, but I think most of it should go pretty fast. (I hope. Please, deities of contrarians and parliamentarians, don’t let it run for the whole time or overtime.)
I saw someone refer to themselves as “just a lowly volunteer” the other day and it really distressed me. There is no such thing as “just” a volunteer! (This is written in the context of science fiction conventions, but probably applies to many other kinds of all-volunteer events.)
For those of you who have no context, a lot of SF conventions (especially ones that are more about books than anything else) are entirely volunteer run, top to bottom. This includes Worldcon and Arisia and Boskone and Minicon and BayCon and all kinds of other big conventions. These conventions literally would not happen without their volunteers.
Yes, there’s a level of volunteer called “staff,” but that really only means a couple of things. First, it means you probably joined up to do work before the convention, rather than mostly or entirely at the convention. Second, at some levels, it means you can have bucks passed to you. (Also, some of these jobs are more interesting -- I’m having a hell of a lot of fun being Deputy Division Head for WSFS at Worldcon this year, but I also had a lot of fun being a roving troubleshooter at BayCon two years ago.)
Our volunteers are the people who make the whole thing go. They take registrations, give directions, lay out tech setups, make sure programming is running smoothly, take care of guests, and so much more. They’re really the face of the convention for 90% of the membership, and without them the con would never happen.
The joke is always that everyone working a convention gets paid in “ego cookies,” and to some extent that’s true, but it shouldn’t be because some people get to be important when others aren’t. It’s the satisfaction of a job well done, of knowing that you came together as a part of a team to make an awesome event for your community. Everyone gets to share equally in that pride -- the person who puts in two hours as a door guard so someone else can go get lunch just as much as the con chair themselves.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you you’re “just” a volunteer -- you’re the foundation on which the entire thing is built. Be proud of that.
(Last night I had a whole elaborate metaphor about marching bands that involved telling you that the parade doesn’t sound right without the tuba, be glad you were spared.)
WSFS Business Meeting 2015 Report: Popular Ratification
This was a resolution passed along from last year that would have required any amendment passed by the Business Meeting (twice) to be ratified by a majority vote by the members the next year. (That’s a majority of the people who vote, not a majority of all members of a given Worldcon.)
This failed, and I was part of that, and I’m really, really conflicted about it.
I am generally a proponent of pretty much anything that enfranchises more people. I think that more people being a part of Worldcon and its business is almost always good. On the other hand… I’m from California, where we *have* popular ratification of laws.
This measure did not require any kind of supporting information to be included – just the text of the measure, for the members to vote straight up or down. I’m not saying the WSFS measures are as complicated as the CA legal system, but it does use some technical language to accomplish subtle effects sometimes. If I can’t understand what things do without ages and ages of discussion in the meeting, why should we expect members to be able to do so? And if we don’t provide partisan and neutral statements on the measures, what’s to keep the internet from doing so (although I suspect the “neutral” bit would be less common). (And, as someone else pointed out, even if we did, it wouldn’t help some international members, since any such statements would probably be produced in idiomatic American English.)
While I agree that there are people who can’t participate for reasons other than just “not caring enough to come to the meeting” (supporting members, dealers, people working bid tables, etc.), I really do think that allowing people who haven’t heard any of the arguments on the measures to vote on them would produce either a rubber-stamp approval (“the SMOFs know what they’re doing” ) or a rubber-stamp disapproval (“I don’t understand this/I don’t like what I’ve heard about this on the internets”), neither one of which is particularly useful.
And that’s not even mentioning the potential effects of organized political groups who are actively trying to do damage to WSFS and the Worldcon…
So I wound up actively trying to prevent the passage of something that I ought to ideologically be behind. If I thought it was possible to find someone who understands all the issues discussed at the meeting who’s capable of producing a non-partisan/neutral statement, I’d probably consider introducing a measure to produce a non-partisan review of the measures passed each year, so at least people would have some idea of what’s going on. But I’m dubious of that, so I guess it’s onwards with the current situation of biased reviews on the internet afterwards. ;)
WSFS Business Meeting 2015 Review: Two-Year Eligibility
This was an amendment put forward as new business this year that would have automatically extended eligibility for *all* works to two years, instead of only ones where the Business Meeting extends it manually. Extended eligibility is generally used for things that came out in very limited distribution, generally at the end of the year. This was the first thing killed at the BM, using the new "Postpone Indefinitely" motion, which is replacing (in function) Objection to Consideration. PI is much better than OTC, because it can be debated, which means that nothing gets dumped with no discussion at all. I'm actually the person who motioned the PI. The argument basically runs like this: In favor: Things that come out at the end of the year are penalized because people might not be able to get to them before the end of the nominations period. Against: It's not like things STOP coming out because a new year happened, so all this does is mean that your reading list will longer and longer. I think I would have been happier with a motion to make the Hugos for works from two years ago entirely, instead of for two years at once. (I still would have opposed it, but I would have had more sympathy for it.) Unlike many other things that happened at the BM, I don't actually have any personal feelings about it, I just think it's a bit of a silly idea that wouldn't make anything any easier or better for anyone.
