Okay, I normally don't (a) pay much attention to SFWA these days, and (b) prefer to let them exist without my continuing interference (I interfered more than enough when I was a member, thank you...), but this is getting insane.
The quick summary: a while back, a member of SFWA sent down a huge set of takedown notices in the name of SFWA, many works of which he had no authority to represent -- including Cory Doctorow, who rightly had a cow (however, in typical Cory fashion, he went so over the top in conspiracy crap he almost made SFWA look the victim... ). SFWA did what it could to undo the damage and banished the committee this came out of.
And now, they've created a new, replacement committee, which is chaired by -- yeah -- the person who committed the original disaster. In this case, though, when all was said and done, it's because the SFWA Bylaws require that the vice president chair all committees, and this person is the elected VP of SFWA. He's evidently not recused himself (forevergodwhynot? Oh, wait, this is SFWA) and I don't see any indication SFWA members are going to try to recall him or force his resignation (or do anything concrete but write letters to Forum and declare they'll never volunteer or do any work for the organization again, although most making that claim never did... ).
In other words, it's your typical SFWA kerfluffle. The only place where I can fault SFWA or it's current President is that given the situation, I would have thought long and hard about re-creating that committee in any form under the current administration, because this was inevitable, and he should have seen it coming. Better to NOT have the commitee for a year or so than create it under this guy's tenure as VP and force the organization into a position of obvious ridicule, which is effectively what's happened. Ohwell. That's almost as sad as this guy not recognizing the problem and -- even if he couldn't formally recuse because of the bylaws, publicly handing responsibility to some other officer and standing away. But if I've read the subtext properly, he's unwilling to do that. Perhaps I'm wrong from way out here in Siberia; I'd like to hope so.
This is covered in public in a few places, most notably Charlie Stross, who has some detail on what's been going on:
Charlie's Diary: SFWA attempts to commit public suicide:
This just isn't funny.
SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organisation of which I am a member (on account of my having just a slight interest in writing and selling SF in that country) managed to get into a huge public relations mess back in August/September, when Dr. Andrew Burt, acting on his own initiative as a member of the SFWA e-piracy committee, caused a major screw-up in dealing with Scribd, a text file sharing website. (Details on the whole debacle start here; for SFWA's response see here: more here: if you really want to know everything, Google is your friend.)
[....]
Guess what's happened?
Yup. I am not privy to his thinking, but our dear president and executive have voted to reinstate the old piracy committee, with Andrew Burt to chair it, under the new name of the SFWA copyright committee.
[....]
UPDATE
I've just been made aware that there's an interesting anomaly in SFWA's by-laws. The vice-president of SFWA is officially the head of committees, and it's their job to appoint or remove people from committees. Andrew Burt is, interestingly, the vice-president, and there's no mechanism to remove someone from a committee without going through the vice-president: consequently the only person who could act on our call to prevent him from having anything to do with the SFWA copyright committee was ... Andrew Burt.
p>
and John Scalzi:
How to Enrage Charles Stross:
That said, I think the board choose puzzlingly, to use as polite a word as possible, in its choice of chairman for the new committee, for some of the reasons which Charlie outlines in incendiary but not unreasonable fashion. It would not have been my choice, for those reasons and a few others (the suggestion in the board’s statement that our committee recommended installing the chairman of the new committee is quite obviously in error). I believe the situation was additionally complicated by the fact that the once-and-future chairman is on the SFWA board, and voted on the recommendations, and voted for himself as chairman of the new committee; had I been him, I would have chosen to recuse myself from the deliberations.
I joined SFWA in the mid-80's, ran the Nebula Awards for them for the better part of a decade, worked on the bylaw rewrite for the Nebulas with Ben Bova, and for a short period of time stood for VP of the organization, then decided that it was the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, and pulled my candidacy and then resigned from the organization since I'd decided to stop writing and focus on my computer work. That was about a decade ago (how time flies....), and I wrote about it a bit back in 2004 for those painfully curious. Laurie is still a member, which means occasionally I get my hands on Forum, and once in a while, she lets me see an email or message from the organization, but in all honesty, SFWA's not normally on my radar screen these days (but I will admit to having seen Capo's response to Jane Yolen, but that's as far as that goes in public).
