Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2021-09-13 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by kjchen. In attendance were Student keyholders: kjchen, bds, cela, mrittenb, cjq, gshay, mwnguyen, cela, jeffery, huydai Associate keyholders: quentin | petey Members: mitimmy, ololade, leoy, jmvidal, rgabriel, alwinfy Guests: '() Administrivia: kjchen: As you probably saw, I sent out a Google form earlier today to get thoughts on the possibility of having an in-person SIPB meeting. Please feel free to send questions to me if you have any. I want to make sure that everyone is able to express their opinions/ thoughts on this matter & that we are all comfortable with potentially doing in-person activities. kjchen: We also got a lot of interest at the Activity Midway (about 80 signed up) plus a couple of dozen from CP*. I want to invite them to the next SIPB meeting with a couple of activities catered to showing people what SIPB is. If you feel that your project could use more people / would like to advertise to new people, start thinking about figuring out how you would want to host welcome events and setting the format for training new people. We tend to have a lot of people who are interested at the start but the number peters out later on. We want to make sure people feel supported throughout the process that they are exploring/ getting familarized with SIPB. mrittenb: I feel that this type of event is best if it is in-person (since online breakout rooms tend to feel clunky). kjchen: Yeah, I was thinking next week we could have the meeting outdoors. We've also discussed the possibility of providing food to people (e.g. takeouts from Mary Chung). That's the kind of decision we're looking at right now. kjchen: We want to avoid having only "old" people/ senior members as the only people who know how to maintain the projects in SIPB. Petey: *in chat* Two thoughts from an old person: 1) your remark about projects — giving people something cool they can get involved in — a rung on the ladder they can get on right away — seems right to me 2) there’s also the question of “how do people find sipb” which, besides the midway, how do they, and is that fully optimized? kjchen: I'm not sure if we are publicizing our events outside of SIPB mailing list, but that could be an avenue to look more into. However, I would say that it's less that we're not getting enough initial interest but more that it's a harder process to try to keep members involved for a long time. Petey: Yeah it was interesting because last week I had mentioned with an Admissions staff who's been working at MIT and he had no idea what SIPB was, but when I showed him the SIPB website and pointed him to all the projects that SIPB is working on he was very intrigued with SIPB. cela: One thing that is helpful is that we should figure out how to better streamline our training process so that we could take in more students at once. Most of the projects we have require individual mentorship of students that are coming in and we only have so many trained people to help the new people. I think I tried to approach this differently with HWOPS differently when we had that Zoom call where many people could listen in at a time and be able to learn things about the project and help prepare for stuff collaboratively. That way it wasn't just a one-on-one meeting. kjchen: On the non-technical side this could be easier to pull off. Like technically an unlimited number of people could work in swag and publicity. But I think you're right that a lot of the technical projects are resource-intensive to train new people. cela: I think it could also be due to the way that we've been doing training. I feel that there are certain things that we could change in our training approach to make it easier to work with more people at a time. mrittenb: I think the reason for the format in the past is that people tend to go by different schedules and also it's harder to get everyone together at a specific time. kjchen: What if we just invite people to attend different meetings held by the individual projects? cela: This may be a challenge that can't be solved by one general solution, but perhaps it is something that each individual project must consider and make their own necessary changes. kjchen: With this it may be good to have an ongoing e-mail thread in sipb-office to talk more on this issue Administrivia: cela: I wanted to ask about SIPB's plans for allowing in-person meetings to be hosted in the SIPB office this semester. What kind of policies and/or restrictions are we planning to have? huydai: Secretary hault! Etherpad just crashed on me ;w; *Secretary hault initiated* cela: Who's the Etherpad maintainer? *Secretary hault stopped. Meeting is resumed* huydai: I guess it's Notepad for me for now. petey *in chat*: sorry for being off camera i have been awake since 2am and am in no position to be seen by any living person gabriel: Are minutes a thing that happened before Zoom? Like there are documents somewhere with word-by-word playback of everything everyone has said in the history of SIPB? *all: Yes* mrittenb: I think the minutes only go back to the 70s, and not the 50s. [Note: ""only""] kjchen: I'll send out the results of the form by Thursday. From what I see in the results right now most people seem to be okay with allowing physical meetings to happen in the SIPB office. cela: I think for project meetings we'll don't have to have input from everyone within SIPB, as long as everyone who's doing the project meeting is okay with meeting in-person. ghsay: What's the Covid policies for using the office like this? Do we have to do contact tracing? cela: It's probably not for small meetings with like 4 people right? cjq: The contact tracing has to be done for every event, I think quentin: What's the definition for