Now that Sasquan is over, and the Business Meeting likewise (although fortunately the latter happened before the former, which seemed in doubt for a while), I’m going to do a series of posts on this year’s agenda and what I thought about it.
You can find the videos from this year’s Business Meeting at the YouTube channel (https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0oLnkb-s4Yd_nZwV7lG_aItUV_5aP0aB), and I HIGHLY recommend that you watch them if you care about this sort of thing (and/or enjoy parliamentary procedure).
The agenda itself is available at the Sasquan website, and I won’t bother posting the entire text of the longer motions, although I will include this link in every entry about it. (Old Business here: http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/WSFS-Business-Passed-on-to-Sasquan-1.pdf // New Business here: http://sasquan.org/business-meeting/agenda/)
Mostly I think the things that happened are pretty good. I’ll have a separate entry on my feelings about the Hugos and the Puppies.
Having just watched a friend of mine go seven rounds with an organization that says that it tries to embody feminist principles in its work structure, I’ve been putting some thought into what a feminist work environment looks like. Here are my thoughts, along with some ideas of what they might look like in practice at a small (<10 person), medium (<100 person), and large (100+ person) company. (Assume that each size includes the recommendations of the size below, unless otherwise stated.)
First, some assumptions: I am assuming Western-style companies with stable funding. I am assuming the need for a US-style benefits package.
I believe that a feminist organization is one that provides for the professional, financial, physical, mental, emotional, familial, and community health health of its employees.
(Part one, which you can find here covers professional, financial, and physical.)
Mental
Maybe it’s just because I work in games, but the rate of burnout is spectacular. I think part of that is that a lot of games companies (and I suspect a lot of companies in general) view their staff (especially non-technical and lower-level) as replaceable cogs. This completely overlooks any investment that the company might have put into making them productive employees and the rewards of having long-term staff members who will remember why things were done a certain way or be the only person who can keep some legacy system limping along. (Not to mention that happier employees, like healthier employees, do better work...) I believe that a feminist organization values its employees as individuals and will attempt to treat them as such.
Small organization: Make sure that you are explicit about how much work you expect people to do. (Don’t promise them a 35 hour workweek and then get distressed when they won’t put in 70 hours every week.) Try very hard to have enough people to get all the work done in a reasonable workweek (for me this seems to run about 50 hours). Keep an eye on people and try to make sure that everyone feels supported enough for the amount of work they’re doing.
Medium organization: Make it very clear that the culture of your organization is NOT for people to be sleeping under their desks all the time. Reward people who do good work fast by not piling them down with more and more things - let them take shorter workdays. If people do have to stay late, find out if it’s because they choose to/made their own problem, or because they have to (unreasonably short deadlines, something like that). Reward the former and talk to people about the latter. People should be free to work later schedules, but if they’re always in the office late because they can’t get their work done in an 8-10 hour day, that may show a need for more mentoring, better task allocation, or a new employee.
Large organization: No, seriously, hire more people. Try to get mental health benefits included in your health care plan. Make sure your PMs are good, and believe in supporting the team. Basically all the same stuff as the medium org, with more money behind it.
Emotional
This is actually one of the few things I think will be easier on a smaller organization, because it involves trying really hard not to squash people with bad business news. I believe that a feminist organization respects the private lives of its employees, and tries hard to not release/announce bad news in a way that will cause any more distress than is really needed. I also believe that a feminist organization tries to spread emotional and cleanup work evenly across employees, instead of waiting for someone to pick it up, since that person will almost always be a woman.
