Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of February 17, 2014 The meeting was called to order at 19:30:00 by dove. In attendance were Voting members: dove tboning cereslee sqshemet davidben phurst dwilson codetaku dvorak42 vasilvv | iannucci Associate members: geofft jhawk glasgall achernya| jbarnold Prospectives: rht dzaefaen sadun | asuhl vahle snp Guests: Administrivia: gals: On behlaf of dlaw, move to allocate $15 for remaining electronics for the DEFCON sign. 2 connectors from digikey. Apparently this is the cheapest we can get them. dove: I have had it working. It just wasn't in the state I was comfortable leaving it. [Second and white ballot] [Motion passes] jhawk: Useful to talk about tidbit. Okayt place to do it. Maybe give a little biut of background. In Dec, 4 MIT students got a subpoenoa from NJ from work produced at a hackaton. Became big deal recently. Hal Ableson produced open letter to Reif about lack of support. On Thursday dove callsed meeting to talk about what we might do. tboning and WIll were supereffective. Drafted communicatoins to most undergrads. Quite liekely that those were instrumental in Reif's email form this weekend annoucing that MIT was going to look at aprocess on how to deal with legal issues associated with these things. ALl deserve som erectgonition that we appear to have produced a result. dove: Have a pretty good feeling that yeah we did something. Sure he heard about Hal's letter and read the petitoin earlier, but would have expected him to wait til Hal sent it. I said I was going to draft an email tpnight, but sent letter, now not sure what type of email I should be drafting. "Thank you, still want to say these things", just "thank you". I sort of took his email a little bit as a cue to stop sending him things. I'm wondering what the most constructive things are. Still think I should send mail to Hal. Point begin, situtaion evolved, not sure how to move forward. Wanted to get input. jhawk: Couple things. One is, at this juncture it may be more useful for whatever you write to be on paper. Two, students at MIT definitely have a role to play in MIT's exploration of what to do in these situations. Plausilby some of these students could be form SIPB. Might consider offering to provide hinm with one or two student representiatives to work with peopl ein trying to figure out how MIT should respond. Beyond that, yeah, acknowleding is worth doing regarless. dwilson: Going to say faily similar things. Reasonable approach to such a letter might be opening it with okay, saw recnet email, thank you for making this decision, brief description of concerns, then from his email I recall him mentioning somehting about talking about setting up some sort of legal resource for students and potentially saying we as SIPB think this is relevant and would like to hear updates when they are available with the potential of possibly involving ourselves when that becomes a thing. dove; I'll draft something to that effect and we'll have it ready sometime this week. Will send mail to Hal and follow up with him. At this point, not sure if relevant to email John Charles. If Reif going to push new initiative then the academic counsel is still going to have some discussion. gla: Discussion concerning coc continues, on Github and mailing list. OI'm still hopeful that we're going to have something to propose at next week's meeting. Thanks again. jhawl: Should those who have offered feedback expect to hear back from you. glas; Proibably. dove; Also wanted to mention we talked aout the MIT branding stuff. At the same time, received a zephyr from rhkeeler from ASA bout the same hting. The ASA met with the communications office. dove: We have a projector screen mounted now. John and I did this last week. There's tape on laptop land. Please don't remove them. The projector can basically go anywhere between there. You can get it to fit on the screen wihtout hitting any objects on the tables, people can sit basically anywhere on the office and have a pleasant viwing ezperience. Project Updates: glas; had a hackaton Sat to work on possible successor to linerva project. slane: Setting up successor to Linerva, at this point called Hedwig, setting up a strange FS where everyone will have their own VM, so if AFS crashes it only crashes for one person. Issues with this in terms of logins as well as zephyr. We have installed Devian on the hardware, set it up in SMR, and started looking in to zephyr problem and setting up strange filesystem. ach: And built some debian backages in order to suport overlays dove; Poepl eintersted in wokrin g on tha tproject, feel free to senbd mail. dove; Met with FSF about Libreplanet, still happening weekend in March, going to get advertising in the need week or so. Other: Other Other: vahle: Taking over cokecomm for dwilson. The huge load outside is only half the stuff. Roughly 200 sodas. Got the cost down to about $.28/soda. [office boggles] dove: I'm thourougly impressed. Thank you very much. vahle: Going to redo the dot system. And would like to start accepting stripe. asuhl: Do you accept bitcoin? vahle: Someone needs to show me how to set it up, but yeah. dove; dwilson, you've done a very good job. Thank you for volunteering so much of your time. vahle: If anyone wants to help me clean up some of this, that'd be aweosm.e glasgall: MITNEt connectivity problem most of yesterday. Things seem to be resolved now. jhwak: Worthwhile to provide more detail. Apparentl because of an alledged DDOS on Kerberos, any IP addresses that tried to talk to Kerberos server were blackliseted form all of MIT. No reason to think they are unblacklisted. If you have random problems talking to MIT, ping network. Seems like an awefully goofy way to run the network. dove; I'm kind of surprised to hear it's all good now. Lead to believe it's going to take a long time to resolve. jhawk: On the