Return to 1999 Business Meeting Minutes
The committee reports below the compilation of items from the 1994-98 Worldcons, together with the collected items from earlier Worldcons. The committee continues to use a definition of "likely to continue to have effect for more than a year" as "continuing". Items appearing with a "BM" in them were motions passed by the Business Meeting while items with a "CH" in them are rulings or opinions of the Chair.
The committee intends to make this full cumulative report available through its web page.
At San Antonio, the committee was charged with codifying the "customs and usages of WSFS" in light of the recent constitutional amendment which refers to such matters.
As a first step in this research, Tim Illingworth & Pat McMurray have OCRed and corrected the WSFS Business Meeting minutes for 1974, 1979, 1980-1983, 1985-1987 and 1990. We have OCRed but not corrected 1984 and 1988. 1993-date are available elsewhere (through Saul Jaffe). Pat has 1975 and 1991 to scan, and George Flynn gave us a disk with 1992 minutes that we have currently mislaid. These minutes are currently held in Word 6 format, and should be available from Tim’s web site (www.smof.demon.co.uk) Real Soon Now.
The 1979 minutes are a report constructed from Ben Yalow's copy of the agenda of the Main Meeting with contemporaneous annotations. We have been unable to track down any copy of the 1989 minutes - which is surprising for an MCFI convention. If anyone has one, we’d like to hear from them.
The NP&FSC recommends that the Business Meeting adopt the following:
Short Title: Continue NP&FSC
Resolved: That the WSFS Nitpicking and Flyspecking Committee is continued as previously constituted.
Short Title: Rules Should Follow Practice
Resolved: Amend the Standing Rules by inserting a new rule before existing Rule 26:
SR xx: Constitutional and Standing Rule Amendments. Motions to Amend the Constitution, to Ratify a Constitutional Amendment, and to Amend the Standing Rules shall be considered ordinary main motions, except as otherwise provided in the Standing Rules or Constitution.
Discussion: This removes a technical ambiguity in the current rules. Under the adopted parliamentary authority (Robert’s Rules of order, Newly Revised, 9th Edition), amendments to the constitution are explicitly defined as "incidental main motions", a special sub-class of main motions to which special rules apply. (Examples: 1. An Objection to Consideration may not be lodged against an incidental main motion. 2. An affirmative vote on a constitutional amendment may not be Reconsidered.) WSFS has, in practice, ignored all of these special rules, and has treated constitutional amendments as ordinary main motions. This rule explicitly codifies long-standing practice
Return to 1999 Business Meeting Minutes
Pat McMurray pat@cooky.demon.co.uk