LAcon V: The 84th World Science Fiction Convention previously announced that the annual business meeting of the World Science Fiction Society, which takes place during each Worldcon, will be held online in 2026.
IMPORTANT: The first virtual WSFS Business Meeting will be held Friday, July 17. All new business must be submitted on or before June 17, 2026 (30 days before the start of the business meeting, per the WSFS Constitution). All financial reports from Worldcons and NASFiCs that have not closed their books are due on that date as well. All business should be submitted to bm-submit@lacon.org.
What is the Business Meeting?
As a member of LAcon V, the 2026 World Science Fiction Convention, you are a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). Each year, the membership of WSFS is made up of the membership of the Worldcon for that year—this year that’s LAcon V.
Your WSFS membership gives you the right to nominate and participate in finalist voting for the Hugo Awards and to participate in site selection for the 2028 Worldcon. If you take the additional step of becoming an attending member or virtual attending member of LAcon V, you have the opportunity to attend the WSFS Business Meeting and debate and vote on the rules of the organization, including Hugo Award categories, site selection processes, and the rules of how the debate on those topics happens (i.e., the rules for the WSFS Business Meeting itself). All WSFS members can submit business, but only attending members and virtual members can participate in debate and votes at the Business Meeting.
The debate and discussion about topics such as the Hugo Awards, site selection processes, and WSFS Business Meeting rules occurs at the business meeting (yes, the individuals at the meeting debate how the individuals at the meeting should debate). You must be an attending member or virtual attending member to attend and vote at the business meeting; however, all WSFS members may submit business.
When and where is the Business Meeting?
LAcon V will host the business meeting virtually on four different dates prior to the convention:
- Friday, July 17, 2026
- Sunday, July 26, 2026
- Saturday, August 1, 2026
- Sunday, August 9, 2026
- Sunday, August 30, 2026 (Site Selection Announcement)
All of the virtual business meeting sessions will start at 9:00am Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7). The meetings are scheduled to last for three and a half hours, but may go up to 15 minutes long depending on where we are in the schedule.
Prior to the first meeting, there will be Test Your Tech sessions to practice using the virtual meeting platform. The date and times of the Test Your Tech sessions will be announced once they have been scheduled.
What happens at the Business Meeting?
The main thing the Business Meeting deals with is changes to the WSFS Constitution. Changes to the WSFS Constitution normally have to be passed at one Worldcon and then ratified at the next one before they are confirmed. This ensures that there is time to fully reflect on the decision made in the room before finalizing the change. This year’s Business Meeting will decide whether to ratify changes that first passed at last year’s meeting in Seattle. You can see a list of these items, called Business Passed on, on the WSFS website. There will also be proposals for new changes to the Constitution submitted to this year’s Business Meeting; if those pass, they will then be up for ratification at next year’s Business Meeting in Montréal.
The Business Meeting also handles changes to the Standing Rules, which govern how the Business Meeting itself is run; resolutions to extend Hugo Award eligibility for certain items; reports from the Mark Protection Committee and other committees that have been established by the Business Meeting; and elections to the Mark Protection Committee.
You can find the minutes from the 2025 Business Meeting on the WSFS website. You can also find video recordings of all sessions of the 2025 Business Meeting on the Worldcon Events Youtube Channel and Seattle Worldcon Youtube Channel.
You must be either an attending or a virtual member of LACon V to attend the Business Meeting.
What will happen at this year’s Business Meeting?
Great question! Beyond the ratification of Business Passed On from last year, election of Mark Protection Committee members, and the results of 2028 site selection, the rest of the agenda for the 2026 Business Meeting will be determined by what proposals and reports are submitted by members to the Business Meeting.
The deadline for submission of new business and reports is June 17, 2026. The agenda for the Business Meeting, with all the proposals and reports that were submitted by the deadline, will be available by June 27, 2026.
Regardless of the specific items of business submitted, the general schedule for the Business Meeting tends to be as follows:
The first session of the meeting is known as the Preliminary Business Meeting. It is used to review the agenda for the rest of the sessions, set debate times (which can always be amended), and provide members with the chance to object to discussion of certain items of business (there is a particular mechanism for this and it requires a vote of those present). This session can also include reports on the finances of previous and future Worldcons, reports from other WSFS committees, and votes on certain resolutions. If all preliminary business meeting business is completed, we will move on to the main agenda.
At the second and following sessions, the meeting handles the remaining business in order, including debate and, as necessary, votes (the order is generally Resolutions, then Standing Rules Changes, then Business Passed On, and finally New Constitutional Changes, though the body can vote to take things up in a different order). Business can be either voted on or referred to committees to report back this year or in future years. As noted above, the in-person business meeting session will include the presentation of the results of site selection and a presentation from the newly seated Worldcon.
How to submit proposals to the Business Meeting
Proposals can be submitted to bm-submit@lacon.org. The deadline for submission of new business is end of day (Pacific time), June 17, 2026. For anyone submitting reports, including both committee reports and financial reports from previous or seated Worldcons, please also use the bm-submit@ email. Reports must also be submitted by June 17, 2026.
Proposals must include a short title, the text of the proposed change with markup, the names of any sponsors (all proposals must have at least two sponsors, and all sponsors must be WSFS members), and any rationale you wish to provide.
Please double-check the spelling of all sponsors as the Business Meeting staff don’t know everyone. The text of the proposed amendment should format any insertions in blue underlined text (example insertion) and any deletions in red struck through text (example deletion).
Your proposal can be either in the text of the email or an attachment, but for complex amendments with significant markup, please use an attachment. Any attachments should be a file that allows Business Meeting staff to easily select/copy the text (such as Microsoft Word or a Google Doc, please no PDFs).
If this is your first time submitting a proposal to the Business Meeting, we recommend that you take a look at a prior year’s agenda to see what information is typically included in the rationale for proposals. If you need help crafting the specific text of your proposal, you can contact Business Meeting staff for assistance at businessmeeting@lacon.org.
How is the Business Meeting run?
To ensure that each attendee has an opportunity to be heard, aid in managing votes, and keep the agenda rolling, the business meeting is run according to Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR) unless the WSFS Standing Rules include a specific deviation from RONR.
Remember that “fair” doesn’t always mean “I get what I personally want.” It’s a deliberative assembly run in a democratic manner. That means that sometimes you don’t win, but it does mean that everybody has to play by the same rules.
Reminder: the current standing rules, along with a copy of the WSFS Constitution, can be found on the WSFS website.
How was the Business Meeting scheduled?
On December 6, 2025, the LAcon V Committee announced the schedule for the annual WSFS Business Meetings, conducted virtually over four sessions during the summer of 2026. As part of the announcement of a virtual meeting, members of the society — which includes all those with memberships in the 2026 Worldcon LAcon V — were encouraged to fill out a survey which will be used to help schedule the online business meeting sessions. The results of this survey, which garnered 147 responses from the science fiction and fantasy community, led the committee to select the following dates for the scheduled virtual sessions.
Results of the business meeting survey can be found here.
Any Questions?
If you have any questions or concerns about how the business meeting works, please contact us at businessmeeting@lacon.org.