other hand, the set of effected people is not super large. Elections: dove: [reads over elections info in the consitution] glasgall: Speaking fo the KDC thing, I think I just got myself blocked. dove: First elections for chair. Nominations? dvorak42: I nominate dove. vasilvv: Seconded. dove: I accept. dwilson: I nominate tboning phurst: Second. tboning: I decline. tboning: I nominate dvorak42 dvorak42: I decline. <>: I nominate vasilvv vasilvv: I decline. dove: Right now I am running unopposed. i want to make sure tha't swhat the board actually wants before that's what happens. I guess this means that there will now be a dove.AMA session. In case you're curious, the ear ring is white gold, and yes I am engaged. Questions for the nominee? Going to delegate interrogation to the vice-chair. tboning: How hosed are you? dove: I am thesing this semester for my master's. Not taking any classes, not participating in any tabletops. Only SIPB and masters. dwilson: Writing a Mystery Hunt? dove: On a writing team. My intention is to write a puzzle or two and that's it. Basically ignored most emails. Decided to basically remove myself from majority of process. Very quickly decided wouldn't be pleasant. phurst: Plans for if you are reelected? dove: Couple things I talked about last time. Having more open discussion before motions pass. Not having decisions happen in private. Feel like I've done a pretty good job. Thing I didn't do a good job of, more social events. Getting the projector up was a thing that had to happen. But feel like I havne't done a good job of making social events happen, and that's what I'd like to focus on. Also getting more prospectives involved, particularly with new proejcts. Roost, Hedwig, and more. More softwar projects. Feel a little bit guilty that I havne't had more prospecitves memberd this term. Would like to brainstorm ways of fixin ghtat. jhawk: Biggest challenges in past term? dove: Has been challening to address the issue of prospective retention. On the one hand, decent influx of prospectives, but a lot of them disappeared. Some have come back. It's sort of unclear what we did right or wrong. Tried to get them involved in projects. Some were blocking on other things. Was really challening to work out what it is I needed to do to insure we kept prospectives. There are some people who had worked on project but wouldn't hang around the office a lot, or vice versa. I would call that my biggest challenge. Been trying ot reach out individually. achernya: We appear to have gotten into the unfortuante pattern that there are very interesting events that happen right when the EC has to change. If you are elected as chari, what do you think that the ec and the board should do in order to insure that transitions between ECs go more smmothy. dove: We only have so many candidates for the positions. There will be unavoidalbey majoriy overlap. I think tha'ts actually a constraint at this point. I think we need to have some sort of transition meeting, but I think we need to have poeple involved in the past be still around. Fortunately most are still students. I think that most of the work has been done for us. All of these things happened in the past week. Said we weren't going to have an EC meeitng aobut them because elections. Next EC has to take on a lot of things, but not much passing on. ach: If you wanted at least one other person to run against, who would you rather be running against. dove: Anybody. I think all the active full members would be good candidates for chair. [dove is elected Chair] dove: Now we will take nominations for vice chair. codetaku: I nominate dvorak42 dvorak42: I accept. dwilson: I nominate vasilvv: vas: I decline dvorak42: I nominate tboning tboning: I accept. dwilson; i nominate cereslee cereslee: I decline dvorak42: I'm steven, I'm a senior but I'm menging next year, was vice chair, xvm ctf tboning; Tom, jiunoor. curent treasurer, work on scripts and ctf. Try to help out on other things. glas: One of the responsiblities is machine room. The wiring is deplorable. What will you do to make sure we actually get to deploy shiny new things to clean up the racks? tboning: I'm not very familiar with how the machine room is currently wired. ach: Neither are the rest of us. tboning: I didn't realize that the new PDUs weren't actually being used. I think that's a shame and maybe something alon ghte lines of a hardware hackathon would be in order. I know in the past this has been done. To be honest, I haven't really been in the mahine room. glas: Arguably that's good, because it means none of services respondibel\ dvorak42: ROrningally going to do a reqirin over IAP, would like to do a large-sclae rewiring over the summer. Spring break is so small a time probably can't do things then. Have some information that I can use to figure out what we need to do. jhawk: Word shiny was used recnely. Do you want the silver thing that's shiny or dull? How do you feel about shiny v dull in the context of management? dvorak42: In terms of machine room, think it should be a place with cool new projects that are shiny, and possibly move a coiple of our more resiliant projects somehwere else. Should use that space for more cool projects. tboning: Second the notion that we wan't new projects in our machine room. Another connotation of shiny is whether the hardware needs to be the newest. Answer is not especially. Old hardware from Slian that is great, even though it sin't the shiniest. glas: Given [redacted]. how do you propose to redacted the redacted. tboning; First play madlibs, then answer the question. dvorak42: Redacted*15-ish. cereslle: How hosed are you? dovorak42: Not super hosed. helping with hunt. Finished the 10-day I'm writed. A couple games that will be done, like, tomorow. In general no big things over the summer. Am going to be in CA this summer, thouhg planning on coming over to