Today, the chair of the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon, Esther MacCallum-Stewart announced in a statement that Kat Jones “has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.”
The move comes after a report posted on File 770 revealed, via leaked emails provided by Diane Lacey, that Jones, along with Lacey and Western Hugo administrator Dave McCarty, researched nominees for anything they thought might be of concern to the Chinese government in the lead up to the Chengdu 2023 Worldcon.
“We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so,” Lacey said in an apology statement. “Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”
Jones also issued a statement in light of the File 770 story by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. “For Chengdu, I conducted the eligibility research as instructed by the 2023 Hugo Award Administrator [McCarty], and asked for clarifications where instructions were not clear,” she said. “I did have concerns, and I shared them with the Administrator. Those concerns you should have evidence of if you have access to all communications. I was not involved in the evaluation of the data we flagged—and you’ll note in those emails we all expressed confusion over the vague instructions and had no idea whether anthing [sic] we were mentioning was an actual problem.”
She added, “I had serious concerns at this point about this process. I then stepped back and did no further work for the Chengdu Worldcon after the first pass of eligibility research. I only had visibility into that first step as a Hugo researcher. I did not ever and do not have visibility into why the choices that were made, were made.”
Glasgow 2024 also announced that they were taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.” Those steps include publishing “the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot” in late March or early April (i.e., without the delay that occurred with Chengdu); full voting results, nominating statistics, and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on August 11, 2024; and the publishing of “a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony.”
