Council meeting minutes from 2024-08-15

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

Mathematics Prepatory Course

The Mathematics Prepatory Course will take place from 09th September to 04th October. In this voluntary organised course, current students prepare new first-years for university. While the main focus on preparing topic-wise, the new students should also get to know their peers. For this, the prepatory course organieser will also host social events, where food, drinks etc. will be offered. It would be great if there could be some funding for the social event, so the first-years don't need to pay the full price for food (or nothing at all).
We are in favour of supporting the Preparatory Course unanimously. The details of the process will be discussed with the FIS (main question: Is this eligible with Fachschaftseuro?).

Semesterticket

From the next semester on, the Semesterticket will be upgraded to a Deutschlandticket. The SaarVV, who is providing the ticket, will be giving out a mobile-phone-ticket instead of printing a label onto the students ID card. Students who do not have a mobile phone can get a physical chip card.
There are multiple issues with that. There use scanning devices only work unreliably as well as mobile phones can have an empty battery because of daily use. In addition, not all computer scientists use Android/iOS operating systems on their phone and thus cannot use the SaarVV application, where the ticket will be stored and validated. The app can also be out of order because of software updates etc., meaning students have effectively no ticket.
If the ticket cannot be read by the properly, the burden of proof is pushed to students, and not on the ticket scanner.

We don't really see why students cannot get a chip-card? SaarVV claims this is not possible bacause of the card costs, so it was proposed to pay a small card fee of 2€ (or so). On the other hand, the semester ticket is already expensive enough, and the cost per chip card should not too expensive. It seems to some members that only money wants to be saved as much as possible.

Fixing this is not within our responsibilities, but we will ask the AStA about this and their contract. If they are not of the opinion this being an issue, we consider bringing this forth in the StuPA (Study Parliament). All members are unanimously in favour of this.

International Students Support

If international students want help or counseling from the foreigners office, they should not contact relevant people via private messages. It is bad style to distribute private phone numbers for official purposes, so do not do it.
In general, the best contact place would be the international office, who will forward them to the relevant people.

NEXT

After the NEXT is not in our responsibility anymore, the task force is somewhat irrelevant or jobless. It would be interesting to know what the next plans are, e.g. another fair (not necessarily about jobs) or a completely different event. Also, as some elected members have resigned, some other task forces could need some help.
The task force will take some time to consider these options and will present their ideas.

Pupils Information Day

Like last year, on 30/10/2024, a pupils information day will take place for pupils who will finish their Abitur (A-levels) soon. The study coordination asked us whether we could help them with presenting the CS-study courses and nudging visitors to start studying here.
There will be again financial compensation for each helped hour.
Mona, Manuel (and Alexander) have already volunteered to do so.

After last year, there was some unclarity. Apparently, the Bioinformatics study course was either forgotten or only shortly mentioned. We can also imagine giving the presentations about the universities Computer Science course of Studies.


Anton V. will be contact person for now and set up a doodle.

Discord Server

Manuel has restructured our Discord server. By now there exist an onboarding infrastructure we now use. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks: People need to have a verified email, which is for us is not a problem, as we do not have online meetings there. Also the server will be scanned against illegal content.
There are the following changes:
- People can select whether they are already enrolled or not. Also students are selecting their course of studies and then get the respective channel permissions.
- The prospective students section is more cleaned up, and with more detailed sections.
- Selections can be changed, so if you made a mistake you can fix them later on. Also prospective students can change to enrolled if they were accepted.

There are some open questions we solved during the meeting.
- Necessity of two prospective-bachelor-en and prospective-bachelor-german and no need to join them? Do we need to keep an international-bachelor channel? We think not.
- Political Discussions? There was some dicussion about the merit, e.g. Mona thinks, general political discussions have value. We voted that we won't allow general discussions, as the server is mainly about education and studying, not a general-purpose channel. However, as it is relevant about studying, university politics should remain allowed. We also decided that we want a specific university politics channel, where political discussions can be held and will be moved to. However, university groups will not be allowed to promote themselves. It is often quite unclear when a discussion becomes too political, we trust the (voluntary) council members are able to use their moderation rights reasonably.
- Distinction into elected and voluntary members? Voluntary members have essentially the same rights, but this allows people to know who is elected. We voted on a supergroup of elected members with the same rights, but in addition of an internal chat.
- Admin roles? We want only People actively managing the server and the IT team to have the rights to change server settings. It only increases security
- Elected-Member channel? A channel with texts and photos of the currently elected members which needs to be visited to complete onboarding. We voted against this.
- Possibility of selection of multiple study courses? Exclusivity of courses allows that people don't get false information from other channels or cross-post things.

Manuel complains about the confusing and unintuitive structure of the onboarding and discord settings, nevertheless we thank him for his effort.