Boston for a couple weekneds. tboning; Aslo not very hosed. Classes are normal. Not super ivolved with Hunt, along the same lines as dove. No other stupid big commitments. [dvorak42 is elected vice chair] dove: We will now elect the treasurer. dvorak42: I nominate tboning. tboning: Accept. dwilson: I nominate sqshemet sqshemet: Decline. iannucci: I nominate vasilvv vasilvv: Decline. dvorak42: I nominate cereslee. cereslee: I decline. dove: tboning.AMA. iannucci: What's the worse idea you've ever had? tboning: There are a lot of these ideas I get in steven's campaigns. let's go do terrible, terrible rituals for power. phurst: Have you considered doing terrible, terrible rituals for sipb funding? tb: Other than asking companies for funding? dove: Ever burned down any bookshops? tboning: No. dwilson; Do you feel that the amount of money that SIPUB gets annually is sufficient to meet the needs of SIPB in what goals we have for it? tboning: So... assuming that we're not chaning anything, the amount that we get is okay. I wish it was larger, but. The problem I see arises when we don't get increases, or have the ability to replace hardare from other sources. Right now we're reliant on getting donations ever few yuears. Hard to do hardware and office upgrades with our current budget. dvorak42: The SIPB oiffice burns down. First thing you buy. ina: Fire extinugisher. tboning: Probably tables. <>: Is SIPB insured? iann: All institute property. The insitiute takes care of it. dvorak42: SAO makes the process for reimbursements about 50 times harder. What do you do? tboning: Probably just go through it anyway. It might take longer, but SIPB's in a position where we will need to buy things. [tboning was elected treasurer] dove: We will now have nominations for secretary. dvorak42: Sabrina cereslle: vasilvv vasilvv: Decline. dvorak42: Ceres cereslee: Class conflict that I will punt only if no one else is willing to do it. dwilson: I nominate iannucci iannucci: Decline. dvorak42: codetaku codetaku: Decline. cerelss: dwilson dwilson: Decline. dvorak42: I nominate phurst phurst: I accept. phurst: This would be my second time. I was secretary my sophomore year. I did a decent job at it. I was kind of bad about taking minutes, but in the scheme of things being late with minutes is not the worst thing in the world. In terms of welcomgin people I can't say how good of a job I did with that. Would have to ask others. dvorak42: Given that you can't be a secretary without secret, how good are you at redacting things? phurst: I'm good at it. dove: Will you be able to make the meetings on a regular basis? phurst: Yes. I have no conflict. dove: How hosed are you? phurst: Doing what will hopefully be the last term of my MEng. Kind of punted for the first term. Somewhat more hosed, but class I'm taking isn't tat hard. jhawk: What is your opinion on the most controversial secretary issue? phurst: What do we currently use for version control? sqshemet: It's complicated. [office confirms] phurst: I actually went through and deleted old vcs things. glas: Will you comit to wokring with current secretary to finish minutes phurst: Yes. ach: Commit to commiting minutes phurst: Yes. dove: Mentioned this is your last term. Where do you see yourslef. phjurst: Uncertain. Don't start work 'til Sept-Oct. But wouldn't count on being here this summer. [phurst is elected secretary] dove: We will now elect members at large. iannucci: I decline the nomination. [cereslee, codetaku, dwilson, sqshemet, vasilvv are elected members at large] phurst: So I swapped positions with Sabrina. dove: "The current EC must validate the election." ... Wait, really. We have to wait four days. I will gavel in the new EC at the next meeting. Else: dove: Received an email from interested person in India asking to get involved. Not sure what the correct response is. Seperate emia form someone in Austraila, but theyu're actually going to be here. If anyone has any ideas about how to respond to this. To be a member of the Board, you have to be present at at least four meetings. And maybe some other things. It is impossible to not visit the area and become a member of the Board. Tha'ts not the question that ws asked. Not sure if handing a bunch of grunt work over is the right answer. A bunch of the projects are heavily sysadmin-y right now. glasgall: entirely possible that the correct answer is that this is a group for people physically here, but here's a list of similar organizatoins near you. dove: I can send that response, or if anyone else wants to volunteer to do so by all means. Other Other: iann: I'm really excited about grad school because today spent all morning spidering around reading papers all over the place, now transcribing a paper in Cyrillic into vim. You all shoudl do grad school, it is awesome. dove: Myself and rlm are comisserating about a weird behviro in emacs today, when you auto-fill, or fill-paragraph, sometimes it'll leave a short word and not fix this, but if you manually adjust the fill yourself and then meta-q, it's happy. This occurs toward the end of the sentence. Emacs assumes that all of your sentences will end in period-space-space. There's a varialb eoyu cna change to make this stop. This happens so it won't break if you do your abbreviations strangely. If you want to be really cool you can set a regexp for exactly what oyu say is the end of a sentence. Prospective Introductions: sadun: I'm sadun. Frosh,. Showed up in the fall and then dropped everything. Am now trying again. iann: If any of you read the unofficla apple rht: Super-old prospective. tboning: How many messages slane: spencer, first year grad student. dianah13: I'm Diana. Frosh. Came a little in the beginning and then dropped everything. dove: Welcome to SIPB. Hope you guys don't drop everything this time. The meeting was adjourned at 8:59. Minutes taken and submitted by sqshemet.