Council meeting minutes from 2021-10-20

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

Welcome to the new semester!

The student's council welcomes all students back for the upcoming winter semester.

We hope that with this new hybrid semester more life will come back to campus and the councils activities.

We hope to see you back on campus soon!

Matrix Server

A fellow student has come up to us and proposed to host our own Matrix Instance.
Matrix is an alternative communications protocol/server that can e.g. be used as an alternative to Discord or MS Teams.

Matrix is already used by several universities throughout Germany and offers a lot of benefits in regards to privacy as it is self-hosted.
We had a lengthy discussion about setting up Matrix based on past experiences which have been vastly different especially in regards to voice- and video-chat.

Generally we as the students council do not have the manpower to support such a project on a large scale. However we contact members of the faculty to discuss if and how such a project could be supported.

Perhaps we should also contact the people of TU Dresden who have a larger instance running. Additionally we might set up a small test instance to evaluate the feature set.

The following people have offered to further look into this:
* Thomas (Proposer of the idea)
* Lukas
* Adrian
* Alex
* Max

Upcoming FSR Elections

We have upcoming students' council elections in November. The application phase will be in early November, while the actual elections will be in late November.

We encourage everybody interested in the students' council work to put themselves forward to be elected.

If anyone has a question regarding the exact work of council members drop us a mail, telegram message or just drop by.

StEP Feedback

We had three StEP events this year: The Bachelor StEP in German, the Bachelor StEP for the new international bachelors and the Master StEP.

The Master StEP was generally succesful and went along well with 50-80 persons attending throughout each day.
We were discussing whether to combine some events from the Bachelor and Master StEP for the upcoming events. We discussed some pros and cons but finally this is a decision the new council in December will have to make.

Generally we hope that for the upcoming events we can further involve more of the social events as usual.

There were some concerns raised regarding the organization of the Master StEP as there were some organizational issues this year. Therefore the suggestion to the next council is to establish a dedicated team of 2-3 people per StEP event early on to improve the planning. Additionally more people should be involved early on as e.g. moderators.

For the Bachelor StEP we had an average of around 100 people constantly watching.

All of our presentations were well received, however we need to improve our presentation on "Anwendungsfächer" for the DSAI study course. The game night was generally very well received by the students who attended.

We received some negative feedback regarding our schedule as we often exceeded the time. Therefore for the future we should plan additional intermissions between the presentations.

One group of students that fell short in our current StEP events are exchange students (through Erasmus or similar programs). However most of the information from our StEP is not relevant to them. However it might be good to check if there is some option to plan a dedicated block with relevant topics to them.

Inventory and Ticket Party

Due to one year of absence the council room is kind of messy. With the new hybrid semester we should soonly get together and tidy and clean up.

We will setup a list of tasks to be done and additionally a Dudle to find a slot when we can do this. This should be done rather shortly as we can soon allow students back in our room.

We have already arranged for QR codes to register with Staysio so with that we can allow students back into our room. Additionally we will get a new soap and hand-desinfection dispenser in the room.

Additionally there are a few new things to add to our inventory (e.g. network switches) we will distribute a list were the council members can add items and we will discuss if we want to buy them.

Verfügungsraum

As people might know we have an additional room next to the council room that is currently unused and is only rented out on request.

Julian suggested that we open this room to all students as we now have a lot of couches in there and it would be nice for students to sit, talk and just get together. The open question is how we handle this is we still want to continue to rent out the room.

The suggestion is to open up the room to the public during specified hours (e.g. 8am-6pm) and afterwards rent it out to anyone who wants to use it. In order to arrange for this we might need to arrange for a new lock to enable access.

MfI 1 & 3

People have contacted us regarding MfI 1 and 3 as currently there is no video recording available of these lectures for students to look it up afterwards.

We will take this feedback to the professors.

Sabine & Natalia

A while ago we discussed the idea of a farewell/welcoming party for Sabine and Natalia.

This would be a simple non-formal event which we will try to organize shortly.

New stuff for students

Some students have suggested some items that might be useful for the faculty to obtain, e.g. fridges in some of the rooms.

We will setup some mean for students to make suggestions to the department regarding this.