Small organization: Try to not announce bad company news publicly right before or after major life events of your employees. (E.g., you’re firing someone - go ahead and tell them privately, but if you know they have a major family event coming up, offer to hold the news from the press until after that so they don’t have to deal with explaining at the event.) There’s very little in the life cycle of a small company that will be ruined by being announced a week later.
Medium organization: Make sure that if you’re giving out bad news, it’s done in a reasonable and respectful manner, and at an appropriate time. I once worked for a company (which, by the way, I adored working for) that announced their shutdown by calling us all in on the Wednesday before payday and saying “well, we’re shutting down, we can’t pay you, you’ve got two days to get your stuff before the office goes away.” That’s... a bad way to do things. A better way would have been to announce this in the middle of the prior pay period - “we’re shutting down, this will be your last paycheck, you’ve got a week to get all your stuff out of the office before we have to close” would still have sucked, but it wouldn't have felt quite so abrupt or mean-spirited.
Large organization: Make sure that bad news comes from someone the person giving it will recognize. Don’t have a random HR person come along with it -- ask their manager to do it. That way they can get bad news from someone who they know and trust, instead of from a random effective stranger. (Yes, I do think it’s part of being a manager that you sometimes have to tell people they’re fired or the company is going away.)
All organizations: Please check to see who is doing the emotional labor at your company - is it always women who are cleaning up conference rooms, making coffee, passing around birthday cards, organizing going-away parties, making sure everyone knows who’s out sick? Even when they’re not office managers or team leads? Maybe you need to establish a rota for the conference rooms, the coffee. Maybe you need a culture that doesn’t include birthday cards, or where people buy and start their own birthday card. I’ve organized my own birthday and going-away parties at every job I’ve had because I wanted those things to happen - but I’ve had people ask me why I didn’t get them cake for their birthday.Â
 Familial
It is a sad truth of American life that women do the largest share of family caretaking, whether of children, siblings, or parents. I believe that a feminist organization tries to make sure that all its employees are supported when family emergencies strike, and are sensitive to the fact that sometimes people have to take care of their families first.
Small organizations: Make sure you comply with FMLA, even if you don’t have to. Try to allow for work from home or flextime. Provide a room for nursing mothers to pump, or consider allowing them to bring their children into the office. (I’ve worked at places with well-behaved office babies, and they were great!)
Medium organizations: If one of your employees has a family emergency, let them take as much time as they need to deal with it, as long as it won’t completely sabotage your business operations. Can you carve off some work for that person to do if they want it? Most jobs have something that can be done in isolation from the rest of the group that really needs doing, even if it’s just a cleanup task that everyone’s been sitting on because it’s not terribly high priority. Try to offer parental leave for new parents, and be aware of eldercare requirements.
Large organizations: By the time you’ve got 100 employees, you should absolutely be offering parental leave and/or work from home for a reasonable amount of time (3 months leave, 6 months WFH?). Make sure that the company culture supports people taking care of their families and does not penalize them for doing so.
Community
Very few organizations actually give back to the communities that they’re in, or acknowledge that their employees may have obligations to communities they’re already in (religious, hobbyist, etc.). I think a feminist organization should actively support these activities, as a part of acknowledging the whole person of each employee.
Small organizations: Ensure that your employees have the resources necessary for their religious obligations. (Prayer rooms, no expectation of being available during religious times, etc.) Do not judge employees who require this time as less. If you know what your employees are spending their time on outside of work, do not treat them differently based on those activities.
Medium organization: Consider becoming more involved in the area your office is in. Is there some service you can provide for the community? Do you encourage your employees to eat at local restaurants, use local services?Â
Large organizations: Set up a company-wide volunteering initiative. Allow employees who already volunteer to continue those activities as part of this initiative. Participate in fund-matching for non-profits.Â
These thoughts are... incomplete. They’re mostly a start of some stuff I’ve been thinking about - changes I’d like to see for things that are important to me. I hope that people in different places in life than me can contribute more ideas for a feminist, humane workplace.
Having just watched a friend of mine go seven rounds with an organization that says that it tries to embody feminist principles in its work structure, I’ve been putting some thought into what a feminist work environment looks like. Here are my thoughts, along with some ideas of what they might look like in practice at a small (<10 person), medium (<100 person), and large (100+ person) company. (Assume that each size includes the recommendations of the size below, unless otherwise stated.)
First, some assumptions: I am assuming Western-style companies with stable funding. I am assuming the need for a US-style benefits package.
