Minutes
Oct. 17, 2005
All newly elected officers were present at our first official steering committee meeting on Oct. 17, 2005.
I. Write-in votes: There were two write-in votes for vacant offices in the election. Write-in votes are not specifically mentioned in the constitution, so we needed to decide how to deal with them. On the one hand, we need people in those positions; on the other hand, this means they would be elected based on the anonymous vote of one person (as opposed to a nomination, which has some measure of accountability since you send it by email). Back on the first hand, though, we have the power as the steering committee to appoint GEO members to fill vacant offices, and we were planning on taking volunteers for those seats after the fact anyway. We initially decided to disallow any write-in votes unless there were at least two for the same person, but after Adrianne joined us we revisited the issue and decided to disallow one on the basis of illegibility but to contact the other person and ask if he is interested in the position. I will do that.
II. Distribution of duties [most of what we talked about here was not worth recording or else had to do with something else, so I'm only going to put the stuff to do with the tech support job here.] Tech support: Ursula will get webpage info from Jeff Motter to Jeff Welty. For now, the most important thing to get on the new website are the names of the new steering committee and when our meetings are--we can talk about other changes that need to be made later. It's Jeff's job to maintain the email lists and the database of grad students. (As the one who reads and answers the email, Elizabeth has begun putting messages into folders, including one for technical messages.) Ursula has the database on her hard drive--she will clean it up and meet with Jeff to explain it and hand it over to his keeping. Data recently collected by Anne-Jose has been partially incorporated into it at this point. Adrianne also needs to get the sign-up sheet from the election to Jeff. Jeff will set up a new email list for the steering committee, since Dave Woken is the administrator of the current list, so it's hard to add and subtract people. We gave both Jeff and Sharyn the username and password for the email account and CFS space. This brings up the issue: what are we going to do for storage space once the CFS server is retired in January? Sharyn thought her boyfriend might have information about this. Morgan asked if we should give the password to the stewards or just send them the files they need, but we never answered this question because of the other question about the CFS space.
III. Stewards and Grievances: We are still on for the stewards' meeting on Thursday, Oct. 27 if it works for most of the stewards we have so far; Morgan will check in with them and see. As many of us as possible should come to this meeting, just to help out and make it feel like a bigger group. Our main goal will be to train the stewards in organizing. We had some discussion of how much to focus on grievances as opposed to organizing right now--they go hand in hand and support each other to a certain extent, but we don't want to take on more than we can work on right now. We do want to do something about the lack of office space in the Spanish and Portuguese dept. if we can; we considered asking the Stewards' Council to take on this issue, but I think we decided against it. Ursula will contact the GEO members in the Sp. and Port. dept. to ask how much help they can give us if we take on this issue.
The English dept. fall forum was not successful in recruiting stewards because there was a long discussion of other topics before our presentation, which meant that only 8 people were left by the time Adrianne got a chance to talk. Those present did agree to our suggestion that the responsibility of being a GEO steward could be combined with the role of the department's Labor Committee grad student representatives the next time elections come around. Other plans to get stewards? Shall we try to have department GEO meetings? The idea of emailing all the GEO members in a given department seems less promising after our failure to get people to run for office or help with elections via email (it's too easy to ignore it). Morgan is going to try organizing among the first year students in the English department, and we can also ask the stewards we have to help us recruit others for now.
IV. BGSA has contacted us and wants us to do a presentation. Maybe they could make an announcement endorsing unionization? Adrianne will email them and set up a time.
V. Potluck: Ursula will bring a main course and dessert, Adrianne cookies, Elizabeth a salad [and maybe I'll try to bring bread or something too?], Sharyn hummus and veggies, Morgan lasagna, Jeff drinks. 2 stewards are coming, 1 is not, and the others Morgan hasn't heard back from. Elizabeth will send a reminder email with Ursula's address on Wednesday.
VI. Next step in response to dental petition: [Adrianne remembered the reply from Vice Chancellor Theobald as simply saying that another administrator dealt with the appointment of the grad students to the committee, and we made plans based on that. However, I looked at the email again just now, and he did in fact say that he would forward our message to Dean Kintgen to let him know of our interest.] We planned for Elizabeth to contact the next person [i.e. Kintgen] and to ask for GEO to send a 6th grad student for the committee--not to replace one of the GPSO slots. At the same time, Elizabeth will contact the chair of the GPSO Grad Benefits Committee and the GEO/GPSO liaison to tell them what we are doing so that we don't go behind their backs, as it were. (On the other hand, we don't want to go *through* the GPSO--we want the administration to deal with us as a separate entity.) The committee suggested I include the facts that we represent 400+ grad students from N departments [Ursula has since emailed me to say that N=52; what a nice number!] [***Now, given the different information, I will hold off emailing Kintgen unless you all still think I should--?***]
VII. IUSA email: Someone from IUSA emailed us to ask if there is anything IUSA can do to support our goal of getting dental, perhaps in collaboration with GPSO. We agreed that it's best to meet and work on this in person, not via email. Morgan will contact her. Perhaps IUSA and GPSO can both pass the same pro-dental resolution. We agreed to work on fleshing things out with IUSA first, but we don't want to wait too long to bring GPSO into the discussion either. (On the other hand, it should be less difficult to get support for dental for grad in GPSO than in IUSA, since they have already taken on this project.)
VIII. Next CGEU conference call Thursday Oct. 20th 11:00; Adrianne hoped one of us could take that for her but no one could.
Next meeting: Monday Oct. 24, 5:15 p.m. (or as soon as 5 as possible), IMU dining area.