Proceedings of the June 6th, 2007 meeting
Agenda 1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Anwei!)
2) 6:00 Welcome with introductions (Kristina)
3) 6:05 Announcements (George)
i. Approve minutes from 5/30/07 Meeting with the following clarifications about housing from Kyle:
a. The plan is to convert just one of the couples-housing buildings into inexpensive 2-bedroom (no living room) apartments, not to convert all of them.
b. Munger construction is scheduled for completion in summer 2009, while the associated parking structure is scheduled for completion in winter/spring 2008.
ii. Need someone to help Euan for the summer.
iii. If you are leaving for the summer, let Kristina or George know and recruit a proxy.
iv. We’re taking a break for finals and the inter-term break, so the next GSC meeting will be on June 27th.
4) 6:10 New online system for funding groups (Adam B.)
5) 6:15 DC Legislative Action trip (Dirk)
6) 6:25 Request for funding for a new GSC server (Kristina)
7) 6:35 Request for funding for a new GSC Secretary laptop (Kristina)
8) 6:45 July 4th brainstorming (Justin and Adam)
9) 6:55 New Business
10) Out to dinner! (RSVP to Kristina (
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) if you want to go). Attendance Voting members present:
At large 1: Maxim Afanasyev
At large 3: Kristina Keating
At large 4: Zeng Fan
At large 5: Lan Wei – proxy Anwei Chai present
Business: Rhyan Uy
Earth Sciences: Kyle Anderson
Engineering 1: Melahn Parker
Engineering 2: Marja Mullings
Humanities: George Bloom
Law: Shireen Barday – proxy Donna Winston present
Natural Sciences: Fen Zhao
Social Sciences: Euan Robertson
Voting members not present:
At large 2: Hanna Muenke
Education: Ryan Williams
Medicine: Yana Hoy
Additional attendees – Adam Beberg, Dirk Englund, Justin Brown, Adam Sciambi, Hershey Avula, Polina Segalova Minutes I. Introductions
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II. Announcements –
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a. Approved minutes from last week with the following changes:
i. George: Edit description of plans to convert couples housing to inexpensive singles housing (convert living room to bedroom) to specify that potentially only one building would be converted, not all. In regards to the timeline for Munger, the parking structure is scheduled for completion in winter 2008, while the actual housing should be done by 2009.
b. Euan: Needs someone to pick up receipts over summer and take them to the ASSU office.
i. Fen offers to do it.
c. George: If you are leaving for summer let them know so they can assign a proxy. Also, last meeting for the quarter and the next meeting will be in three weeks on the 27th.
d. Thanks to Hershey for taking minutes this week!
III. 6:10 New online system for funding groups (Adam B.)
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a. Adam: New funding system is online and ready to go. Effectively this year’s funding is done, and basically Polina is the new me. YAY! I’m done.
i. Rhyan: So people who are not a part of the group cannot ask for money?
ii. Adam: No, they just have to come to the GSC.
IV. 6:15 DC Legislative Action trip (Dirk)
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a. Dirk: I went to DC to discuss student tax relief. Major change from the past is that GSC stipends have become taxable. The major advocacy desire was to make student aid and stipends tax deductible. I never got to talk to some legislators in person, but got to talk to their staff. The Palo Alto Representative’s office gave the least amount of sympathy to our plight. The person who I got the most sympathy and interest from was the Office of Senator Diane Feinstein. Ms. Rodriguez, the person I talked to, informed us about the Higher Education Affordability and Equity Act (proposed by Phil English and it might get through the House). She suggested proposing a companion bill in Senate. Whoever is the current advocacy committee it may be good to set up a meeting and talk about where to go with this (companion bill).
b. Fen: We were supposed to have a meeting this week, but the plans for dinner derailed that, so we will reschedule.
c. George: Does the national organization we are a part of have any role in this
d. Dirk: They are in full support of the one bill highlighted in the handout. We should talk to them
e. Fen: Yeah I think it’s their primary focus.
V. 6:25 Request for funding for a new GSC server (Kristina)
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a. Kristina (on behalf of Matt Turk): I come before the gSC to ask for a new server for the GSC, The server, which I have nicknamed gsc.stanford.edu, is (stats listed) and I have made some updates. However, I feel that we should bring the server up to date because of increased needs. I would like to install the server as soon as possible (by the end of June) to better serve the Stanford students.
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or
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The total cost is $1,021.21; we should just request for $1030.00
b. Adam: I think this server is really overkill. What I would recommend is actually a $600 server from Dell.
c. George: Well, are we just reducing the speed then?
d. Adam: This Dell server would be able to handle our site even if we had 1000 hits a day.
e. Fen: Well, would the Dell server actually last that long?
f. Dirk: Online web hosting only costs $10.00 a year.
g. George: The constitution demands that we have the GSC server in the GSC office, or something of that sort. So unless we change the constitution we can’t do online web hosting.
h. Kristina: Well, I believe that we should just vote on Matt’s proposal for now.
i. Euan: We have money from the ASSU that we might as well spend it before it rolls over.
j. Maxim: This would have to come from operations budget.
k. Fen: Can I suggest that Matt talk to the ASSU people about it?