I believe that a feminist organization is one that provides for the professional, financial, physical, mental, emotional, familial, and community health of its employees.Â
Professional
One of the big problems that comes up over and over again when I talk to women in the tech industry is that there’s basically no mentorship available for people who are above entry-level. I believe that a feminist organization will support the professional growth of its employees by providing opportunities for growth and learning.
In a small org: The company might offer tuition reimbursements, or some kind of support for a career coach.
In a medium org: The company might organize in-house learning of some kind - lunch speakers, for example.
In a large org: The company might have an explicit mentorship program in which everyone participates. Everyone mentors at least one person in the level below them who is not their direct report, if possible. (Note: I know that some people are not good at mentoring or being mentored, so I think this needs to be a “you can decide to only meet them once and never again, that’s okay” kind of thing. Someone might volunteer to take on more than one mentee, or go it alone without a mentor. The point is that mentoring should be a valued part of the corporate culture.)
Financial
Every time I interview for a job, I wind up with what I think of as the Goldilocks question - “how much money are you looking for?” Honestly, I have no idea how to answer that. If I ask for what I’ve been making, do I know that last company was treating me fairly? If I ask for as much as I want, is that maybe too much? Argh. I think a feminist company will make sure that all their employees are making a living wage, and help reduce uncertainty in financial interactions with the organization.
In a small org: The company should publish base salaries for all positions, and not negotiate. The company must have clear, explicit job descriptions for every position. Make sure that employees have access to information about retirement and stock plans that is easy to find.
In a medium org: The company should have clear and explicit standards for how employee evaluations are done, to ensure that they are based on job performance and not things like “looks the part” or “people like them because they make coffee.” These standards will be tied explicitly to how raises and promotions are done, and have clear paths for promotion. Commit to the highest paid individual only ever making some sane multiple of what the lowest paid person makes. Offer some kind of 401(k) matching, and make sure that you offer both Roth and standard 401(k)s. Try to pick a 401(k) management company that offers investment help.
In a large org: The company should ensure that technical people are not pushed into management because they’ve run off the end of the tech track, and that non-technical staff are not undervalued because they are not engineers. Offer profit-sharing or other schemes to allow your employees to benefit from the value they help create. Offer lunch seminars or online training about financial literacy. Have financial planners come in during open enrollment periods to discuss employees’ financial health with them and make sure they’re set up correctly for their own futures. (These should be from a third party and be totally neutral with respect to the employer.)
Physical
There are so many terrible stories about people being forced into bankruptcy because of medical issues. I’m sure everyone working in an American office with more than five people in it has gotten sick from someone coming into the office when they shouldn’t at least once (a year). A feminist organization understands that healthy employees do better work, and that it’s better to lose one person for a few days being out sick than have the entire office’s productivity depressed as everyone’s brains run out their noses because someone came in with a cold.
In a small org: Offer unlimited sick time. (This does require the org to only hire adults who won’t take advantage, and to fire people who do. It’s okay to require a doctor’s note for someone who’s out more than three days in a row or who’s out every Friday-and-Monday without fail.)
In a medium org: Offer the best health insurance you can find. The best insurance I ever had was at a very small company who figured out that it was cheaper to buy us all high-deductible plans and just *give* us the deductible amount than it was to get lower-deductible ones. Use an HSA instead of an FSA - HSAs carry over from year to year and allow the money to be invested once it’s over a certain amount. That lets people save up for bigger things and not worry about having to use it all up in December. Make sure you have dental and vision as well.
In a large org: Offer some health services in-house (flu shots, massages, that sort of thing). Up your insurance to something that covers more stuff - a nurse line is a great addition, as is mental health, physical therapy, chiropractic, and other “luxury” items.
I’m going to do the other four aspects in another post, since I think this one’s plenty long already. Thanks for sticking with me.
