Compsoc Minutes (03/11/2006)

Present (Exec listed first)

Bruce Tinton (Bruce)
Andrew Wheat (Candle)
Frederick Emmott (Fred)
Laurence Hurst (Laurence)
Arun Prasannan (Polar)
David Buckley (Bucko)

Sadiq Jaffer (Sadiq)
Daniel Watkins (Odd_bloke)

Agenda

Issues
Academic Events
Xen
Exec tickets
Lug
Any other business

Issues

A number of issues were raised on the exec mailing list regarding the society. These included a lack of forward planning, lack of open decision making process, lack of follow up to items which are assigned to people.

Sadiq suggested that it would be a good idea to draw up a calendar of planned events so that people, including the exec, know what is coming several weeks in advance. Candle reported that he has very nearly sorted the coach for the IBM Hursley trip. Bucko suggested promoting it in lectures. Sadiq said it was important to fill the coach if at all possible, otherwise the society will not be able to recoup the cost of the coach despite IBM’s subsidy.

Sadiq noted that there has been a lack of follow up to items assigned during exec meetings and someone needs to chase people up. It was agreed that the president would be the one to chase people up, and the secretary should produce a job-list to address these issues.

Sadiq said that he felt there was a lack of an open decision making process and Laurence reported that some people had expressed that they found exec meetings inaccessible. Those present generally agreed that exec meetings would seem more accessible once gaming started again and much of the problem was that people were unwilling to make a special trip to campus just for the exec meeting. Sadiq suggested that less discussions should be held on the exec list, in the interest of making the decision making process more open. Candle agreed and said he felt that discussions should not be held on the exec list, it should be for agenda items and contacting the exec only. Odd_bloke said that gentoo had three main mailing lists, one which is restricted to very few core people, one for developers which is open and where most of the discussion takes place and one for users with trivial requests.

Fred said that someone recently publicly published sensitive portions of the exec list and asked if a warning followed by removal from the exec list would be appropriate if this happened again. Sadiq pointed out that the exec list should not be a secretive list.

It was also pointed out that things got very heated on IRC until the LAN and then cooled down quite a bit after. It was suggested that the lack of socials may be affecting attitudes within the society.

Bucko asked that it be minuted that there is a pub crawl organised as a number of exec members were unaware of this.

Academic Events

Polar reported that the IBM Hursley trip is the Wednesday after next. He asked how much we should be charging and that it was &£4 last year. He also requested that we advertise the trip with posters, flyers etc in a bid to fill the coach. Fred asked about the DCS projector, and Polar reported that he had already organised for the event to be advertised there, and the event will also appear on DCS’ website.

Polar also said that he was now in contact with another person at Accenture and is waiting to hear back from them. He also reported that most events are on the website. There are a number of tutorials coming up, but not set in stone yet and a poll on the topic for a Microsoft lecture is in progress on the forums. Sadiq mentioned that it would be worth talking to Acehole to see if Rackspace would be interested in giving a guest lecture.

Polar said that DCS were concerned that current second year CS have not been offered any functional programming tuition, and that there was a possibility that a postgraduate would be willing to give a prolog tutorial. He also said he would like an academic wiki on the website, and proposed having an academic section on the existing wiki used for the tech-team to save having another installation. Polar was unsure if the O’Riely membership was in the name of Compsoc or the LUG. Laurence said he thought it might be the LUG, but Polar should check with Seren (Sophie Marshall) to be sure.

Polar added that he would like to create a ‘how to do stuff on our servers’ area on the website for the benefit of freshers.

Xen

Fred reported that PlanarPlatypus (Peter Ellis) and Covbob (Graham Hayward) have volunteered to setup the Xen servers. Polar suggested more information be put on the techteam wiki about the services we offer and Fred agreed this was a good idea.

Exec tickets

It was requested that if be minuted that the exec should file buzilla tickets on all issues emailed to the exec mailing list. Bucko pointed out that Bugzilla is difficult to log into. It was agreed that both the President and Secretary should keep an eye out for ‘ticketable’ emails in the hope that they would not both miss one.

Lug

Sadiq said that there was no formal structure to the LUG and suggested this was a bad idea. Polar said that he felt the LUG was a special interest group, within Compsoc. Sadiq pointed out that no-one knows who is running the LUG. or whose responsibility it is to organise things within and for the LUG. He suggested that the LUG should elect a couple of people to put in charge of organising both executive matters and organisation matters within the group.

Odd_bloke said that although there is hostility between Compsoc and the LUG it is hard to characterise it. Candle replied that the hostility was not open hostility but he did not feel welcome to attend LUG meetings. Sadiq said he felt it was important to agree a formal relationship between both parties.

Bruce reported that the LUG had suggested that he go on an AV training course to be able to use centrally timetabled room’s AV equipment for free but Sadiq said that a number of people in Compsoc had been on the course already. The LUG were not aware of this when the suggestion was made.

Any other business

Fred suggested that someone should suggest Catalyst to Morlark for the new ‘WUGLUG BUGFLUG’ event.

Polar said that he would like posters for events, and Fred suggested flyers with all planned events on for pigeon holes. Bruce said he could turnaround any posters or flyers which needed reproducing within a day.

Sadiq said he would like to see more moderation in #compsoc and incremental bans as kicks are not working. He also suggested banning Karma in #compsoc, which Laurence agreed with. Bucko said he liked karma in #compsoc and Candle said that it should be left as it is.

Fred reported that he is still waiting for ITS to open SSH ports to Insomnia so that he can begin work on restoring it as the resnet gaming server.