Council meeting minutes from 2025-03-13

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

Maths Cellar

There have been some incidents of bad behaviour, which is creating a issue for other students. Problems such as usage at late hours (beyond 8pm, which the department isn't a fan of), leftover food on workstations, workstations being blocked for long periods, cables are unplugged, stolen whiteboard pens. There are also reports of students accessing areas used by professors, students taking away coffee. According to them, the students are popularly from CS department, not just math students.

There is also an issue of the vents, in a seperate room, giving out a sewage-like smell, recurring very often. Facility Management has been contacted about the smell issue. However, there is no scope of this being resolved.

The dept. is looking for a solution to this or else they will have to restrict access. They would like that the two councils can collaborate to come up with a good solution.

The issue of vandalism is common among both departments, however, we have now put up posters in our working rooms to ensure students actually throw away their waste. It is important to point out to students to behave well, as the math dept. contributes a lot (in terms of tutors and more).

Post this, the discussion was directed to whether or not the math dept. has control over the access distribution to students. Manuel suggested that the math students can also be given official stickers, like the SIC students do. Whether or not these stickers are also valid for math students right now is unknown. However, these finer details can be discussed with the responsible people and more stickers can be made for the math people too! Anton feels that everyone is facing consequences due to bad behaviour on some students part. To this, Lukas suggests that during the upcoming StEP, we can make it explicit about how students should behave in the said rooms. There is also a suggestion by Ferdinand about making posters that advertise the same.

Daniel then asked for some clarifications regarding the give-and-take system for coffee, etc.

MfCS Tutors needed!

Simon needs tutors for the MfCS prep course. HIs decided tutors have backed out in the last moment. He needs tutors for the coming Monday i.e. 17th March, 2025.
About the repatorium, it is a course to help students get a bette grade.

Skills needed by the tutors are -
1. Knowledge about Calculus (analysis of series, etc)
2. German and English speakers, both are welcome.

CMS: it is a issue

Our CMS has been facing problems lately. CMS is "down" quite frequently. The network switches for CMS are a bit fragile, and hence can again go down, sooner or later.
An example of a problem - CMS being down restricts students from registering for their exams.

Alex has reached out to the SIC IT team. They are aware of the problem; However, they are not the responsible people for it. There's not much that can be done, except to trust the people in authority will work on it.

It could be that the HIZ network leads to CMS being down, or just CMS going down by itself.

A temporary solution to this could be to -
1. Inform professors to be a little lenient towards students in such cases,
2. Inform students to already have their materials ready with them
3. A downtime detector? it will be a best effort solution; no guarantees

If the council would like to escalate this topic, the university president can be contacted (worst-case scenario though)

Contrary to earlier meetings, we did NOT vote for anything with regards to this. Yay?

StEP Goodie bag gets an upgrade?

We have SIC bags, but there is a lack of good goodies. So, the StEP team had an idea to ask sponsors if they would like to put their things in the bag. The sponsoring team was contacted for their insights on this matter.

We can get more goodies, but the question remains - does the council like this idea?

As good as sponsoring sounds, the StEP is a council offered event and selling a spot in the goodie bags seems a little - meh.

Manu voices out that the goodies should be of value to the first semester students. Also, giving a spot in the goodie bag could undermine our sponsoring value.

Ferdinand points out that we have one pipeline for sponsoring - our events. This is good, but we could benefit from more. SO, establishing more channels can help in the long term. Ferdinand adds that for now, the sponsorship model has not been established so should this idea should be kept on hold.

The current discussion is whether we want extra goodies for just the upcoming StEP (we are not discussing future StEP)

We vote, do we want sponsor goodies in the upcoming summer StEP -
Yes - 5 in favour
No - 1
Abstain - 3

we also vote on who is in favour of selling the spot in the goodie bag:
Yes - 2 in favour
NO - 0
abstain - 7

Official Stickers, they're here.

Alex recants why we needed stickers. This topic has been spoken about at length in earlier meetings.

TLDR - there were external students who were misbehaving and staying past the official working hours.
The stickers will act as a way of recognizing who is allowed to stay and who is not (post the offical hours). The council is responsble for handing out these stickers. We do it in this manner: student comes requesting for it -> we check if they are a verified student or not - > if check passes, they get the sticker. (make sure you add the sticker and not hand it out, could lead to potential issues)

For the verification purpose, we will need the matriculation document. For Privacy concerns, students can choose to black out their name from the document. We require mainly their matriculation number and course program.

We hope that this will result in less unauthorised students being in our buildings. If in case students are still removed from buildings, they can come to the council to advocate for their stay. We will have a proper tutorial on how the sticker should be placed on the ID Cards

Cubby distribution

New members can get a storage space in the inside office room. If interested in this, please reach out to daniel so he can print your name out and place it on your allotted space.

Be responsible to not store Uranium, food with bad shelf life, and things that can be of disturbance to others.