So I'm on a not-very-private, very high traffic mailing list for con runners. It's a (theoretically) useful place for people to talk about the nitty-gritty aspects of con-running. (Seriously, there a lot of sausage making in cons, from hotel contracts to guest selection to weird politics. Also, some stuff about how to get new people involved, which could probably use some airing out.) As a producer, I know that one of the most useful things you can do after a project is a post-mortem. Drag the good, the bad, and the ugly out and poke at them. See if there's anything you can learn for next time. Because there are a lot of cons run by a lot of people, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But you can only do that in a space where it's safe to say "oh, wow, we really fucked this one up big time, here's what happened and here's what we should have done." Which, if you're going to do it with a big group, means a mostly-private email list. As with any group of people talking about things, a lot of the conversation is off-topic, and sometimes people say really dumb shit. (No, really, really dumb shit. Racist, bigoted, dumb shit.) Not because they're bad people (I've not met them, I wouldn't know), but because they're just not thinking about what they're saying. And then other people jump in and explain why what they've said is dumb. Generally, they apologize, and life goes on. What's nice is that because the list is private-ish, this cycle of learning can take place and the people involved can just go on and be better people, without having to suffer social indignity. (We'll leave aside the question of whether social indignity might not be a useful tactic in dealing with bigotry - I think the answer is that sometimes it is, but that most people learn better when they're not busy scraping egg off their faces.) Now someone on the list has taken it upon themselves to create a Tumblr for the purposes of posting quotes from the list of people saying those dumb things. There are a couple really big problems with this as a tactic. It doesn't accomplish anything useful. Oh, look, an anonymous feed of people saying dumb shit. That'll teach them! Well, yes - it'll teach them not to say those things out loud where they could be examined, and corrected. It'll teach them that the list isn't a safe place to let your ass show, which kind of negates its value for post-mortems. What it won't teach them is that what they said is wrong or hurtful. Since the quotes are both out of context and anonymous, it gives the impression that every person on the list says these things and no one argues with them. The first simply isn't true, and the second is utterly laughable, since the people on the list will argue for 100+ posts about single vs double spacing, let alone something that's actually personally important to lots of people. That mistaken impression leads to the further mischaracterization of the people running cons as unwelcoming, at best and dangerous at worst. (This irritates me on both a personal and a societal level.) I'm not saying we shouldn't call people on their bullshit. I just think that maybe a random quotes feed of people being stupid isn't the best way to create change in a community, or to help that community be more positively viewed by people who might be interested in joining it or trying to change it from within. On one final note, and maybe this is just me being old-school... It's really rude to post quotes off a members-only list to the public internet, even if you don't have names attached. The default assumption is that the posts to the list are intended for the members of the list, and within the context of the rest of the posts on a thread and the overall culture of the list itself. Removing that context and presenting the content to a new audience is disrespectful to both writer and audience. I've been lurking on the list (on the very good advice of someone who advised me to lurk for a year to figure out who was and wasn't worth arguing with on what topics), and this kind of crap doesn't make me any more likely to participate in the future. I wonder how many other people are scared off not only by the constant flames and arguments, but by the knowledge that if they're ever wrong or stupid (and everyone is), they'll be contributing to the growing shitstorm around people who fundamentally spend a lot of their free time, energy, and money trying to entertain and engage other people? Fandom and con-runner-dom are both deeply flawed in some ways. But I'm pretty sure that this won't fix it.
I know I owe you an entry on Worldcon programming and awareness, but I'm actually upset about something, and I wanted to talk about it while I was still upset and thus thinking hard. I find that, as a woman, it's very hard for me to express anger or distress on any level to a man who doesn't know me well without it being portrayed later by that man as having been at least three or four emotional steps further down the road than it was. If I'm mildly peeved, I was "angry." If I'm actually angry, I was "furious." If I'm distressed at all on any level, I was "hysterical." This upsets me on two levels, one personal and one... let's call it systemic. On a personal level -- I have mild depression, which manifests itself as being *extremely* short-tempered. I am in treatment for it, and am very proud of the fact that I no longer randomly snap at people for no good reason all the time. (Unless I've gone off my meds for some reason, and one of the first signs I tend to have that I need to get back on them *stat* is when I start doing that.) I do still get angry with people, and I do still yell at them. (Or worse, get very quietly vehement at them -- some of my friends have seen this and apparently it's quite impressive. It generally only happens when I'm really losing my shit, though, and I think I can count the people I've done it to on the fingers of one hand and still have at least one finger