Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2019
At the Sydney IAU General Assembly (GA) the statutes were modified to remove the votes by individual members. Few noticed this at the time but the subsequent reaction by disenfranchised members led us to revise this position in Prague. The need to have a members’ vote on the status of Pluto was complicated by these changes and the drama behind the scene at the Prague GA where the planet definition was resolved is not well known despite the huge public impact of this GA. I will describe some of the activities of the executive and its working groups during this very exciting GA. The IAU structures served us well during this process but of course there were also many lessons learned.