Minutes of the MIT Dormitory Council meeting of March 30, 2009

In attendance:
  Aziz Albahar, proxy for Baker
  Anila Sinha, McCormick Hall president
  Chris Hoffman, DormCon housing chair, MacGregor House
  Dan Lorenc, Simmons Hall president
  Lyla Fischer, Random Hall president
  Cody Daniel, Senior House president
  Geoffrey Thomas, DormCon secretary, Next House
  Gloria Yang, Next House predient
  Josh Bails, East Campus vice president
  James Torres, DormCon president, Burton-Conner
  Karl Wolff, Phoenix Group (NW35) president
  Michael Berry, Burton-Conner president
  Nathan Pallo, East Campus president
  Preeya Phadnis, DormCon EVP, Random Hall
  Raul Garcia, MacGregor president
  Sandhya Ramakrishnan, outgoing DormCon REX chair, McCormick
  Shenwen Huang, Next House vice president

The meeting was held at Next House.

Blue Ribbon

  James: We have an initial outline for our report, and are now working
    on making a rough draft, so we can edit it at the next meeting and
    get the iteration back from the consultant.  On the public website,
    there's a list of specific guidelines the committee has agreed upon.
    Donna has sent the revised version (including things like "no
    mandatory dining") to the consultant.  We have about 75% of our
    document written now, and we're meeting this Thursday.

  Lyla: About the UA Dining Proposal Committee -- we met once, we had
    some issues getting data.  The Excel spreadsheets they gave us didn't
    have the individual data, just totals for "75% answered this."
    There's some really raw data in a difficult format.
  James: It was suggested that someone can write a Python script to
    interpret it, so we got it.
  Geoffrey: I've been playing with the raw data. I guess I'll come to
    the next DPC meeting.

  Nathan: The MIT produce cart is starting up tomorrow, on the EC
    courtyard between noon and 6pm Tuesdays. You can grab some food
    between classes.

CPW

  James: At the meeting 3 weeks ago, I asked the presidents to e-mail
    Lauren Avalos about attending the dorms panel during CPW. If you
    haven't yet, please do so as soon as possible. If you don't want to
    do this, you're busy, etc. please send a proxy and e-mail that
    person's name to Lauren. The panel is under an hour and a half, and
    there's a short meeting one week before... there's no prep work.
  Preeya: You just need to talk for two minutes... Last year, I
    thought about what I was going to say an hour before.
  James: This is CPW, not REX. You want to portray your culture but
    you're not rushing these prefrosh yet. Just make them happy to be
    accepted at MIT.

Housing Strategy Group

  Chris: We'd like it if four to five dorms would volunteer to give
    presentations about your dorms.
  Aziz: Didn't we do reports last year?
  Chris: Yeah, they want updates. It's not nearly as formal as last year.
    All we want is to look at the written report, most likely everything
    is the same... Just do a couple of slides to introduce a quick
    summation of our dorm. "Hi, I'm Bob from MacGregor. We have nine
    entries. This is what we do, and here are some problems you could
    help us with."

    If you can bring up budget items important to the dorms, say that.
    If you like your housemaster and think they do awesome things and
    want to keep their budgets, you should say that. 4-5 dorms, ten
    minutes, four or five slides.

    *MacGregor, Senior, Baker, EC, Random, and BC volunteer*
    
    Get copies of the reports from last year and look them over. The
    meeting is on April 16.

  Chris: If you have any CPW issues, bring them up beforehand. BC and
    Magregor brought up that there are no phones in the rooms - there are
    only VoIP accounts. They're going to figure out something to get in
    touch with prefrosh.

  Chris: They're projecting standard yield for next year, so that means
    about 70-90 crowds. 

  Chris: The UA secretary was at HSG meeting and was trying to find out
    DSL's budget items ... that didn't really work.
  Preeya: They ask us what we really want to keep so they can cut
    everything else. We asked, on the scale of leadership programs or
    summer housing? It's more like summer housing. We said we can't do
    anything unless we know where their money's going...

  Chris: The website and the desk system are going fluidly. I don't know
    when we're having a meeting, we're graduating soon. Both of those
    programs are supposed to have student input...

Risk Management

  James: Party registration website is trudging its feet, unsurprisingly.
    We're waiting for the student programmer for CDSA. He says he's
    working on it but he's quite busy.

Next Meeting: Simmons, April 13th, 5pm