Minutes

Approved

Persian Students Assoc:

-Celebration (festival on winter solstice Dec 21), at Bechtel, applied for $1000 food, was recommended. Will start with food, appetizers, music performance, karaoke, poem reading. Expecting about 200 people attending. One of the most popular PSA events of the year. Recommendation is $1000 for food. Voting, passes unanimously.

Graduate Students in Electrical Engineering

-$3000 alcohol, $1000 food, $1055 event services. Voting, passes unanimously with 2 abstentions.

Sikh Students Assoc

-Play about 1984 Delhi pogrom. Requesting $2000 for play in Cubberly. Lights, sounds, people need to be paid. Troupe is Jewish. Eventbrite tickets for free, capacity is 380 but right now it is at 300 already. Most of groups is grad students. Recommendation is $1810.89 for event services. Voting, passes unanimously with 1 abstention.

SIA:

-Having event during Christmas night get together. Small event with alcohol food snacks, etc. Requesting $160 food and $160 alcohol, and that is also the recommendation. Voting, passes unanimously.

Just became available. In person events starting Jan 5, 2 events that week, 2 events in the 3 weeks after that. Engr quad, LKSC cafe, total 6 events. Adrienne asks about what about the new year’s stickers on top of the last year’s? Trevor says it should be fine. Sebas says there could be numbered tickets so ppl don’t have to wait in lines for so long.

John LF is here. UG Senate called a special election that’s tmr. Voting on constitutional amendment to change UG funding system. Brief overview: replaces Gen/Special Fees with grants. Right now each group has its own fee. Now it will be together in grants. Annual grants for expenses that can be predicted a year in advance. Standard grant is like general funding. Quick grants are stuff that can’t be predicted ahead of time, under $6k, if unanimous consent from appropriations, then approved. No more general fee reserve. Budget goes to grants pot, will be allocated by UGS. Currently special fee groups money rolls over, in new system the unspent money from annual grants will be taxed if not spent. New money is taxed, old money isn’t. James B asks about groups petitioning if they don’t like what the Senate decided about annual grants. John LF thinks that less groups will do it, because there’s a big jump from no petition to 15% if they want to go against Senate. James B asks about if they’ve had any town halls since the bill has been formed. They say there’s been an effort this week through Senate and Exec and Financial Manager to organize a larger townhall, and to get individuals into dorms and buildings. Mailing lists too have been used. This bill represents the work that was put into the SAFE reforms. James B says that no groups have endorsed it publicly, they say that most of the groups that have responded to this before are not focused on this issue anymore. Joint fees are not being touched. Sebas asks how long will the reserves last? They say will be disbursed in the next 2 years. Money won’t go into the special fees reserves anymore, so they don’t need general reserves anymore because that money will come from the special fees leftovers. Trevor asks about what the new checks are that would stop the UG groups to apply so much money? University supports the current plan. Assistant to the President will look over it tomorrow, but they will probably support it because that’s what they’ve been saying all along. This will be signed and go into effect in the spring. They want it done now so that the special fee groups will know what to do in the spring. Adrienne asks why the groups are not supporting it? John FC says that they don’t want to publicly endorse it because they are focusing their attention on the Ferguson decision. John FC says there are no groups who are publicly against it. SOCC says whenever they make a decision they rally their people behind that, but right now they don’t have resources to do that right now. Some of the most contentious points from SAFE last year were removed because of suggestions from groups like SOCC, Club Sports, etc. Logistical details will be worked out by a task force of the UGS. John FL believes that he has done due diligence in gettin word out and solociting feedback from student groups. Voting, passes 10 for, 0 against, 1 abstaining.

Voting on bill, passes unanimously with 1 abstention.

Wants to create a publication fund for open access publication. There’s 2 different methods for publishing, 1 is a paper with PI and they get involved in this, Stanford pays the fee for access to journal. Other method is open access, author pays upfront fee to make it open access so anybody can access the publication. At other universities there is money set aside for interdisciplinary open access publications, you can pull from this fund, you submit an application for this money or it’s first come first serve, once the money is gone for the year it’s gone.

Served 1641 grad students between 5 sittings. Longest check-in time from line to sitting down was like 15 minutes. Lessons learned: having 5 seatings as opposed to 4 worked well to reduce congestion in the tent. Event depends on volunteers, 1 recommendation is that she had 7 volunteers signed up and spiked to 30 after she offered gift cards, so that’s good. Positive comments about the music. Photographer from CoHo did a good job, we have photos on Dropbox. She loves the Turkey suit!

Adrienne asks if we want to do go karting or Tech Museum.