Meeting Minutes 9th March 2005

Present

Society General Meeting

The last SGM was reviewed and we had no suggestions for improvements.

It was mentioned that in accordance with our Constitution (clause 9.2) we should arrange an SGM for next term. The provisional date for this has now been set for Thursday 28th April at 5pm. We hope to get COLT2 booked for the meeting.

Among the subjects to be discussed at the SGM next term will be the money held in the Compsoc bank account and future plans for Compsoc and KentIRC. We also plan to go over things that have happened to KentIRC since the last SGM.

Money

Ben Charlton told the Committee that he had emailed David Barnes about the money held in the Compsoc bank account with a view to getting the paperwork in order and access to the money. He stated he was still waiting to hear from him in reply.

Staff Member

Ben Charlton mentioned that David Barnes was not interested in remaining the staff contact that has to be listed on the paperwork with the bank and so a replacement for him was discussed. Fred Barnes had previously said that he may be able to act as liaison. Ben said that he would speak to him about the matter.

New Compsoc1

The idea of a new (brand new) Compsoc1 was raised and it was seen as a good idea by the committee, especially if it were a rackmount machine that could live in the Cornwallis Machine Room. In the event that a new Compsoc1 would live in the racks in the machine room the current compsoc1 would act like a thin client, allowing a terminal to remain in SE109 for the use of members. The possibility of this machine, or a RaQ, holding a disk big enough to back up a new Compsoc1 was also raised. It was well recieved by the committee. This would allow all a complete backup over the network using rsync to protect against catastrophic disk failure in any new Compsoc1.

The Treasurer undertook to put together some machine specs and email them to the officers list. These specs will ultimately be voted on by the society in a motion at the SGM next term. Any specs will involve two hard disks for the new machine (this will allow for RAID to be employed) and a hard disk for the present Compsoc1 or RaQ for backup purposes.

Sponsorship

The possibilty of Sun Microsystems sponsoring Compsoc was raised and it was agreed that should Sun decide to sponsor us it would be of real benefit to the Society. To this end the President and the Treasurer both offered to talk to various contacts within Sun about this.

Abuse

It was agreed that any reports of abuse received need to be logged by the Secretary. It was decided that abuse@compsoc.co.uk should be set up to forward to the committee email list. The reports then received by the committee can be filtered and any that require the attention of the officers team should then be forwarded to the officers list. If an oper deals with abuse of the service then details of the abuse and action taken should be forwarded to the secretary.

As we're still drawing up guidelines for officers, it was suggested that some leeway should be given when dealing with abuse reports about IRC opers and other officers; officers doing something they'd previously been warned not to do would lose their powers, but a first offense should only result in a warning.

If there is a serious report of abuse recieved it may be forwarded to the relevant department. For example, an abuse coming from a user on raptor should be reported to Computer Science Sysadmins and other users should be reported to Computing Service.

Committee List

This is currently a Kent email list and not archived. Adam made the point that efforts should be made to archive it. The Committee agreed with him. Oper/Sysadmin Guidelines

This is essentially a work in progress at this point in time, as a good deal of the things to be specified depend on what emerges as time passes. What was agreed was that all Oper actions should be at least logged (by mentioning it #compsoc), and ideally agreed upon by more than one oper before the action is taken. If this is not possible because of the nature of the incident (e.g. a person is spamming many channels on the network at once and seriously diminishing the experience for the other users) then it should be reported in #compsoc after the event.

A carefully considered response is urged in all cases. It was agreed that a /kill should always be a last resort. A warning should be given first in every situation, followed by a kick from a channel by the channel operators. Only if this fails or abuse is taking place in more than one channel at once should a kill be initiated.

If someone requests a clone killing then this can take place without discussion as long as it is clear that the duplicate being killed really is the user. In this situation the oper should take the action but also point out to the user that with nickserv they can do this themselves and advise them to register their nickname with this service.

If someone requests an a-kill for a certain period of time to enable them to get on with some work they could not otherwise complete this can be done, as long as the case is documented and an email request from the user is recieved.

Promoting KentIRC

It was agreed by the committee that the profile of KentIRC needs to be raised. The general opinion was against the use of leaflets to do this but Posters and a stall at Freshers Fair were discussed, as well as trying to get a mention in CS lectures. This last idea relates more to the start of next year than the current point in the academic year.

Posters were agreed to be a good idea and it was decided that new posters should be generic and not date specific. These should go up in the same places as the ones for the elections (all computer rooms on campus, notice boards in the colleges, the door of the Computing Octagon). It was generally thought that more posters than went up before the last SGM would be a good thing and it was suggested that rather than one person walking all the way around campus and every college the officers be brought in to help, with possibly one officer per college plus someone to do Park Wood and the Octagon if enough people volunteer. Ben mentioned that copies of the logo are available on the Compsoc website at http://compsoc.co.uk/compsoc-logo.zip.

Another good idea was the stall at the Freshers Fair. The Secretary has been tasked with looking into this.

Finally it was mentioned that the new Services offered on KentIRC should be properly launched and promoted to the users.

Incoming SSH

Jam has apparently mentioned to David Bell that he will do his best to put forward our case to Computing Service. The committee acknowledged this kind offer, but it would appear that incoming SSH is more of a Computer Science problem as we are hosted by them. The general approach favoured by the committee therefore is that Tim Bishop puts forward our case to the head of the Computer Science Sysadmin team.

RaQs

The work we want to do to the three RaQs should be done soon.

Adam Sampson has offered a debian box that we can use as a bridging box and Tim Bishop will apparently provide the IP address for the machines. It was suggested that we do it once and document the process for future attempts.

Uses need to be found for the RaQ machines. Games were a major suggestion. The ideas that were talked about are below:

Compsoc1 Free Music Store

Ben Charlton mentioned South by SouthWest, an American Music project that has made available hundreds of songs free over bittorrent. The Live Music Archive was also mentioned. It was decided to get music from these to start off the music store on Compsoc1. These will be on that machine very soon.

Compsoc1 Software

It was mentioned that Firefox on Compsoc1 needs updating now. An install of both Sunbird and Eclipse were also requested.

Machine in SE105

Elizabeth Overal raised this issue. A thin client machine for SE105 would be a bonus for the society as it would provide an extra terminal for users. It was decided that this should be discussed with Tim Bishop and a machine should provisionally be found for this room.

Maintainance Slot

Adam Sampson raised the idea of a scheduled maintainance slot. It was agreed this would benefit the society and Tuesday morning would be a good time as this would coincide with the maintainance slots of the rest of the University. The officers should discuss this to arrange a convenient time.

External Machine

The possibility was raised of a future external Compsoc machine housed in a facility such as Telehouse. This may be a worthwhile future goal if members are interested in it.