Exec Minutes - 22nd May 2007

Present: Mullet, Sadiq, Odd Bloke, Bruce, Fluff_eei, Bucko, Tim
Apologies: Polar

The minutes are partially complete - Si was late due to a research meeting but only general discussion had taken place before hand. For these details see Mulletron’s email.

Removing Karma

There was considerable discussion on the issue of Karma in the Society. Mulletron said that in general, it was often the cause of disagreements on IRC which eventually turned into full-scale arguments. These often became worse when more members joined in the discussion. He proposed that removing Karma would improve this situation since the actual spark (Karma) wouldn’t be permitted in the IRC channel.

Sadiq echoed this point saying that using Karma doesn’t really add much to the channel but is a big cause of people not joining in discussion.

Mulletron added that this was a definite put-off for new members or people wanting to engage with the Society more.

Bucko argued that just removing Karma wouldn’t neccessarily stop these kind of arguments. This was the nature of some of the discussions with our without Karma being present.

There was more discussion relating to specific IRC conversations which are not included here in order to keep reader’s sanity.

Si added that given that we were already being accused of changing the Society too much, further aggrevating members by removing Karma might not be a good idea. He also said he just didn’t understand why Karma was such an issue.

This caused more debate.

Finally, there seemed to be more members supporting for the removal so it was agreed that there would be an indefinite trial run of removing Karma. This would start immediately and would be discussed at a later point.

Technical Officer Position

With Tim leaving the University in June, Mulletron raised the issue of how the Society will replace the Technical Officer.

Bucko opened the discussion by saying in his view we definitely needed a Technical Officer rather than a committee or management group.

Mulletron asked whether this meant an elected officer or just an officer - the Exec agreed to call this the Technical Lead.

Sadiq said tht he was happy to have a tech committee with a Technical Lead. None of which would be an Executive position.

There was much debate as to whether the Technical Officer needed to be an Executive position. Some members felt that there needed to be an officer position in order to facilitate good communications with the Exec. Others felt that this could still be achieved without an Executive position but with a liason style approach used in the LUG.

Si asked whether a committee would be a good idea - assume something had gone wrong, would there be finger pointing rather than responsibility? This wouldn’t help fix the situation but would help complicate it.

Sadiq suggested a rolling committee where members could hold lead positions for a few months at a time. This might help improve the skills level and could give more members the opportunity to become involved.

Odd Bloke raised the point that if we did pursue this setup then the lead might change the procedures every three months so the tech team would be in constant flux rather than addressing the real technical issues.

Si asked whether we could just give the Technical Committee the autonomy to run the servers, if anything went wrong it was their responsibility but when it went right it was all to their credit. This removes the Exec from getting involved in technical issues.

Sadiq and Odd Bloke said that this was OK in principle but not in practice since the buck always stops with the Exec.

The Exec agreed to take a vote on the situation. The winning suggeston was to co-opt a Technical Officer during term 3. The Exec would then review this decision and agree how to proceed at the start of term 1 next academic year.

Next Meeting

Tuesday 29th May, 16:00.