left over.) But I don't do it by accident, or when I'm not actually angry. On a systemic level -- I was talking over this entry with a female friend of mine, and her take on it was that every woman who speaks and is then mis-represented now has to deal with the social consequences of being believed to be so much more upset than she was. This is much smarter than what I was going to say. If you're always represented as being "angry" or "hysterical," then people are going to stop listening to you. (Or not paying attention to the thing you were upset by, if they're only getting stories in the third person.) This makes it much, much easier to disregard the seriousness of women's concerns (or, indeed, the entire idea of the concern itself). "Oh, she's just upset about nothing." "Oh, she's just worked up over something or other." Whatever it was is not as important as the fact of some woman's purported overreaction to the thing. The net effect of all of this is that women do not feel comfortable expressing direct anger or hurt about things, because having to deal with people telling you to not get so worked up about things doesn't make dealing with the initial thing any easier. I, personally, tend to watch myself very carefully around certain men, because I know that any expression of displeasure will cause them to either blow up at me or treat me like a child. Since I don't wish to have fights over things I'm not *that* upset about in the first place, or be patronized for expressing mild concern over things, I just don't say anything. And thus do the small things become accepted parts of our culture, and a new set of things become "the small things" that no one wants to speak out about. Then one day we turn around and wonder how we became these people who accept all this crappy stuff as normal. Well, when you can't be mildly upset or mildly peeved about things, they do tend to grow. "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept." It's not just for the Australian Army anymore. What can be done? As women: We can speak up anyway. We can back each other up. We can correct incorrect third party reporting - "hey, I know you probably feel like you were being yelled at, but what she actually said was X, and it was pretty mild. Maybe you should examine why you feel so put upon?" As everybody: Please, before you report on someone else's emotional state, make sure that your reporting is accurate. Examine whether your reactions to what was said are coloring your understanding of what the other person was feeling. And don't use words like "hysterical" - it's a specific term that's pretty much only used as shorthand for "you can write this person's comments/feelings off, they weren't in their right minds and don't have to be taken seriously." (Unless that's what you actually mean, in which case, well, that's up to you.) Changing the way we talk about each other is hard, but if we want people to feel free to say "hey, this thing you did upset me, and I value your company, so I thought you should know," then we have to be willing to value that expression enough to listen to it, and to report it faithfully if we must discuss it with people who weren't there.
So I'm watching the post-Worldcon chatter play out, and, as usual, there's a large chunk of it around "where are the young people at Worldcon?" I have some thoughts about this. First off, I want to define "young" - in this context, I'm going to use "young" to mean "under 35," and probably (in actual usage) to mean "between graduating college and 35," because I think that there's a huge underserved demographic there that we might have a chance of reaching. There are really three things that keep people from going to Worldcon, in my opinion: cost, appeal of programming, and awareness. I'm going to talk about cost here -- awareness and programming appeal will be covered together, probably tomorrow. (I've only got so much interesting in me for any given day!) I actually don't think that Worldcon qua Worldcon is too expensive. Let's call the average cost of a membership about $200. Assuming that you go to 10 hours of programming on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and 5 hours on Thursday and Monday, that's 40 hours of programming at about $5/hour -- about the same cost as going to a first-run movie, at least for me. (I tend to use "is it cheaper than the movies" as a first test of "is this too expensive".) (Programming in this context meaning "activity or entertainment made possible by the con," which would include parties, opening and closing ceremonies, trolling the dealer's room or the art show, etc.) The real problem with the cost of Worldcon is the rest of it -- hotels, travel, and food. Not much anyone can really do about the cost of those things themselves, but I do think that Worldcons could do a much better job helping people find ways to mitigate those costs. In terms of travel: not every Worldcon is in a city that's a hub for some airline, but most of them are near those cities. I wound up flying into Austin and driving, because it was half the price and not that far to drive. It would have been nice if the con had pointed that out (that Austin was a cheaper place to fly to), and told people some of how to get from the cheap airport to the con. (I *think* there was actually a cheap Megabus service from either Dallas or Austin that weekend to San Antonio, which could have helped a lot.) Net savings: $250 on airfare. (Which, admittedly, I turned around and spent on renting a car for the week, but I was probably going to do that anyway.) Hotel variety: LoneStarCon 3 (the most recent WorldCon) was in two hotels -- both Marriotts. Across the parking lot from the second Marriott was a Days Inn. I don't know if it would have been possible, but it would have been nice for the con to have one room block in the Marriott attached to the convention center, and one in the Days Inn, just to have an option for those of us who