l. Kristina: He has.
m. Fen: Oh, okay. Well I was just suggesting he do it to make sure.
n. Rhyan: For a non-techie. My understanding is that this just makes things faster.
o. Kristina: Well to my understanding, we want to put a wiki on the site, which would need this new equipment.
p. George: Are there any objections to approving the request
q. Adam Objects: What he is proposing is what you would use to run Stanford
r. George: Okay, then we need to bring this to a vote
s. Vote Results: 6-2-4; Request Passes
VI. 6:35 Request for funding for a new GSC Secretary laptop (Kristina)
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a. George: We have a projector and screen, and the idea is to give the secretary a laptop to use to take minutes so he/she does not have to bring one of his own. What I have requested is a Macbook ($1300 - $1400). It is not a pure bare bones computer
b. Melahn: What happened to our GSC laptop that we are supposed to have?
c. George: We have tried looking for it but it has disappeared apparently.
d. Donna: With that said, I think we should not spend $1,500 on a Macbook. We could spend up to $1,500 total but spend more on security and software.
e. Dirk: $870.00 seems totally reasonable.
f. Melahn: Is this a critical thing? Does the secretary not have a laptop?
g. Adam: There’s only how many laptops here (6).
h. George: The rationale is… why should the secretary have to bring a laptop each time?
i. Euan: This is not coming out of student fee money. This comes out of our operating budget.
j. Melahn: Is there anything else to spend it on?
k. Maxim: We can use whatever we have left in the operations budget to use on other projects like the 4th of July bar-b-que. (My (Hershey) commentary: you would have to approve to take it out of GSC reserves).
l. Adam: We’re talking about spending a lot of money on something that will be used for an hour each week and essentially will not be used.
m. Fen: It would seem that it would be beneficial that if you had a secretary without a laptop who wanted to be secretary that he/she wouldn’t have to bring one.
n. Melahn: I have a laptop to donate.
o. George: Lets propose to table this then
p. Motion Tabled
VII. 6:45 July 4th brainstorming (Justin and Adam)
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a. Justin: Supposed to be a luau, which is a bit of a challenge because I am not exactly sure what happens at a luau. A roasting pig, bar-b-que, etc.. We have a $6,000.00 budget, which is pretty line-itemed. We have most of the money for food. We can either cater or do our own food? In terms of you folks, we need some volunteers. At the very least we need 15 volunteers. Does anyone have any questions as to what the event is about?
b. Rhyan: Great stuff. I think you all have put a lot of work into it, but I am wondering why the event has to be so long? Would it make better sense to shorten the time period and have more people come at a particular time?
c. Justin: Seven is not in stone
d. Adam: Also, people have a lot of activities throughout the day so spread it out allows people to come and go.
e. Fen: Are you having it more shifted towards the night? Because 2-7 seems more dinner time? Are you looking for a dinner time or lunch time event?
f. Justin: The time can be shifted to whatever.
g. Adam: From my experience people have things going on from 3-4. There seems to be a bulk of people who come during a certain hour and then the rest of the hours not that many people come.
h. Justin: Any activities ideas?
i. Fen: Watermelon eating contest.
j. Adam: It’s a tradition. Yup.
k. Fen: We do have sports equipment we can use.
l. Justin: Aside from food from the Hukilau; is there anything else we can do to make it more of a luau?
m. Donna: Consult the Hawaii club.
n. Polina: I actually like the Luau idea. I think it is different and it could get a lot of people to come out. I too think we should consult some Hawaiian grad students about putting on activities. It usually was a few hardcore Hawaiians who put on the event, but really had good activities.
o. Justin: I have a really good friend who is graduating that is part of the juggling community.
p. Fen: You can get an instructor to teach people how to do hula dancing.
q. Justin: A couple of days ago I went over to the Hukilau and had taste testing for free, but it is expensive to cater for $600.00. Do we want to spend more money on catering or just getting a lot of food and beverages for people?
r. Adam: Some years the food runs out really quickly.
s. Fen: But last year we had a lot of excess.
t. Justin: Things will either become really expensive from food, or really expensive from entertainment.
u. Rhyan: Why did we have excess food last year?
v. Fen: We went to Costco last year and got a lot of food for cheap?
w. Justin: We can either cut funding from the Hukilau and spend a lot on entertainment, or vis-a-versa.
x. Fen: I think we can do both because of the $800.00 miscellaneous funding.
y. Donna: The $3,000 is priced out for how many people?
z. Justin: The $3,000 is for 250 people.
aa. Donna: Whoa… that is way too expensive.
bb. Polina: I like the idea of having normal food and then maybe doing something symbolic like a Pig roast. Lyman does an annual pig roast so you should talk to their CAs.
cc. George: You can add pineapple and teriyaki sauce for burgers.
dd. Justin: Before you guys all run of for the summer. Save the date (from 10-4 PM). June 27th be ready to sign up for positions (sober monitor, etc.).
ee. George: Justin, see Kristina and I about the P-card.
VIII. 6:55 New Business
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a. Fen: I think that before meetings we should announce that we are being recorded because there are some legal issues otherwise.
b. George: Okay the meeting is done and I hope you all join us at dinner. Thanks! |
