Roll Call
Announcements
SEF Proposals
Zimbra Computing Environment
Amanda and Diana Show how to use the blog!
ACB Board Discussion
Old Business
New Business
Meeting called to order at 3:11 pm.
Roll Call (coming soon)
Announcements (coming soon)
Two Cents
Aheli Purkayastha, ’09: I’m a member of the President’s Diversity Council – which is a diversity leadership group composed of Raymond Albert, Karen Tidmarsh, Mary Osirim, Florence Goff, Chris MacDonald-Dennis, and students; it was started around the 80′s when we had concerns brought to the president. Nancy J created a group in 2001 since one person didn’t accurately reflect all issues. There are now 6 members-at-large to represent the student body.
Jessica Coulter: I am new to this group. I wanted to do this more as like a separate issue of diversity – bring in mental health awareness, as I am a part of Active Minds, and we are a part of Multicultural Affairs.
Grace Steick, ’12: I joined because I’ve worked with children’s disabilities for a long time and wanted to work on issues of diversity.
Aheli Purkayastha: There are other members also, but we should be able to be accessible to you. We represent the student factions, but we want to make sure we are effectively and intentionally talking about diversity all year round. Starting Nov. 10th -Dec 19th, there will be a campus climate survey for all members of the BMC Community, asking questions about race and ethnicity, sex and gender, sexual identity and gender, and class. It is completely anonymous, and encrypted, so there is no way for it to be traced back to you. It’s very important to fill this survey out, as we need feedback. Representatives will come and talk to SGA about issues, as we are only 7 members, and need feedback. Please support us.
Emily Reuman, ’11: I’ve been trying to work on getting bottled water off campus, but tap water tastes terrible according to most people on campus. Wanted to see where to go – get water filters in dorms in tea pantries, but don’t know how to do this.
Patricia LeBron, ’09: Facilities would be involved, and ask them if it is feasible, and it has to come out of someone’s budget.
Elise Nelson, ’09: Need backup from the administration – schedule a meeting with the president.
Sadie Marlow, ’11: What do you mean by filters, which kind?
Emily Reuman, ’11: It depends, there are many kinds.
Sadie Marlow, ’11: So, there are options.
Emily Reuman, ’11: If anyone comes up with anything, please let me know! Thanks!
Laurel Lemon, ’11: Next week, Saturday at Temple, they are hosting a student leadership conference. It’s a great opportunity to meet other students in the area who lead. Keep that in mind.
SEF Proposals
Klaralee Charlton, Treasurer: Sorry I wasn’t here last week. We have an excel file with the events that were passed last week, to remind you. Today we will have Amelie and Rachel come up and present their final two events. Since we have quorum, everyone in assembly will vote, and we need a simple majority for this to pass.
Amelie Raz, ’11: Fair Trade Celebration – 3 days later this month, with 3 separate events, including a panel of speakers, a community picnic, and a trip to Media, the only fair-trade town in the country. Last week, people decided I didn’t have enough money to feed everyone for the picnic – I originally had 400 dollars, but we decided we would have more people, so I decided to raise the value to $1200 – total amount now to $1320.
Christina Wagner, Class of ’11 Co-President: How many people will this feed?
Amelie Raz: About 80. Because changing the budget forced us to have renegotiations about the food, we have pushed it back to the weekend of the 21st.
Vote for this event: In favor, 27; Against, 0; Abstain, 1. This event passes.
Rachel Corey, ’10: I would like to bring a Palestinian comic to campus for a night of comedy. The biggest concern last week was the travel cost – her fee was 2000 dollars, travel inclusive – I have no idea where she is coming from.
Sadie Marlow, Member-at-Large: She gave you , “I need 2000 dollars total for fee and travel”, and the other part is for snacks and publicity. Our concern was flying from NY to Philadelphia was so expensive.
Rachel Corey, ’10: I don’t know where she is coming from, but I asked for an itemized figure, and never got one, so I broke it down myself.
Vote for this event: In favor, 3; Against, 1; Abstentions, 23. This event passes.
Zimbra Computing Environment
Janet Scannell, Computing Services: We have a new email system this year, so I’m here to talk about it, hear questions, and give a little bit of information. I will pass around folders with some documentation about where to get more info about the new system. There are a couple of sessions scheduled to show you how to use these systems for students. For context, I’ll share some statistics with you – 800,000 messages sent to @brynmawr.edu, and about 60% were spam and dropped, of the other 40%, half were put in quarantine, and the other 20% were delivered, and even some of those are still spam, etc.. Our job is to try to stay neck-and-neck with the spammers, so we are working on it. We are trying to filter that out. Those of you who forward to another account, if some of that spam comes to you, and you block it, it blocks Bryn Mawr, so don’t do that. We started this process about 18 months ago after we realized we were behind, so we wanted to do integrated messaging, with email, calendar, etc. all together. We are moving staff and faculty messages onto a server, so that everyone on campus can save it and access it everywhere. We have much larger quotas, and now we have a quota meter, and have made a big leap forward into a more modern system. We did have student representation, along with faculty and staff representation in the process, we did surveys, focus groups, etc. I would be happy to share things.
Christina Wagner: Can you show the calendar feature, please?
Jane Morris, ’10: Can you access the quarantine messages more often than just once a week?
