[PLUG] Csociety elections and other stuff

[Seth Heckard]

(I apologize to those of you on csociety-announce who get this
twice)

As many of you know, the Computer Society has been pretty quiet lately.
There have been a few reasons for that, mainly me being fairly busy and
a lack of speakers to give presentations.  A few things are in the
pipeline for next semester, so we'll just have to wait and see.  It's  
come to be the time of the year where we need to start thinking about
elections, and I'll also use this opportunity to fill everybody in on
things happening "behind the scenes" here.

First of all, we need to take care of elections.  Csociety is a strange
organization in the fact that we have no real definition of membership.
There are over 300 people subscribed to this mailing list, over 100 with
an account, and only a handful that routinely come to presentations.  So
for a lack of a better definition, if you're a Purdue student and you
get this mail, you are eligible to run for office and/or vote.  If  
anyone is displeased with the direction we are taking, by all means run
for office.

Basically, this is what the officer lineup looks like (notice everybody
is running uncontested):

President:      Seth Heckard <sdh@purdue.edu>
Vice President: Will Andrews <will@physics.purdue.edu>
Treasurer:      Derrick Kearney <kearneyd@csociety.purdue.edu>

If anyone wants to run for any office, send me mail.  "Elections" are
scheduled for this Thursday, 7PM, at the office (EE 14).  If anyone
wants to show up they're welcome.  We will be working on a corporate
sponsorship handbook at that time with PLUG, so if anyone wants to pitch
in on that, they're welcome as well.

Also, I think Csociety should follow a little different path in the
future.  (If you don't agree with me, that's what the elections are for
:-)  The way I see it is that there is a fair amount of duplication in
the area of hosting technical presentations, and obviously Csociety is
losing.  So, after discussions with the officers of PLUG, we've come to
the conclusion that we should focus what we're good at doing.  For us,
we will continue to do all the things that we're good at: giving out
computer accounts, hosting websites/mailing lists for student
organizations, and running the FTP/CVS mirrors.  Any interesting
presentations that come down the pipeline will be "co-hosted" with PLUG,
mainly so we can reach the largest audience possible.

Lastly, PLUG has secured 2 10GB disks from VA Linux, and has donated
them to us.  Those disks will find their way into csociety shortly,
possibly Thursday night, so expect some downtime in the future while
everything is moved around.  They will be used to hold /home, which will
free up space that can be used to expand /usr and /var.  csociety is
running dangerously low on disk space, so this donation is most
appreciated.  More free disk space will also mean that (hopefully) it
can be kept a tad more up-to-date.

Seth Heckard / sdh@purdue.edu