off-year biannual council adjunct advisory board election

[solarbird]

I'm running for the Norwescon Guest of Honour Selection Committee. This is an advisory committee that comes up with potential guests to Norwescon. I think four of you can vote, but that's not why I'm posting this here. I think I'm mostly doing it because I just sent it in.

----- Statement for Election - solarbird -----

Vote for me if you want someone on the GoH selection committee who will bring up names from outside the core. If you thought Foolscap's decision to bring in Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade alongside Harlan Ellison as co-Guests of Honour was genius, as I did, and loved the resulting dust-up, as I did, then I am your candidate. If you want someone who will bring in suggestions like Michael Poe (Errant Story), or Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs (A Miracle of Science) or Fred Gallagher (Megatokyo), vote for me. If you want someone who tosses out names like Chiho Saito (Revolutionary Girl Utena, possibly the finest effort in high urban fantasy of the 1990s and substantially unknown to mainline fandom) or Rumiko Takahashi (Inu Yasha, Maisan Ikkokou, Ranma 1/2), or, well, anyone from CLAMP studios, vote for me. If you want someone who knows exactly why the word "Daikatana" is still funny, then I am your candidate, and I deserve your vote.

I'll list my own negatives for you: I am not a big reader of modern SF&F novels. I still read and still enjoy reading, and my classics background is pretty solid - particularly in the short-story canon - but I'm not the voracious novel reader others on the committee are. Similarly, I dropped my subscriptions to Asimov's and Analog when I realised they were boring me to tears several years ago. I hated Beggars in Spain. So if the person you want reads the surviving prozines religiously and skulks through the new-novels section every week - or even every month - I'm not her. Similarly, if you're looking for someone to pitch a Big-Name Actor as a guest, then, for the love of god, do not vote for me. I'm the chick who made Scientology jokes in the newsletter when John Travolta showed up, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

But if you want someone who is strongly aware of the alternative forms of fantasy and science fiction, someone who is knowledgeable enough to know, at least, what kind of questions to ask, and where to go asking - that's me. I'm that person. If that's who you're looking for, I am your candidate - and I want your vote.

Comments

[cow.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd vote for you. But I don't go to "mainline fandom" cons. Maybe these two things are related. :)

Good luck!

[solarbird]

Maybe! But Norwescon has historically been one of the places everybody would go, kind of the annual regional meet-up of all the tribes. I think there's value in that.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'd vote for you, but who is the electorate? All of NWSFS, or just the board of directors? If the former, maybe I should renew my membership (I can always remember my membership number: 1111.)

Kevin

[solarbird]

Neither. The registered Norwescon convention committee. NWSFS is a related but separate organisation with its own board and stuff. The current President of the NWSFS is on the Norwescon ConCom, but that's because he's interested in both rather than of any formal interboard linkages.

[smarier.livejournal.com]

Anyone on the Norwescon ConCom who has "registered to vote" (~1/2 of the concom) gets to vote in the elections. The whole registered to vote thing was a work around for a quorum issue, not enough concom members were voting in elections to make them valid, so instead of doing the smart thing and lowering the quorum threshold we came up with this.

NWSFS and Norwescon have a relationship through a parent organization.

[solarbird]

Well, we just couldn't get full quorum for the bylaws change, no? Or was there actual opposition?

[smarier.livejournal.com]

I don't recall what the reasoning behind not dropping the quorum (65%).

In the end we had to do this change in two steps.

First we changed the policies on who is "officially" on concom. This was a paperwork nightmare and only postponed the quorum issue a few years.

Recently we change the bylaws to more closely match the "new" policies, so that the right to vote is an "opt in" process, still more complicated than it should be.

When we came up with the above bylaw change we finally got smart and did the change of the vote at the convention. It is the one time we know we will have almost all of the concom present.

We could move the officer election to the convention as well, but most people want to wait until after the convention is over to see how the current officers did before voting.

-S

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Does that group's responsibilities include selecting the fan guest of honor? If so, I think I'm available that weekend. ;-)