Announcement from WSFS Mark Protection Committee

~ Linda Deneroff

Worldcon Intellectual Property, whose board of directors is the members of the Mark Protection Committee of the World Science Fiction Society, has issued the following announcement:

World Science Fiction Society

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

25 February 2024
World Science Fiction Society
Mark Protection Committee
Post Office Box 61363
Sunnyvale CA 94088-1363 USA

The World Science Fiction Society (www.wsfs.org, WSFS) is an unincorporated non-profit association whose activities include the annual awarding of the Hugo Awards via the selected World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) each year. WSFS, through its Mark Protection Committee (MPC), manages Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), a non-profit corporation that holds intellectual property on behalf of WSFS, which previously issued a Press Release on January 30 addressing some of these issues.

The WSFS MPC takes very seriously the recent complaints about the 2023 Hugo Award process and comments made by persons holding official positions in the MPC. In connection with these concerns, the MPC notes the following. There may be actions taken or to be taken that are not in this announcement.

  • Dave McCarty has resigned as a Member of the WSFS MPC. The MPC has elected Bruce Farr to fill the remainder of Dave McCarty’s term until the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting. Thereby Mr. Farr automatically became a voting member of the WIP Board of Directors (BoD).
  • Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the WSFS MPC and Donald Eastlake has been elected Chair of the WSFS MPC. Notwithstanding his resignation as Chair of both the WSFS MPC and the WIP BoD, Mr. Standlee remains a WSFS MPC Member and WIP BoD Director.
  • The Hugo Award Marketing Committee (HAMC) of the WSFS MPC has been dissolved and its activities transferred to the WSFS Marketing Committee, an advisory board to the WIP BoD. At this time those activities include the management of the WSFS.org, Worldcon.org, TheHugoAwards.org, and NASFiC.org web sites.
  • To avoid any possibility of confusion, note that the “Tianwen Program” is not a part of WSFS and has not been approved or endorsed by the WSFS MPC or WIP.
  • Minutes of the special meetings of the WIP BoD held on January 28 and 30 and minutes of the meeting of the WSFS MPC on January 30 are posted at www.wsfs.org/committees/mark-protection-committee/mpc-minutes/.

Please note that each year’s Worldcon is run by a separate organization which administers the Hugo Awards for that year. The Chengdu 2023 Worldcon has asked that any specific questions about the administration of the 2023 Hugo Awards be sent to hugoteam@chengduworldcon.com. The Glasgow 2024 Worldcon will be administering the 2024 Hugo Awards and can be contacted at hugo-help@glasgow2024.org. For media enquiries on other topics related to MPC or WIP, you may contact info@thehugoawards.org.

One thought on “Announcement from WSFS Mark Protection Committee”

  1. This appears to be deck chair shuffling while the ocean liner sinks. Continuing to insist that people reach out to the Chengdu team for any matters pertaining to the 2023 Hugos, when it has become crystal clear that the Chengdu team is either ignoring all attempts to communicate with them or they have been outright disbanded, indicates that WSFS MPC still has not accepted that they’re the only body with a duty and the power to fix this disaster.

    From a place of utter sincerity – to get ahead of this, you need to do three simple things. 1. Take ownership of the problem. This means the buck stops with the MPC, not the defunct Chengdu committee (or worse, no one). 2. Stop looking for a perfect solution to the problem – it doesn’t exist. There will be hurt feelings from here forward no matter what is done; you need to take the least-bad option from the choices in front of you and do the best you can to rebuild for long-term credibility.

    https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-2023-hugo-awards-somehow-it-got.html

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