Council meeting minutes from 2025-11-25

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

Study Clout - product presentation

---- INTRO ------

We already discussed the platform Study Clout in several meetings, one member from the previous council met with them in person and it was then concluded back then that we do not need this product. In this council it was brought up again several times. In one of those meetings we gave them the option to hold a advertisement presentation for their product in a meeting.

Meetings where this platform was discussed before:

30th January 2025: https://cs.fs.uni-saarland.de/uber-uns/protokolle/?prot_id=20250130
5th February 2025: https://cs.fs.uni-saarland.de/uber-uns/protokolle/?prot_id=20250205
25th August 2025: https://cs.fs.uni-saarland.de/uber-uns/protokolle/?prot_id=20250825

---- DISCUSSION ------

Summary of the given presentation:

Bad things some councils have / do :

1. Scattered (non complete) Information across multiple channels
2. Different Channels (Whatsapp, telegram, etc)
-> overwhelmed and uninformed students because of this

Things this product claims to improve:
1. Communication -> Reaching Students
2. Show internal Organization

The product is a platform which has on the front end an event calendar, content pages, course rating, chats, polls, chat groups (communities), help documents (thought protocols, study protocols), job boards and on the back end: email ticket system, cloud, internal communication.

For reference, things we currently already have implemented:

Ticket system for our mails, discord for communities, fsr.saarland (word press) website for event info with calendar, general information and thought protocols. Printer website. Our Busy beaver with together with Qualis for course quality. Internal wiki with 30+ content pages for members to help them do their job. Cloud. For communication we currently switched to Signal, before we used Telegram. Regarding job offerings, we use our physical pin board. Additionally we also use the current social platforms for event advertisement (currently insta).

After the presentation we asked them some questions:

The main idea of Study Clout is to have everything centralized on one platform back and front end wise.

Currently, according to their data,their user base consists of 1.500 registered user with 300-400 active every day. The majority of those users are BWL students and Psychology students.

The ticket system is still in the working. The chats come with a ban function and communities / content can be filtered (like discord). Events have build in polls and statistics (site visits). Study Clout is hosting the servers. For security they claim to work together with BSI. The job board is their current monetization model, where they manage the companies that can post and the posts themself. They do net have an official plan for what to do, if the monetization does not work. They are treading it currently as "it should be fine, it is currently fine". The job board is being checked manually by study clout, they would have the complete control over what and who posts there. Regarding our sponsors, it would be fine to put them into the event announcements.

After they left, we discussed internally:

Positives:

The main point of interest for us is the reach and if our students want to use this channel. Some test events might give more information. We could also mirror our announcements to their platform to increase reach but that involves more maintenance work. Something similar like this was done in the past with the mensaar website and broke down, when the person maintaining left the council.

Negatives:

We currently already have every single feature they offer plus more, that was the reason this product offer was declined in the past and that point still stands. Study Clout is not the only (start up) company with such offers that contacted us in the past, all failed to offer more. It comes quite natural for a computer science faculty to be well equipped with software. Also many things we use are custom developed by council members (past and present), since it also comes quite naturally for CS students to procrastinate on some side coding projects.

With our current model of having our tools scattered across different software products (potentiality different companies) we can pick the best solution for each.

Students that are here longer then the first semester likely have seen or heard of at leas one of our channels. Study Clout also would need to be advertised the same as our current channels for new semester students.

They filter jobs which gives them the key to which companies can post and what they post. This introduces more business into the honor work of CS students' council. A topic we heavenly discussed in context of our sponsoring system.

If the Study Clout product is at one point in time no longer supported, migration would be hard.

Having everything (external and internal) on one platform creates a single point of failure. Even if eduroam is down again, our internal channels at least work.

We concluded that there was no one present with a strong interest to switch to Study Clout as of reasons above. But we could see if we can get more event reach through their platform, and could test reach with one event, therefore we voted:

Do we want the next GameNight to be announced though study clout with the condition that it is only visible to students of CS:

Yes: 6
No: 0
Abst: 1

(The reason for the condition is simple: Our money comes from donations through a Non-profit association (FIS) which is for CS students, therefore events that use this money are only allowed to target CS students by the given association statutes. If this condition can not be set on Study Clout, for example everything visible to all visitors even without login, than this would be a hard block.)

---- CONCLUSION ------

Study Clout still offers less then we already have, while additionally introducing monetization and moving ownership of things outside of council hands all to one single product/company.

We will however test if we can get more reach for our events through their website:

The next GameNight will test out Study Clout event announcement to figure out the reach of Study Clout and if our students have ever heard of this platform.

NikoFete

---- INTRO ------

In a past meeting we opened a shared doc to collect charities to collect donations for at NikoFete. Now we are done collecting and vote on which two to pick:

---- DISCUSSION ------

We did an open vote on the charities we would like to support, we will pick the two with the most votes:

1. Kältebus Saarbrücken
In favor: 10

2. Ingos Kleine Kälthilfe
In favor: 6

3. Tafel Saarbrücken
In favor: 1

4. Tierschutzverein 1924 e.V.
In favor: 0

5. Freundeskreise für Suchtkrankenhilfe
In favor: 9

Since we do not have an event sponsor this time (besides our long time sponsor), we could use the space for charity:

Blood cancer (DSD) is a charity. (https://www.deutsche-stammzellspenderdatei.de/STARTSEITE.html)

We voted if we reserve space to advertise them during the event:
Yes: 9

---- CONCLUSION ------

We will collect donations for Kältebus Saarbrücken & Freundeskreise für Suchtkrankenhilfe while also offering some advertisement space to DSD.

Glühweinkocher/Rentals

---- INFO ------

We internally discussed rentals where there was some overlap.

Projector pool info, do wiki page / manual

---- INTRO ------

Many times people (tutors) come to our room and ask us how projectors in room x works. We could pool information we have together into a info print to give them to tutors (people).

---- DISCUSSION ------

Apparently we do have media group at university that is responsible for those projectors and should have manuals.

---- CONCLUSION ------

We will contact the media group of university to give us some info material to hand out.