President's Report

End of Fall 09 Semester Report:
By. Chris Cook
Position: President

Throughout the elections and semester I created a number of goals for my term as president. Since this term is only half over I will make this report basically a status report of my progress thus far. I’ll include a list of my primary goals, obstacles, progress and forward looking plan.

Goals:
1.Improved communication
2.Improve relations with Faculty
3.Host a successful Snowball
4.Make society meetings more open and less formal.
5.Implement the Littleboard System with a theatre style area in the atrium.

1) Communication to the Students has always been a barrier for our society. Unfortunately our e-mails sent through csannounce@cs.dal.ca are commonly ignored. Coming into this semester my plan was to use our website to inform more people of our events. Getting people to our website proved a challenge as well. Early in the semester I had our website linked from the main page of the CS Faculty. Unfortunately due to a problem Dalhousie officials had with our logo this was removed. I hope within the next semester to get a logo approved by the Dalhousie executive and get this link back up.

2) I have been maintaining and improving relations with the CS Faculty and Staff throughout the semester. My methods for this is to keep them informed of all of our events and initiatives. Having a Faculty representative regularly attend our meetings as well as some meetings of the Snowball committee has been a great step forward for our society.

3) Probably the thing that took up most of my time this semester was Snowball: The Computer Science Student Awards Gala. Thankfully as a society we formed a Snowball Committee which I was the chair. This committee organized, planned, booked and created everything Snowball related. This allowed there to be much less of a burden on any one individual and for many different opinions to be present in organization of the event. My recommendations to any future council would be to form a Snowball committee around August and start planning early. This would allow the committee to be very organized and for there to be much less of a crunch time near the end. My plan is over the Christmas break to write a comprehensive “Guide to Snowball” which will likely borrow some parts of John Doucette’s report from Summer 09. I was very pleased with the event and from what others have said I believe most others were pleased too.

4) This was the first initiative I took when elected. Personally I had been turn off of Society meetings during my first year when I attended the first one. I felt it was too strict, formal and uninviting. For something that relies on Student involvement for success this is not the first impression that you want to give students. Upon getting involved this summer due to a personal friend asking me to and my having some extra time, I discovered that not much had changed in the almost two years I wasn’t involved. I read through the constitution and discovered this is because of the mandated use of “Robert’s Rules of Order”. This prompted some research at which point I discovered there were much less strict versions of these rules which could be adopted. These are the rules I have decided to run the meetings using and I feel it has been successful thus far. Our council has filled all of its positions with three first year students among our ranks. Also meeting seem much less tense and friendlier which is always good in my opinion. Also for this initiative I generally send out the agenda for the meetings out to the entire student populace and invite them all to attend.

5) Finally there is the Littleboard project which is being lead by our Secretary Tasha Bartlett. I won’t go into huge detail however I feel this project once complete will provide society many more opportunities to put on many less formal events such as gatherings to watch specific TV shows and movie nights. Currently the events require equipment bookings and hauling and are thus less frequent. The Littleboard Project’s theatre setup in the atrium would just require simply turning couches around to create an event. The project will also allow society to reach students from other faculties about our events such as Geekbeer. This project is still in the proposal state and has yet to be approved by the faculty but I feel it has great potential and look forward to working with the Faculty to make it successful during the next semester.