Council meeting minutes from 2025-02-24

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

Organisatorial Matters

Today we are visited by Clemens, the election officer of the AStA responsible for us. He gave some words about the Student Council and the new elected members. He kindly reminded us, that this job is not to get ECTS, but to help the students. On the other hand, one needs to find a balance between studying and doing council work. The student council is not only work, but you can also find friends.

Official Election Stuff

Clemens asked everyone whether they accept to being elected into the student council. Everyone accepted, except for Tehran, Owen and Kamila who were not present. Clemens will send them email asking for confirmation.

FSR for Dummies

Manuel gave a presentation about how the student council works. The main task for the student council is to help students. We do so in various ways: Answering questions 1-on-1, events, printers etc.
The main mode of operation is to hold in meetings, where decisions about various things are made. During the lecture time we meet once a week, in the lecture free period only every other week. Attending a meeting is NOT optional, because this is where the decisions are made and important matters are discussed. Of course you can be excused if you have a doctor's appointment, however you should not skip it on a whim.
If you notice the FSR is too much work (which is reasonable, and also happened previously), then you can contact the AStA to step down from your position.
Manuel also presented our infrastructure, of which we have plenty: We maintain a website for informing others. Our wiki helps us internally, code is maintained in gitlab. We manage a printer, have a cloud, hedgedoc, ticketing system.
A system administrators (Max) will help you set up a student council account (e.g. email account, website etc.).

Manuel presented how to do a rental contract. It's very easy, there also is an explanation in the rental folder, and also in the wiki.

Important People: The dean of studies is Prof. Demberg, their vice dean is Prof. Rahmann. They are typically the highest authority to contact, so if things go very very wrong, we contact them.
We work together with the Study Coordination closely. Sometimes we don't know things, but they typically do. They are very nice and the collaboration is very good.
Natalia Weis and Evelyn Kraska are managing rooms at SIC, which we often reserve.
Erich Reindel is the CEO of the faculty, managing finances and stuff. All of them are very approachable.

Manuel also presented how the Mampfkasse works. It works credit-based, and if you don't pay them, they cannot stock up.

Verfuegungsraum/Seminar room: We have another room, which is for free use, both for us and general students (and others), however everyone who is not a member needs to rent it first.
Students council room: Our main room is always open for you. Often people come here with their questions and complaints (typically not with laudations, but it happens) or to relax and gossip.
Office: We also have an office (staff only), where there are work-stations. Don't rearrange the work-stations or the SysAdmins will kill you. You can also have a shelf cubicle for personal item storage.

Communication: Currently communication is done via Telegram. There is a public (associate) group, and a private group. The internal group is for internal stuff, so if there is private/sensitive stuff, please write into the internal group.

Meeting Minutes: Someone is writing meeting minutes. If you cannot attend a meeting, you can inform yourself about the discussion in the meeting minutes. There might be some internal notes, to read these, you need to be logged in.

Task Forces

Our various works is distributed among different things, and noone can (and wants to) do everything, so we distribute it into task forces, where small groups can work more efficient. The works of the different task forces might be discussed within a meeting if there is things to be discussed.