This whole "Andrew Burt" thing, for lack of a sexier name for it, frustrates me massively. Not because of the situation itself -- this is minor, really -- but because it's a clear indication that a FREAKING DECADE AFTER I QUIT over SFWA's overall dysfunctional organization, NOT A DAMN THING HAS BEEN FIXED.
Look, what Andrew Burt did was well-intended but wrong and stupid. That he pulled SFWA's name into it is unfortunate. That he's now (still?) an officer of SFWA and in charge of a committee chartered to handle the things he's already been a major screwup with. That SFWA (the organization and members) have allowed and tolerated that? That they went and created that committee again, knowing he'd be in charge?
Sorry the mind boggles.
SFWA's been trying to turn itself into a professional organization for 20 years now; it's made some progress, finally enough of a staff to make sure things like legal forms and taxes get handled when they need to be. But 20 years later, the same core problems are still core problems: getting involved in the organization is a thankless and sometimes painful task, the number of people willing (much less qualified) to be involved in the organization is tiny, and SFWA insists on embroiling itself in the wrong fights at the wrong time.
SFWA's traditional solution to "how do we become professional" is to start yet another navel-gazing exercise in figuring out how to kick out the non-professional members. My argument was always that the affiliates and the up and coming members are your future and need to be included and nurtured and involved -- it's how you invest for the future. In one of the early "kick out the affiliates" fights, before I sold enough fiction to go active myself, I pointed out that my own work on the Nebulas was a successful model of using affiliates (who aren't trying to scrape by a living in a marginal business like writing fiction yet) to do work for the organization. The response by one high-visibility member was to tell me they'd happily let me stay after they kicked out all of the other affiliates because of the good work I was doing. He honestly thought he was being complimentary to me, but if you think about it a bit, you can see why I found it rather insulting (in a "boy, you keep the kitchen so clean" way).
Think about it -- WGA, Screen Actors Guild, Screen Extras -- these large and successful organizations haven't exactly needed to exclude affiliates to succeed. In reality, arguing about semantics of membership has always been a way for SFWA to let itself think it's doing something while not having to actually grapple with the significant issues the organization should be involving itself in. It's a huge waste of time and energy, and all it does is divide and demotivate the membership.
Laurie was recently down in LA at a screenwriting seminar; another participant was a woman who's a mid-list writer who was looking towards screenwriting and getting into SAG. She's already in RWA and MWA, and Laurie asked her about SFWA. Her response? Why bother -- what do they do for their members?
The list is fairly short, unfortunately. When I was a member, it was basically Griefcom doing interventions over contract problems, and that was as much a few key individuals willing to put the time in and do the fighting in the name of SFWA as it was SFWA itself. There's an emergency medical fund, which is great -- but how many years after creation, and it's still not something you can donate to and get a tax deduction? Hello?
That seems to be the overall attitude towards SFWA from outside the organization. I know I see no advantage in rejoining, assuming I get to the point where I'm selling fiction again down the road. I've heard from members and former members telling me interest in SFWA is way down, that Nebula participation is tanking, and that long-standing members are walking away and letting their memberships lapse. That should scare folks inside the organization, if they still care. SWFA seems to be moving towards irrelevance, if it's not already there.
Sad. Unecessary. SFWA is a better organization than it was 10 years ago, and much better than 15 - but still not remotely a good or successful one. And it still lives on the backs of a very few motivated members who fight through all of the crap (much of it laid on them and the organization by SFWA's own members) to try to fight the good fight. If you look at the list of volunteers SFWA publishes, I'd say half of those people were doing things for SFWA (in many cases, the same job) when I was in the organization a decade ago, and many of them are a good piece older than I am; what's SFWA going to do when the backbone of the organization, which is in it's 50's and 60's and 70's (and in a few cases, older) isn't there any more? Nobody seems to be stepping up among the younger members to take on the mantle -- and that's in good part because the organization makes it painful to those that try, so they rarely try twice.
how do you fix SFWA? Maybe you don't. Maybe you blow it up and start over (maybe Jerry Pournelle was right, all those years ago, about the PSWFA, although he was doing it for the wrong reasons).
