\chapter{Meetings}

\section{When and Where?}
The SIPB's meetings are held weekly on Mondays at 7:30pm in the Office.
They are open to the MIT community, and members and prospective members
are encouraged to attend.

\section{Why}
Meetings (and post-meeting hanging out) is a time when you can find
out what the activities the SIPB is involved in, and perhaps
volunteer to help out with those activities.  You can also learn
who's in the SIPB, and let them learn who you are.

\section{What Happens at Meetings}

Weekly meetings are divided up into the following reports. Meetings can be
as short as fifteen minutes if there's not much to discuss, or can go several
hours for contentious issues or time consuming matters like elections. Most
meetings are under well under an hour.

\paragraph{Treasurer's Report.} The purpose of this report is to discuss
the financial status of the SIPB. Typical questions are ``how much money
do we have left in budget foo'' or ``when is the end of the fiscal year?''

\paragraph{Chairman's Report.} This report is for discussing any organizational
matters of the SIPB. These include the election of officers and prospectives,
and making changes to SIPB policies.

\paragraph{Office Report.} Here we discuss most things to do with the office.
For example, we report on new machines or changes to machine configurations,
or make motions to allocate money to buy new things for the office.

\paragraph{Office Cleaning Report.} Every Friday at 4 pm we have an office
cleaning hour in which people wipe down the desks and tables, recycle or
throw out cruft left in the office, and take down bottles and cans. In this
report someone who was around reports on how it went.

\paragraph{MIT Computing Report.} In this report people mention computing
events at MIT. For example, MITnet outages, new Athena releases or problems,
etc.

\paragraph{Computer Services.} This report is for discussing the services
that SIPB provides. For example, our web and news servers and the AFS cell.

\paragraph{SIPB Backup Report.} Here someone who knows should announce
the status of our weekly AFS or UFS backups (whether they've been done,
or are in progress, or who is going to do them).

\paragraph{Publications Report.} The SIPB provides a number of print 
publications to the MIT community, which are available by the door to
the office. In this report we discuss any new publications or revisions
to old publications, and deal with making motions to allocate money
for publications we are short on.

\paragraph{R/O Report.} This report is for discussing SIPB activities during
the R/O time period. These include the Activities Midway and the SIPB Computer 
Tours.

\paragraph{IAP Report.} This report is for discussing SIPB activities during
IAP. Typically the SIPB sponsors a number of computer-related classes run by
SIPB members, prospectives, and friends during IAP.

\paragraph{CokeComm.} In this report, we mention the status of our soda and
candy supply (which resides in the back of the office).

\paragraph{Other.} This report is for any SIPB-related issues that don't
fit into the other reports.

\paragraph{Other Other.} This report is for everything else, including 
personal and social announcements, or computer-related comments not pertaining
to the SIPB.

\section{Minutes of the Meetings}
The minutes for all past meetings are kept in or below the
directory {\tt /afs/sipb/admin/minutes/}.  Each week's minutes are
also distributed to the mailing list {\tt sipb-minutes@mit.edu}
(feel free to ask to be added to this list).