an event? cjq: Everything that is hosted by a student club, I think cjq: Currently ESP policy is that everytime someone enters the office they have to sign in kjchen: I would agree with having some record of people going in and out of the office just so we at least have some assurance of documentation of office usage & potential contact tracing cela: If the EC could take a look at the guidance for clubs right now and tell us what to do that would be great. kjchen: I will get back to you on the Mattermost tonight. Other quick thoughts? Project Reports: gshay: I finally went through the backlogs of Fireroad change requests, so we're finally up to date, yay! *silent claps* mrittenb: gshay, is there plans for continuing Courseroad weekly project meetings? gshay: Yes. They should resume in a few weeks once the new kids come in. cela: Are the weekly project meetings listed on the calendar happening each week? kjchen: I haven't checked but the answer is probably no. Also, for everyone if you notice there's something on the calendar that actually isn't happening anymore make sure to remove it or let me know if you don't have the permissions to cela: A couple of weeks ago we upgraded the Mastodon server with more disk space and also reconfigured things to make sure they work probably. Progress! Other: leoy: Have there been any more updates from Petey about dropping off old computers? Petey: I got hosed and did not have the thread in the e-mail about how to get them to people. My plan was to just drop them at Stata, and someone could tell me the shelf life of things being left at Stata these days. kjchen: Do you mean Stata Loading Docks? kjchen: I'm not sure if they still do weekly trash pickups but it's possible that the fence cage is open for access at some point quentin: It's open during business areas. The fences are unlocked during the day (where the day is facilities day, so 7-4 or something) Petey: I think my goal is to get the computers out of my office as soon as I can. I don't even have the energy to wipe some of the really old data there. If anyone wants something like the Minecraft server of class of 2014 you can have it. kjchen: We do in theory have access to the SIPB office, though the lock is a little hard to open sometimes. We could schedule a time for someone to help let you in the SIPB office and so people can cruft it later Petey: Sounds good. bds: I went to the SIPB office a couple days ago and was able to go in the office relatively easily. It appears (at least for this key) that the lock is still working okay kjchen: Yeah I think it's about a 50/50 division Gabriel: Is the Office the one in the Stud? kjchen: Yes, 5th floor room 157 Gabriel: I tried to tap in but it didn't work kjchen: The card readers should not be attached to anything (it was like half-configured so not actually connected to rest of MIT network) cela: I find it funny that we [MIT] are planning to eventually allow people to use mobile ID on their phone to gain access into buildings. quentin: How many people are going to get locked out of their dorm when their battery dies? What about that rule "having your ID on you at all times"? kjchen: I feel that only people wearing their keychain are froshs. [Secretary: Hey! I wear my keychains around me all the time ;w;] Gabriel: I've also seen professors and graduate students wear their keychain, but it's probably most frosh. quentin: Has anyone actually got their mobile ID working? justice: I didn't know this was actually a thing cela: I tried to get my mobile ID working but it didn't work gabriel: For me it did work using an Android phone. I think they opened it early for us in 2025. To unlock I would have to unlock my phone, open up the app, and then put the phone near the scanner for it to work. jnwagner: It's added to my Apple Wallet, so it's convenient for me to scan it without entering a passcode. cela: I've set it up and turned on NFC and did everything it told me too but absolutely nothing happened. bds: Did you try tapping it harder? leoy: Have you tried turning it off and on again? cela: I've not tried *disabling* MIT's security system and turning it back on, no. Other Other: quentin: There was Reif mail today. gabriel: What's the difference between Other and Other Other? quentin: Other is directly relevant to SIPB, while Other Other is less relevant to SIPB, and Other Other Other is... well you get the idea kjchen: I would say Other is like MIT news / SIPB-related news while Other Other is like any other news. leoy: I pretended to be an uninitiated frosh and met Kelly in person at the Activity Midway last week. cjq: I remember the first time I met Huy in person and I asked him "what's your name" then immediately had to backtrack with like "of course I knew that. I was *just* checking" quentin: Harvard has just announced that they will divest from fossil fuels. someone: MIT who? someone else: I mean I think MIT recently got a payout from Shell... cela: Hopefully MIT will follow with the divestment. quentin: I think it's partially because MIT has stronger connections with the fossil fuel industry than Harvard does gabriel: Oh what was the entire green building renamed? quentin: No, just the lecture hall on the first floor. gabriel: We should paint the green building green quentin *in chat*: there are already RGB LEDs in every window... quentin: You know how MIT has a bunch of indoor antennas inside its building so they can ensure that people still get cell coverage in basements or whatever? Well recently the antennas system broke in Stata and it's now telling people that the current date is 1024 weeks ago in the past. This is due to a certain GPS week number rollover bug (Wikipedia post on bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover) The meeting was adjourned at 20:04. Minutes taken and submitted by huydai.