swil shows a weekly science fiction, fantasy, or anime movie in kirby lecture hall in martin at 10pm on monday nights. in days of yore, we didn't show weekly movies at all. in more recent, but still somewhat yore-like days, we showed a movie on mondays, and every week at swil meeting, we discussed what movie to show. we don't do that any more, probably with good reason.
we have a couple of un-to-quasi-official guidelines about what constitutes a valid swil movie. we don't show star wars any time besides the first week of classes (see later section), and we don't show ``princess bride''. basically, we try not to show things that everyone has seen 5000 times, or that generate frequent private showings. our mandate is more or less to show sf, fantasy, and anime movies that the campus at large won't have seen, but might want to see. it is not the case that anything swilfolk want to see is a swil movie, though many things are, and it's okay to be somewhat lenient. (for instance, we showed ``pleasantville'' in spring 1999, which isn't really sf/fantasy, but was a huge campus draw.) snibor eoj comments: ``the presidents can declare that a movie does not fall within the guidelines for SWILmovieness, but should bear in mind the general wishes of SWIL while doing so.''
currently, a vote is taken at the end of each semester on what movies to show the following semester. like all swil votes, there is a nomination phase and a voting phase. the nomination phase takes place at a prespecified swil meeting. people send lists of nominations by e-mail, bring them to meeting, or come up with them on the spot. the nominations are read aloud, and things are nominated by show of hands. the number of votes needed for a movie to be nominated should be a function of the general enthusiasm demonstrated by the non-members present. i've found that about 50 movies nominated tends to work okay. any more than that, and the list gets unwieldy.
by the time movie nominations are over, it's at least 1:30. movie voting takes place separately. i've seen movie voting happen by a piece of paper being passed around at a separate meeting. there are pros and cons to this approach. the most notable con during the three semesters i've done it so far is that there hasn't been another meeting with time for it.
so the method we've used, which works fairly well, is to send the list of movies (with descriptions) out to the whole swil list and collect votes by e-mail. generally, we have people vote for the number of movies which will be shown, which is 15, unless the college has changed its calendar. when using this approach, there's an open question of whose votes to count. spring semester, there will be seniors around who won't be at swat when the movies are shown. there are also local alums, and non-dismembered folk on the swil list who send in votes.
Chaos: the general guideline we've used is that people who attend movies should be able to vote for them. in 1998, we put a disclaimer on the top of the movie list saying that only non-members could vote, then, when people ignored it, we counted their votes if we could remember seeing them at some swil movies in the past semester, and counted votes of local alums who attend movies. in 1999, we tallied all votes we received, then separately tallied only votes of nonmembers who would be at swat the next semester and compared the two lists, taking all the ones both lists agreed on, and trying to pick the best mix of movies from the others.
Amy': We tallied the votes in four separate columns: Current-Student-Nonmembers, Current-Student-Members, Alums, and Total. In the spring, graduating seniors counted as Alums. We took clear winners qfrom the Total column, which usually came to...four to six movies. Then clear winners from the Current-Student-Nonmembers column, which was a couple more. Then we just tried to build a balanced movie list -- we assumed Current-Student-Members indicated what would be a more broad campus draw, and Alums could indicate what movies, which current students never heard of, might be really good.