h3. CompSoc Minutes

h4. Present

* Richard Wilson
* David Buckley
* Pete Ellis
* Phil Stoneman
* Euan MacGregor
* Christian Bates
* Chris Boyle
* Paul Broadbridge
* Sadiq Jaffer

h4. Newsletter

Newsletter to be sent to members on Monday. Content to be sent to David by Sunday afternoon.

h4. LAN

Room has been booked, Phil will contact Piazza tomorrow about network socket. Newsletter to mention having an up-to-date virus scanner, LUG installfest. Speaker placement will be adjusted to have speakers on each table. Possible alternative locations for holding LANs discussed were the Westwood Games Hall and Ramphal Building. Phil will talk to room bookings about large rooms and Richard will talk to the electricians about power. This LAN has three reserve signups, one of which is Richard (as he was recovering from a 48h stint when fixing the server) and an ex-member Duncan who would have been able to sign up properly if his account had been reactivated in time. We'll be allowing them to attend, although space will be at a premium.

h4. LUG Installfest

There has yet to be any publicity about this. It'll be mentioned this week in a CS120 lecture. B213 has a stage at the front which will be used for the installfest.

h4. Servers

Not much news from DCS about the cupboard, should be ready in a few weeks though. Phil went to a meeting with Steve Pretty and the building manager about a cupboard in the Union, they want us to pay for the installation of a network socket. We'll start orderring hardware soon, to give the server time to be tested before installation. This is to be discussed in further detail at a later date (8pm tomorrow). Molotov has recently been unstable due to a sudden shortage of memory which has yet to be fully investigated. Current thinking is that the imap server.

h4. Academic

The Perl lectures concluded this week gone, and the LUG also held a guest lecture by Jason Clifford. There'll be another LUG guest lecture this forthcoming week by Dave Jones. Phil believes that we need to organise more academic events, e.g. a guest lecture once a week. This will promote awareness of the society, and would make CompSoc more attractive to sponsors.
In order to prevent the exec meetings dragging on, Phil proposes forming an academic team to meet specifically to organise such events with the academic officer reporting back to the exec. Current academic officer, Pete, has come up with a provisional members list for this team: Sadiq, Johnathan Smith (LucidIon), Richard Oakham (Zatneichat'el), Chris Boyle and himself, although it was agreed that it would be good if we could get some first years involved with this. The team will meet initially sometime early next week. Another project for the academic team would be to revive the programming competition.
It was also proposed to drop the membership fee in order to encourage more members joining, with charges for e.g. attending LANs and shell accounts/web hosting. This will raise more funds than just the membership fee. Phil will discuss this with Steve Pretty at a later date.
Provided it's advertised well (e.g. pigeon hole spamming, mailing head of departments, DCS projector), we should be able to fill L3 for the Kevin Warwick guest lecture next term, to be discussed further at an academic meeting.

h4. Tech team

As discussed last week, we're forming a tech team to manage the servers. Richard would like to attract less "hardcore geek" type people.

h4. Networking

We might be able to get some 16 or 24 port managed 10/100Mbit switches from ITS. Managed switches have numerous advantages, such as being able to enable someone's port(s) at LANs after we've confirmed they're virus free and we can create VLANs to keep different types of traffic separate (e.g. heavy file transfers, games)

h4. Socials

Paul will be organising the meal and karting; He'll report back next week. For the Bletchley Park trip, Phil is taking the minibus test in the middle of week five. Ticket price will be about 10 pounds a head and there might be the possibility of booking a coach trip, although that might be just bad wording on the website. Provisionally, the event is to be held on Wednesday of week 9. Lord of the Rings days this Sunday from 11am at Phil's, which will involve watching the two extended versions before going to the Skydome to see the final film.

h4. Website

Webmaster's private instance of apache2/mod_perl2 etc. is active and the site is mostly now mod_perl clean. The wiki was suggested to be used as a place to discuss events. The details of this and other website design tweaks to be discussed at the tech team.

h4. AGM

To be held on the Saturday on the end of week six, in meeting rooms five and six at 8pm. Proxy voting shouldn't be much of an issue, as the only external member who is officially allowed to vote is James Ross.

h4. Budget

This to be discussed tomorrow at 8pm.

h4. Any other Business

David's efforts with the game server info page were recognised. Sadiq announced he won't be standing for any exec positions.