• Agenda
• Attendance
• Minutes

Agenda

1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Sean!)

2) 6:00 Welcome with introductions (George)

3) 6:05 Announcements (George)
i. Please be aware that all meetings are recorded and will be made available on the GSC website.
ii. Approve minutes from the last meeting (5/7/08)

4) 6:10 Funding (Lan)
i. Cultural Interactions Club
ii. Shaking the Foundations Conference
iii. Turkish Student Association
iv. Stanford India Association

5) 6:25 Programming (Justin and Adam S.)

6) 6:30 ASSU Update (Jonny and Fagan)

7) 6:35 Review and Approve Funding Policies (Polina)

8) 6:50 GSC Publicity (Zeng and Ivette)

9) 7:05 New Business (George)

Attendance

Voting members present:
At large 2: Addy Satija
At large 3: Aleksandra Korolova
At large 4: Adam Beberg
At large 5: Nanna Notthoff
Earth Sciences: Justin Brown
Education: Michelle Brown
Engineering 1: Polina Segalova
Engineering 2: Melahn Parker (proxy Donna Winston present)
Law: Andrew Park (proxy Etosha Cave present)
Medicine: Sean Young
Natural Sciences: Fen Zhao
Social Sciences: Hanna Muenke

Voting members not present:
At large 1: Karan Chaudlory
Business: Rick Thielke
Humanities: George Bloom

Other people present:, Maria Spletter, Lan Wei, Alex Ene, Adam Sciambi, Matt McLaughlin, Jonny Dorsey, Shohini Banayee, Atia Naim, Simla Ceyhan (TSA), Zeng Fan

Minutes

1) 5:45 FOOD (thanks Sean!)

2) 6:01 Welcome with introductions (Polina)

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3) 6:04 Announcements (Polina)

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i. Please be aware that all meetings are recorded and will be made available on the GSC website.
ii. Approved minutes from the last meeting (5/7/08) by consensus.
iii. The Block party will now be on Friday May 30th, moved from earlier in the week.

4) 6:06 Funding (Lan)

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i. Cultural Interactions Club – Requesting $210 to have small end-of-year gathering. Recommended $210. Giving $210 passes by consensus.
ii. Stanford India Association – Recommended $1750 for Cricket and Curry event on Roble field. Expecting 210 graduate students to attend lunch. $1050 for food, $200 for programming expenses, $500 for some equipment. Event will be on May 24th. Would also like some more money for purposes of buying a table, but it makes more sense that the GSC buy the tables and lend them out to other groups as well. Hanna asks about the $500 budgeted for the equipment purchase, which includes purchase of a banner with their new logo, but this is okay under the Funding Committee rules. Giving $1750 passes by consensus.
iii. Turkish Student Association – Having party with Greek/Persian/Turkish groups, to be held at the EV Village Center. Expecting 150 graduate students, asking for money for drinks and snacks. Recommended $1000. Giving $1000 passes by consensus.

Back to tables discussion. Polina recommends upper limit of $150 for tables. Group representatives report they were anticipating a cost of approximately $50 per table, think purchasing two would be appropriate. Quick Google search suggests tables might be more expensive, so we discuss upper limit of $200. Approving $200 passes by consensus.


5) 6:20 Programming (Justin and Adam S.) – Nothing new to add.

6) 6:20 ASSU Update (Jonny and Fagan).

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Have the chair and deputy chair for Undergrad Senate now. Talked to Chris Griffith about a number of issues, including the 750, which we discussed last week. While there is still confusion as to when exactly the lease is up, seems that it will not be this summer in any case.

7) 6:22 Review and Approve Funding Policies (Polina)

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Proposed Funding Guidelines 2008-2009
- Must be a registered VSO with the Office of Student Activities and a Graduate Student Organization (35% or more grad student membership).
- Must not receive special fees directly or through umbrella group.
- Event must be open to all grad students, and be held in English.
- No funding for religious or political events, unless event is educational and all grad students would feel welcome and comfortable attending.
- There’s a soft cap on total funding for the year based on the number of people in the group, which also takes into account if there are groups with highly overlapping populations or purposes.
- No retroactive funding. This is different than the undergrads, which is sometimes confusing for groups. We have it this way because we want groups to advertise their events.
- No funds for purchasing capital equipment.
- No funds for off-campus recreational activities. Rare exceptions will be made. For example, we made an exception for PowderBound with some “conference money,” given that the point of the group was based on that off-campus trip. Other comments about this policy below.
Etosha feels if people converge on campus and drive from there, it would be okay.
PowderBound has a cabin off-campus by the mountains, which Alex sees as a plus for being organized and inclusive.
Donna would like the policy to remain fairly strict, but allow events like hiking and such that can’t be done here, and that might appeal especially to off-campus students.
Adam B. reports that historically there have been few exceptions, and many have been groups that are now under Stanford Outdoors. There’s liability for off-campus for sure. CAs, GSC do some off-campus events, perhaps reducing the need for us to fund groups to do them.
Aleksandra says that PowderBound is now part of Special Fees, so don’t need to deal with that again. Also says that she didn’t feel entirely welcome at PowderBound events previously.
Hanna says that she liked that the PowderBound event we did fund seemed to be geared towards beginners and newer people, with lessons provided, etc, which seemed more inclusive to non-group members.
Michelle reminds us that we would like to build bridges to other parts of our community (off-campus students for example), and thinks that off-campus events would help.
Addy reports that if provided transportation and housing and the event is on the weekend, it’s almost as easy to attend as an on-campus event.
Etosha thinks that some clubs might have particular interests that the broad groups like GSC and CAs don’t meet, such as Hillel planning a trip to a Holocaust museum.
Adam B. prompts us to think about the goal of the Funding Committee money, which is to have good events open to everyone on Stanford’s campus. Off-campus events tend to have a smaller attendance.
Donna says that BGSA for example had a hard time finding money for their outside events, since there aren’t really funding sources for that.
There are many people who would like to continue this discussion, so Funding Committee will draft some thoughts for next week, and we’ll discuss it again at that GSC meeting.

