CSS Meeting

The only event on the calendar for today was a Computer Science Society meeting in Bar One. It is the first meeting I have managed to attend as I have only found out about the others after the event. One of the first points on the agenda was this lack of communication both internally within the committee and externally between us and the students. One of the things I most want to bring to the committee is to involve the members more than they are at the moment. As it stands, all of the social events are decided by the committee and then the members are informed and encouraged to turn up. Last year I received a few emails from the committee informing me about these events but I had no input in where and when they were and had very little interest in going to the events that had been organised.

We currently have a website and have run polls on there before so my idea was to host a poll each time we have a social so that the members can choose the location and date. Whichever gets the most votes will go ahead and thus should give the best attendance. We also discussed our plans for freshers week which mainly involve convincing all of the first years to sign up so that we can take their membership money. We also want to put on a really big event so that we can establish ourselves as a proper society rather than a little start up. We have big targets for membership numbers and want to ensure that this year goes more smoothly than last year. There were a few very bad socials last year and several promises of socials that weren't kept so this year we need to make sure that we keep any promises that we make so that the members don't get disillusioned.

The end of year CSS formal was also tonight and as a member of the committee it was my duty to attend. The venue has been booked out with catering for about 25-30 people in advance with no deposits taken from members. The Facebook event has 8 confirmed guests. See any problems yet? Well, it gets worse. I arrived at 8 o'clock to find I was the only one there. Eventually at 20:15 one other person turned up and it wasn't until half past when we got a group of four people - all either current or ex-committee.

The final turnout was a staggering five people and so the budget for next year has already been spent paying the rest of the food bill for the night. We made a surprisingly large dent in the food and I'm almost certain it wasn't suitable for 25 people. It was also fairly expensive given what we got but once again it is a mistake made by a young committee and will certainly never happen again - at least not on my watch! We roped in some extra people who were persuaded to join us on the promise of free food - we couldn't exactly ask them to pay for it and didn't want to see it go to waste. A few of them headed off to space afterwards but I decided to call it a night and catch up on some sleep before work tomorrow.