Board of Directors Meeting

Directors in attendance: anddone bryli ethanhs etw jyxzhang kdr kmo lmathias njha rayh rjz ronitnath snarain

Guests in attendance: evangong kian ncograin*

Guests marked with a * were appointed to BoD.

Quorum for this meeting is 9

Meeting Started at 19:11

Runbook Social - Runbook social will be Friday evening

Opstaff - Not closing for alumni dinner (meet up at OCF then leave) - Hiring closed 11/29 midnight - Behind by a day! Applications should be read over by EOD 12/1 - Closing after Wednesday during finals week - Monday: Someone was supposed to cover for kdr 6-8, forgot to cover - rjz came to close door, nothing bad happened

*M Elections - happening - 2 min speech, 2 min Q&A, 2 min deliberations (candidate steps out, discuss) - Valid ballots: - GM: ronitnath/bencuan, jyxzhang/bencuan, jyxzhang/ronitnath - SM: rjz/njha, etw/njha, rjz/etw

==GM Elections

bencuan - Most important goal is diversity and inclusino, especially skill wise - OCF historically not good at it, high barrier of entry - Most OCF staff are self-selected, lots of sysadmin experience, so limits ability to relate with/represent community - Want to make contributing as accessible as possible - Will be helping with formal staff training, bridge general CS and decal content - Hopefully people will be comfortable with contributing - Improve organization, create opportunities for designers to contribute - Likely a new committee, integrate both opstaff/OA and volunteer staff - PURCHASE MLK AND DECLARE INDEPENDENCE - Socials were fun, well organized - Committees have been very active - Q&A: - What will staff training entail? - Reserve 1 hr/wk (Thurs 8-9?) towards fun/collaborative starter tasks, advertised to decal students and newstaff - List of ideas already done - Think Hack Day but 1 hr/week - Other ideas for diversity @ OCF? - Advertise OCF to wider audience, be more specific about offerings - Only advertising seen is free printing signs in doe, word of mouth - Increase signage, be more active, connect w/ other clubs - Preferred ticket?????????????? - Waddles and vacuum - Decal status next sem? - Laksith main decal head, very qualified to take over, no major changes - Possible semester off next fall to revamp content - Need facilitators, join #decal-comm on Slack/Discord/IRC

jyxzhang - Focus on previous problems, like afterhours/emergency access - Take a look at advertising OCF to more people - Something more than just a 'printing' place, also a place to study - Take steps to improve exposure of the OCF on campus - Q&A: - How would you work with your fellow GM? *Ms? - Depends on who the other GM is, if it's with bencuan, will work with him on his ideas to improve accessibility to those with less experience. - For SMs, he plans to learn from them, but wants to make sure we maximize the utilization of resources in the lab - What other changes do you most want to see in the OCF? - Increasing hours, more exposure

ronitnath - Solution to increase diversity is to have a mentor system, track progress throughout the semester - Increase general membership up to 2-3x by having better onboarding systems - Q&A: - As internal head, what have you done, how would you change things? - In the future, would prefer to have better onboarding - easier starter tasks - Looked at other org's onboarding, want to build a similar one to make OCF's tasks less intimidating - Issue was that this semester, systems weren't finished, so couldn't put it out yet - What concrete, specific things have you thought about and done in regards to recruitment? - Coordinated a town hall in regards to the issue of diversity in STEM - Large laundry list of ideas that we can implement - Increasing gender diversity -> how we do our recruiting - Can't be so specific about topics, like *nix or w/e - More about "do you want to learn about computers?" -> simpler, more accessible - Bring in more people with different talents - Time commitments? Other visions besides recruitment? - Next semester, a lot less time commitments (activity more like freshman year) - Community of incredible engineers each w/ different talents - Increasing concentration of people will better the network the OCF has - Need engineers who want to work on the issues at the OCF - Not pushing specific projects, but rather on whether we have engineers here to work on the projects - Earlier, was talking about how not everyone is interested in Linux. Do you want to make different kinds of projects? - Need a better system of onboarding: Linux isn't that scary, but if you're not used to it, then it's intimidating - Projects need people with diverse criteria - Need people with more diverse experiences, not just computer-focused

==SM Elections

etw - Main goal as SM is to continue modernizing systems - Want to get Kubernetes server up, so we aren't dependent on a single point of failure (like with hypervisor reboot) - A lot of the work is going to be setting up, moving to new platform - Get transition done ASAP to avoid availability issues - Want to take steps to use all the resources we already have - Q&A: - Plans to balance maintaining old systems vs implementing new ones? - Old services are still running on the old stack, otherwise services will go down - First priority: need to make sure we are able to provide the same services - RT? - Need to get more people comfortable with answering tickets - Include more documentation, staff members need to be able to look at a ticket and easily figure out what to do - Would you propose any changes to the RT system to make it more user-friendly? - Want to, but hesitant because that deals with emails - No plans for change currently because of the above point - Servicable as long as people know how to use it -> documentation, tips and tricks

njha - Goals for current semester: - Working on making new Kubernetes work as well as old Kubernetes - Entirely documented! Has CI mostly working, but it's the only thing somewhat broken - Secrets manager written from scratch, working - Goals for future semester: - OCF API - API-based approach to get things done - Combine with OCF KIT (?) to make things like restore from backup easy - Elasticsearch cluster: all documentation, RT tickets, Github repo, etc. will be indexed and searchable - Reorganize lab space - Don't want OCF to be "free printing facility," could have things like OCF AWS and so on, making lab more accessible for studying and so on - Q&A: - Plans for service, RT? - Happy with how RT turned out this semester, new semester stepped up and responded to tickets - Hoping to continue that, maybe with recruitment and making things easier to do (like with scripts)? - Plans to mentor new staff? - Tried to find two or three staff members interested in one particular thing that isn't really done in OCF - Datasci/design, they aren't here right now :( - Decal was promising - HPC down for around a month, how do you plan to prevent similar problems? - Old infrastructure is a pain and not really used - Thus the focus on Kubernetes, modern infrastructure - Going forward, need to make sure that similar issues are fixed in a reasonable timeframe - Where are your staff hours? - lol - Will commit to adding some next semester

rjz - Current documentation is lacking and/or disorganized, we're also moving to new infrastructure - Good opportunity to make documentation more accessible/useful, for both OCF users and staff - More accustomed to the old way of doing things, but that works well with other SMs who are more up to date with new systems - Need to migrate passwords (plaintext on supernova) to an actual password manager - Q&A: - Plans for service, RT? - Getting new servers up and running in timely fashion - Also want to migrate old systems (e.g., fallingrock eating up resources) - RT: tentative plan is to triage different tickets - Mentoring new staff? - No time :(

==ELECTION RESULTS

• GM: bencuan, jyxzhang
• SM: etw, rjz

Meeting Adjourned at 20:44

Notetaker: bryli