But here's how I'd start, if I were stupid enough to try:
First, I'd send out a survey to all former members who left the organization over the last five years -- and ask them why they left, and ask them what it would take to get them to rejoin, and what the biggest problems were with the organization before they left.
Also send out a survey to all members asking them these things:
(1) why are you a member? What do you see as the benefits of membership?
(2) What do you feel are the problems with SFWA that need to be fixed?
(3) List the five non-SFWA issues (ranked in order of importance) that you feel SFWA should be spending it's time and resources on.
Now, I'd expect a lot of hostility to be returned. It won't be fun to read the results or generate data from them -- but it'll give the organization a clear idea of what's wrong and what to focus on, both in terms of how to fix SFWA and what SFWA ought to be working on.
Once you know that -- find a set of officers willing to put up with the crap they're going to get trying to implement these initiatives and go out and implement them.
Here's what I'd suggest, if anyone were asking me:
First: kill Forum. Serves no useful purpose any more. Hasn't for years, and only creates a place for members to rip each other. Nuke Bulletin. Whatever it brought to the organization in visibility or reputation or whatever over the years, it's done. Instead, Bulletin today flags SFWA as an organization with antique thinking, it's a discincentive to join. Move the NAR to web-only, no reason to waste paper on that any more.
Second, create a new publication, aimed at the members. Written and edited by officers and committees, talking about the actions and issues of the organization. Some of that is done in Forum today, but it's such a small part and so boring that it's hard to believe anyone cares or reads it. Create a place where the organization (as represented by it's elected officers and volunteers) creates a dialog and starts a conversation with the rest of management. Forum's not a dialog, it's an extended high pitched pitiful whine.
Third, embrace affiliates. Make it easier for them to get in, not harder. Create a third tier of membership, in fact -- but don't use my names for the categories, they suck.
Active Pro: Published one novel or three qualifying shorts in the last three years, or can show earning $10K in writing-related earnings in three years (yes, that bar is set painfully low. welcome to the wonderful world of fiction writing).
Inactive Pro: Published, but not currently qualified for Active pro. Yes, this implies that if you stop publishing, you move down a notch. Get over it. Anyone with one or more qualifying publication credits but not enough for Active is in this category.
Affiliate member: anyone who wants to join. Think of it as (a) outreach at prospective pros, (b) a source of income to fund operations and initiatives, and (c) a source of labor to actually get things done within the organization. Yes, this may mean you'll have members who join just to get into the SFWA suite. So? How is that different from, oh -- me, who sold five stories in about 12 years? Oh, yeah, I remember, I did such good work for the organization they'll let me into the suite... (snicker). And give me a nice plaque (which, actually, I still display proudly... ).
Elected officers and committee chairs MUST come from the Active Pro category; Inactive pros can't be elected to office, and run committees. Committees can be from any category, but at least one committee member much come from Inactive and Affiliate. No more than 25% of any committee can be seated from Affiliate.
This structure means the jobs that set policy and direction are done by people who are active, working pros -- not members who published a novel 12 years ago.
it also assumes that things get fixed so members WANT to get involved; be aware this won't be easy, since it implies taking some of the most noisy and cantankerous (no, abusive) members and putting a sock in their mouths; perhaps choosing to make them ex-members so the rest of the organization can get something accomplished. Have fun -- anyone with the guts to tell some of them to shut up will get a standing ovation in the SFWA suite. Honest.
Embrace the fannish side (like SFWA suites). One of the big fights within SFWA is between the "serious" members and the "we're just here for the convention invites and SFWA suite" side. They CAN co-exist. Honestly, some members are in both sides at once.
Think of the fannish side as outreach, create committees to handle it, and consider it part of making SFWA an organization members want to be a part of. It works in other organizations. And membership fees and volunteer labor (assuming SFWA can fix the toxic environment volunteers get shoved into) are good to have.
It wouldn't be easy. It might not be possible. I'm not sure the kind of people who COULD do it care enough to try any more. And even if they do, does it matter?
Honestly? Probably not.
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