Council meeting minutes from 2023-07-19

minutes of the students' representative council for study programs of computer science

New Meeting Time Slot

The Semester is close to its end. During Semester Break we will only meet every other week. Elected members please fill out the doodle which is in the telegram group.

This semester it has shown that alternating meeting time slots are not that useful, and not that many more people attend. It also leads to confusion about when a meeting actual is. Still, a single time slot is not feasible as every elected member needs to be able to attend a meeting.

Busy Beaver

Every Semester we award the Busy Beaver award to honour the best lectures of the previous semester. This year we want to start earlier with organising it. We would like to look for students of some lectures to give their opinion and input about why the lecture was supposedly good. If you would like to give us some information, reach out to us.

We considered to award the Prizes in a beaver costume as it would be funny and would break up the tension in the otherwise formal opening ceremony. However, there were concerns that it would be kind of ridiculous and would undermine the seriousness of the prize.
We need council members who are willing to present the nominees and winners, last time it was very stressful and annoying that some people were kind of forced to do it.

Event Planning

The FIS asked us to present our plans for social events for the rest of the year for better planning. Unfortunately few people are attending today's meeting, so we could not discuss this topic much.
For the future we think about introducing a yearly calendar, where we plan the amount of events for every year.

Seminar Rooms

The student working rooms 105 and 106 are getting renovated from next week on for about 4 weeks. The current plans include new furniture, a carpeted floor, sound dampening and other new things. Most technical devices will be replaced.
However there are no new monitors planned. For computer science students this is suboptimal, as these days most if not all students have a personal laptop and many like to have a second screen for a cleaner workflow. We would hence like to write an official email expressing our concerns on this matter.
In addition, we are currently unsure about the plans regarding LAN ports and power outlets, so we would like to inquire about that as well.
In addition, there were concerns that we were not consulted although we would probably have been able to give some valuable input. We will hence vote online about the following:
Writing an Email, LAN at every table, Monitors, and being consulted for feedback next time.
Apparently the monitors and the cables in there belong to us. We will remove them from the rooms before next week.

Game Night

We hosted a game night last Friday. We had ~40 attendees, which we are happy about considering that the Maths held a game night at the same time. We apologise to the Maths about the colliding dates, unfortunately we only had enough people that day. We plan to host the next Game Night in August.

Bioinformatics-Conference

There will be a bioinformatics-conference in Hamburg. We have been contacted by a Bioinformatics student from another university, who wanted to have a meetup with other bioinformatics students council members.
Unbeknownst to us, the meetup is organised by a professor and is more like a teaching-workshop. We feel like all council members are under-qualified for this, and don't see too much merit about it. There will be an email with more information about everything, which we will wait for to decide on how to continue with this topic.