I only have an hour or so to go as President, and, as my last official act, I'd like to make the official announcement that the Nebula Awards website, nebulaawards.com, is now open and ready for beta testing. Everything is more or less in place, and the content management system ExpressionEngine is handling everything very well. There will be a few tweaks, updates, and additions over the next few days, but the basic set-up is there and ready to go.

The Nebsite, as we've been calling it, is designed to accomplish one of the primary goals of SFWA: to encourage public interest in and appreciation for science fiction and fantasy literature. This is also the goal of the Nebulas and the other awards that SFWA presents, and what I envisioned for nebulaawards.com is a website that will promote excellence in science fiction and fantasy by promoting the Nebula Awards, Andre Norton Award, and the Damon Knight Grand Master as exemplars of the best that sf and fantasy have to offer. Nebulaawards.com is aimed at readers, and sfwa.org will still be the place that SFWA addresses writers and offers member services.

Although there's plenty of static information on the site, nebulaawards.com is focused around blogs and interviews that are intended to be updated frequently. At the moment, there's an interview with Nancy Kress and the blog spot is empty, but a number of other interviews and blog posts have been commissioned and are in the pipeline. The Nebsite will live or die based on the quality of donated material, and we're counting on the membership, especially those of you who have won Nebulas, to provide essays, interviews, and material of all kinds that will simultaneously promote the Nebulas, sf and fantasy, and will be a form of self-promotion as well.

Nebulaawards.com is a tool, and whether or not it succeeds will be based on how the tool is used. It could easily become a place where Nebula rules are debated, and Nebula choices are picked apart. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope that it will help open up the field to new readers, and increase the public's appreciation of sf and fantasy. We'll see.

I want to thank Tony Geer, who programmed the Nebsite, and David De Beer, who is editing its content. They've both been working around the clock to get nebulaawards.com up and running before July 1. I'd also like to thank Ellislab, Inc. for donating a Personal Edition of the CMS ExpressionEngine, which has proven to be quite flexible and should allow nebulaawards.com to grow in many interesting directions.

Please visit www.nebulaawards.com and look around. I think it's got a lot of potential.

Michaelc

Posted July 1, 2008