didn't want to pay Marriott prices. Yes, I could have gone online and looked up the Days Inn on my own, but without having seen the layout, I don't have any good scale for how far away that hotel is from the convention. (Even if a room block isn't possible, maybe something like "5 minutes walk away" rather than .2 miles might help?) Roommate matchmaking: My roommate pulled out a week before the con. When I went to the LSC3 website to see how to find people looking for rooms, all I could find was to check the Twitter hashtag. It might be useful to have either online or well-advertised at the con some kind of board that lets people look for or offer housing. I know it's unpopular to think about sharing your room with someone you don't know, but I'd have welcomed the help with the cost, especially if I could find someone that had been vouched for by somone I know or know of. We can't expect people to be coming in already having a posse, and it can be hard to find roomies at the last minute. Packages: Again, something I don't know is possible, but there might be some interest in selling something like "4 YA memberships + 4 room nights for $1200" or "4 adult memberships + 4 room nights for $1500." (This does represent a discount on my $200 membership price above, so the numbers may need fudging, but the math is easy for me with these.) That way groups can get together and say "okay, A has $600 and B has $400 and C and D both have $250, yay, let's all go to Worldcon!" Even A's $600 is cheaper than going by themselves, and they've got company, while C and D who maybe couldn't afford to go before now can at least think about it. But even with all of this, there's still one big problem that needs addressing... Awareness. It's one thing to say "Worldcon is too expensive." It's a completely different thing to say "I don't see what the value proposition is for me in Worldcon." I think most people who say the first actually mean something more like the second. They just don't see why they should be laying out all that money, or if they do, they don't find out about it until the very last minute, when it's the most expensive (and the hardest to get vacation time for). So tomorrow, I'll try to address some of that.
One of the things I see come up over and over again (in pretty much any group of humans I've been a part of) is that people inside the group aren't always capable of seeing how they come off to people outside the group. What's a cute, funny in-joke to someone who's "in" may feel exclusionary and weird to someone who isn't. I suppose what it comes down to is what the people on the inside do when they discover the disconnect. There are really three options: 1. Double down. Insist to all and sundry that it's only a joke, and that anyone who doesn't immediately get that and react to it as such has no sense of humor. 2. Abandon ship. Decide that the joke and all its appurtenances are irrevocably tainted and must be suppressed with great vigor until such a time as the term has become neutral-to-forgotten and can be reintroduced as a funny joke again. 3. Educate. Attempt to inform all the people who don't think it's a joke that it is a joke, possibly with a history lesson attached. (This can, unfortunately, read to outsiders as variant 1, especially if the people doing the informing are less-than-gentle about it.) I'd love to say that appearances don't matter, but they do. If the goal of the group is to feel inclusive and welcoming to newcomers, then I suspect the correct response is some combination of 2 and 3. (Use the term internally, and explain it to people who join, but don't play it up too much outside the group so you don't scare people off.) This is a shitty solution, but I can't really think of any way to reclaim a term that was meant to be a joke once it's gone off. (Reclaiming slurs is a different kind of thing - since the intent was always serious, it's a different act to use it in a different serious way from trying to reclaim something meant to be funny from the jaws of seriousness.) One of the interesting side effects of effectively growing up on the internet is that I have an almost magical belief in the power of words to define reality. Unfortunately, that makes my reality a very shifty thing, as words get used and misused, defined and redefined. In the same way that I try very hard to not be a prescriptivist grammarian (though I often fail), I think it's important to not be a prescriptivist about word definitions. It's a losing battle, for the most part. While I do have a specific term in mind here, I think it's a more widely applicable thing. I note that liberals are now calling themselves "progressives" instead, and that it's very hard to get into an argument about the actual merits or lack thereof of socialism. (Both preceding comments apply only in the US and in my experience. I know it's not universal.) I wonder if it's a given that any group which chooses its own label is asking for that label to be turned against them? I suspect so, and that makes me sad. I know it hurts to give up a label that was freely chosen and proudly borne. But... when does the label go from being something you use to cheerfully associate yourself with other people to something people refuse to associate with themselves? And at what point do you give it up so as to not turn people off? I don't have right answers. I'm pretty sure there aren't right answers. But it's a discussion that's happening around me a lot these days. I guess we'll have to wait and see what works.
I have a bunch of posts queued up, but I threw my back out Monday in San Antonio, and am thus coping with that (and the side-effects of the groovy drugs they gave me for it).
I'll probably just post the stuff in my queue, but it's going to need some editing before I'm really happy with it. (This is why I should just post directly, without fidgeting - I think it comes out better.)
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