Janet Scannell: It’s a system-wide setting right now to send either once a week or once a day, but you can visit it anytime at spamcheck.brynmawr.edu, and you can log-in with the college-wide login.
Katie Kellom, Honor Board Head: What happens after you graduate?
Janet Scannell: Zimbra is the company behind all of this, they are opensource. They have just announced that they will be hosting email in the same way Google does, but there is a very good chance that they would be moved to that, and as long as you can live with the advertising, you will be able to have access to the mail. Right now we do forwarding, but we hope to keep a mailbox with you.
Christina Wagner: If you want to have receipt of your emails sent, how do you do that?
Janet Scannell: The current version doesn’t have it, but we will do an upgrade in January probably, and we will get it in the next version. One good lesson is to logout of your email, and don’t remember passwords. The number of people who try to grab information from us is amazing per day, so be careful with the passwords.
This is a demo account – to set up a sharing thing with anything – an address book, folder, calendar layer, task lists. And IM stays integrated. Firstly, with the calendar – if you set up an address group, you can enter a group name, and it repeats, so you don’t have to enter it all over again. The college calendar is maintained by public affairs and the Registrar’s office. They want you to block off your calendar, so you can find common time. We’ve encouraged faculty to be clear about how they want you to calendar them. Other schools have all groups manage calendars, and people can check on which type of groups they want to look at. Simona Radu is working on a project about how to get your class registration information out of the VRO and into the calendar. We have a lot of options.
Taline Cox, COPS Co-Head: When you have emails, and someone writes “tomorrow”, if you let your mouse fall on it, your whole calendar pops up. Can we make that stop?
Janet Scannell: No, because we like that feature. One of the features that this has is the “zimlets” that could pop over someone’s name that says “Name, Year, Major”, and those are the things that Zimbra is pushing.
Amanda Cegielski, Faculty Rep: Is there a way to get a weather zimlet in the next upgrade?
Janet Scannell: I think there already is one. We would love to have student input on which ones to include – there are 100′s of zimlets and new colour themes, and this is very flexible. We are very open to this, and if you all want to think about how to advise us, that would be great.
Rachel Corey, Board of Trustees Rep: On the last email system, we could highlight if someone sent you an email, the whole bar would be highlighted, but the only substitute right now is tags.
Janet Scannell: You’d have to use tags or put in a folder.
Christina Wagner: I really like the new email system, and since I have people’s names, but not emails, it’s really helpful to be able to search for them easily.
Judy Barr: I’ve been sending out mass emails to a club, and I’ve been using auto-fill, but if something gets disrupted, it won’t let me send instead of just sending and seeing which ones come back to me.
Janet Scannell: Let me look at that. The things that went around, and the blog is where we would post an answer to that.
Shelley Gupta, ’09: Is it possible to export the email lists?
Kendra Hayde, Secretary: I know it works with Gmail, exporting and importing .csv files, so I think it also works with Outlook.
Janet Scannell: I’ll stick that up on the blog, too. Thanks!
Amanda and Diana Show how to use the blog!
Diana and Amanda showed how to login to the blog. Please read and comment on posts at http://sga.blogs.brynmawr.edu!
ACB Board Discussion
Aheli Purkayastha, President: So the next topic on the agenda is the ACB Board discussion, and Katie will tell you a bit more about it.
Katie Kellom: In the interest of time, we will table it to next week – we wanted as much community input as possible, and ask people “do you think that this is something we should decide, or should it fall on individuals”, and if you say yes, it will give you options. We want you to think about and ask people about whether it’s something that SGA should be doing as a way to get community input, and if the survey is good, and what options for possible action. There two that we were looking at were putting a sticky thing at the top about not posting people’s names, or personal stuff. There wouldn’t be ramifications, but it is a suggestion. The other option was to do it like Haverford and login with a password, and if someone wanted to confront you, they would contact the website, and you’d be able to find out who it was. The third option was to do both. We’d love for you to think of other options, and talk about whether we should do anything at all. The other thing to announce is that it is no longer “google-able”, so any name you type in will not come in. It is internally searchable still. That has changed since the community forum. We thought that was a relevant point.
Old Business
Klaralee Charlton, Treasurer: I’ve been working with the Haverford treasurers about Bi-Co budgeting. We’ve been comparing bi-college funding in general, and the new treasurer is open. We will be talking about that at some future meetings – it wasn’t dropped, and it might end up that we do need to fund the Bi-Co in the spring to keep relations still good. Just looking at bi-co clubs, they are footing more of the bill than we are. Since it is up to the assembly, we will talk about this again. We will speak more about it at a very near meeting.
Christina Wagner: What does that mean by bi-college clubs?
Klaralee Charlton: This talks about Equestrian club, some religious, and a cappella groups. We need to talk about what qualifies a club as “bi-college”.
New Business
Kendra Hayde, Secretary: The minutes are coming along. We are working on a way of implementing new technology to record the meetings that will automatically transcribe the minutes, so all I would have to do is edit them and then make the Mawrk Notes. I will keep you all updated, and as soon as they are done, they will go up on the blog.
Aheli Purkayastha: The exec board has spent about 10-12 hours a week working to plan the upcoming meetings. We want you to have as much time as possible to add to the agenda and prepare. I would encourage you all to check email and the blog about future meetings.
Meeting adjourned at 4:30 pm.