Moderator: moderates a meeting, typically should be done by a person who has some experience. This is a little unthankful of a job.
Minutetaker: Writes meeting minutes. The Minutetaker also collects meeting-topics, and announces the meeting beforehand. Be able to use our infrastructure to fix protocols in post.
System Administrators: Takes care of our infrastructure, e.g. website
Mailing List Administration & Snail Mail: Manages mailing lists and takes a regular look into our physical mailbox
Graphics Design: self-explanatory. Typically graphics are needed for events and other stuff. There is some infrastructure present, so you don't need to start from scratch
Busy Beaver: This is our teaching award, which needs to be decided upon. This needs to acquire evaluation data, talking to people etc.
Social Media/PR: Communicating to students, i.e. advertise our events on instagram, discord, website, etc. The members of this task force need to
Anti-Discrimination: Students who felt they were subjected to discrimination can reach out to us (and other institutions).
Thought Protocols: We collect thought protocols of some lectures. Often needs digitising physical thought protocols
Online Support: Answer Questions are in our ticket system and on Discord. Most enjoyed by people that advertised themselves with "I want to help students".
Cleaning: Our room gets dirty as the cleaning staff does not clean everything. Just because a cleaning task force exists, this does not mean you do not need to clean up after yourself
Mampfkasse: We have an internal shop for groceries and snacks, which needs to be stocked up. This typically involves access to a car.
Seminar rooms: We maintain (and equip) the seminar rooms. People need to check regularly whether everything looks fine or stuff as missing (chalk, whiteboard-markers etc.)
Printer: Make sure our printer runs. Printers are evil, so this is not trivial. This also includes a printing service.
Social Events: Organise Social Events for leisure of the students. Events typically involve Pub Crawl, Board Game Nights, Quiz Nights, etc. You can be creative here, so if you have new ideas, they are very much welcome.
NEXT: We used to co-organise a career fair, however the collaboration with our partners has ceased to exist. Currently there is no replacement, however we might want to organise something else.
StEP (StudierendenEinfuehrungsPhase (Students Introduction Phase)): Help new students to on-board at university and/or Germany. This is a rather large event spanning multiple days, and one of our most important events.
FSK: Conference of students councils at UdS. Meetings take place every six weeks.
Breakfast/Nikofete: We hold a breakfast regularly, where students can eat and drink for free. The Nikofete (Winter Party) is a breakfast++, as we offer crepe, waffles and mulled wine.
Summer BBQ: Summer Correspondent for the Nikofete. Quite big, but only once a year. There is a big BBQ happening.
New Professors: Invite new professors to joins us in a meeting to say hello to us and we say hello back, so they know we exist, how stuff works. This enables communication to the department.
Rentals: We have lots of stuff, which we don't need all the time. In times we don't use it, we rent them out, e.g. the Verfuegungsraum (Seminar Rooms), our Schwenker etc.
Facility Management: Repairs broken stuff and fixes things.
Sponsorings: Events are not free for us, but for students. Companies are often willing to provide some money and need a contact person.
Fachschaftseuro: Part of your Semesterbeitrag (Semester Fee) is for Students Council Work. Someone needs to manage this financially, and needs to discuss monetary matters with the FIS.

All task forces don't need previous experience, however you should have some interest into the stuff a task force does.
Next meeting we will distribute the task forces among members, so make up your mind which ones you want. We will not describe the task forces again, just distribute.

AStA official stuff

The AStA election officer requires us to have more organisatorial stuff for this semester. We need to send some people to the FSK (Conference of Student Councils), need to maintain AStA inventory, and someone who is moderating the rest of the meeting after the official part is over.
These are the election results:
FSR: Daniel and Jonas volunteered (8 in favour, 1 abstaining, 0 against).
Communication with AStA and management of AStA Inventory: Daniel and Abigail volunteered(9 in favour, 2 abstaining, 0 against).
Moderator for this meeting: Ferdinand (10 in favour, 1 abstaining, 0 against).

Voluntary Members

We have voluntary members, typically these are people that are known for helping a lot and are trustworthy. They obtain student council member benefits, but are not allowed to vote.
Typically formerly elected members are given the option to continue as voluntary members.
Alex, Manuel, Lukas, Mona and Kevin accepted to be a voluntary member.

FIS

The Chairman of the FIS gave a presentation about the FIS, what the FIS is and so on.
The FIS e.V. (Freundeskreis der Fachschaft Informatik Saarbruecken).
The FIS was founded as non-profit association in March 2000. They organised the Career Fair FIT, and afterwards in collaboration with KWT (later Triathlon) the Career Fair NEXT. The FIS is the support association of the students' council. Officially the students' council is not allowed to have any money, so the FIS maintains any money that is not the Fachschaftseuro. The FIS has the following goals: improve live of students, teaching and support the FSR financially for the first two goals.
The student council works as part of the Kuratorium (advisory board) and the Executive board. Once a year there is a Mitgliederversammlung (General Meeting), public to everyone.

The standard case of interaction between FIS and FSR is item acquisition, which works like this: Someone wants to acquire an item, and gets the councils approvement. The council then forwards the proposal to the executive board, the executives vote on the proposal and then someone places the order. The executive board can also reject offers.
If you have made an acquisition and need a reimbursement, there are multiple ways to get your money back. For trivial, regular, and small acquisitions, you can ask a single board member who can immediately approve that. You still need to go through the reimbursement process.

The next Mitgliederversammlung (General Meeting) is on 19/03/2025 at 18:00, in E1.1, R. 407.

Communication Platform

With a new Council, we can use the time to change our communication platform to another one. The options are Matrix, Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram (current), Discord. There are lots of different aspects to consider for this, e.g. what features this platform should bring, privacy, usability on desktop devices etc.
As time already has progressed, and it is not clear how to contact everyone for organisational purposes, so we continue with Telegram until we discuss this again.