More Proposed Funding Guidelines:
- No funds for regular, consistent meetings.
- Limited seed funding for new groups.
- Limited advertising money, no newspaper ads.
- Some money for conference travel, but not that much, and technically, they need to pass along the information to other Stanford students, but this has not been enforced. Per conference, there’s $600 maximum, at $100 per person, plus some gas money. Only 1 or 2 people in the past have asked for this funding, so not all that well-known perhaps. Suggestion that students have to demonstrate plans for a specific event when they get their conference funding in order to pass along the knowledge gained.
- Honoraria – our cap this year was $750, thinking about $1000 for next year, but keeping the $100 initial amount given, with everything higher requiring a dollar-for-dollar match from other sources.
- Maximum funding per fiscal year per group is $8000. This is written into the bylaws and the constitution, so can’t change that flexibly. Some discussion in favor of growing by inflation, but we can’t currently do that without changing the constitution and bylaws. That will need to be considered that in the future. $8000 is also the point at which groups wanting more money than that apply for special-fees, so those things would all need to change together.
- Room rental: used to be free, but is not anymore in big places like Tressider. The Funding Committee is using a soft cap of allowing groups one event per quarter with room rental. Old Union is still free, but would get money for table rentals and such as needed, which GSC could help with. ASSU has this on their radar.
- Janitorial Fees: highly restricted; unless building administrators insist, the groups should do setup and cleanup.
- Community Service groups are unofficially treated more leniently by the Funding Committee, since much of what they do doesn’t fit into the types of specific caps for more standard events.
- Equipment check out: Events coordinator handles the rental of the sound system, karaoke machine, and projector which groups can borrow from the GSC for their events.
- Groups must advertise their events on Grad Events prior to the date or have their funding revoked.
- Reasonable food caps are $4 for snacks, lunch/BBQ is $7, dinner is $10 per person. This is an increase from 07-08. This is an overall cap, which includes any drinks, including alcohol, as well.
- New idea is that groups willing to work together to plan events can get money for their event (using the same caps as above) but that would not count against their $8000 total cap.
- One thing that Adam would like to bring back is requiring the GSC logo on group ads, which has been hard to enforce, especially because many groups start advertising prior to meeting with GSC.
- Adam would also like to institute some kind of lottery for small events, so that it’s not just group members who sign up quickly who get to go. This would either encourage groups to increase their size if there is a lot of interest, or would force them to really include a random sample of people interested. Maybe have a policy that some percentage of tickets/spots need to still be available as of when Grad Events goes out.
Donna reports that on Grad Events, sometimes events are listed as location TBA, or to email a particular person to get the information, which is not very inclusive, and suggests that this be regulated more.

Three points to return to in our discussion at the next meeting: policies for off-campus events, logo use, sign-ups for events.

8) 6:57 GSC Publicity (Zeng and Ivette)

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Zeng and Ivette would like to take on the role of GSC Publicity chairs this year. Main goals are to educate grad students about the GSC and to publicize core GSC activities and events.

For educating grad students
- promotional items,
- represent the GSC at campus-wide events
- have GSC social hours twice a quarter. Group suggestion to change that to having one per constituency per year for 7 events per year total, perhaps bunched at the beginning of the school year. Justin is enthusiastic about testing this out with Earth Sciences by the end of this quarter.
- revamp the GSC website with reorganized links to start, add pages about events that are updated yearly, but this will be an on-going longer term thing.
- GSC publication with photos of core events, updates.

For publicizing core GSC activities and events
- Permanent events webpage/link for core GSC events, updated each year.
- promote the GSC at events with banners, flyers/brochures, fun promotional items. Could also have this at GSC funded VSO events with groups having a couple t-shirts to give out or something in recognition of the sponsor.
- improve advertising strategy, perhaps using SSE more often to get more extensive flyering.

General suggestion from Fen – set up Ivette and Fen as resource for students who are trying to figure out how to advertise to GSC.

Aleksandra asks about whether Zeng and Ivette will be able to attend meetings, which both seem somewhat doubtful on due to other commitments, but should be here at least once a month, and will read minutes, and anyone can shoot them an email to get their help on advertising specific events.

9) 7:15 New Business (Polina)

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i. Nanna wonders about whether we want to put together summer bulletin. Maria says there has not been one in past, others agree that better to put effort into fall.