Executive Director 2005-2006 Final Report
Julieta Chan

Throughout the term, I updated all sections of the website such as posting results and publishing the Points of Information in a timely manner. I was also actively involved in Executive discussions on issues concerning different areas of CUSID. Without boring you with all the little things I did, I would like to focus this report on a couple of projects that I carried out this year and issues that I encountered.

Website Updates

Schedule

Besides regularly updating the Schedule to include essential registration information, I added a link to the results of the tournament at the end of each tournament entry. This link shows the full tabs of the tournament or, if none is available, more detailed results than what is required of the Results page. This feature should be helpful for those who want to check some past tabs but do not want to go through pages of threads on the Announcements forum. Recently, some old tabs from ten or so years ago were posted on CUSIDnet and I took the liberty of organizing those results into the schedule as well. All available tabs from all years are now accessible through the Schedule.

Since we consider high school tournaments anyway when we are scheduling, I thought it would be a good idea to include a high school tournament section into the Schedule to list all the high school tournaments hosted by CUSID members. It was suggested that we could include other non-CUSID tournaments, especially high school title tournaments, but I decided against it since I wanted the schedule to remain a schedule of events hosted by or for CUSID members.

Contact Information and Schedule A

Updating the Contact list proved more difficult than I expected. First, I wasn’t sure which schools were supposed to be on the contact list, since the list of full members (a.k.a. Schedule A) had not been updated for a long time. So, I undertook the updating of Schedule A by trying to contact certain individual clubs and checking out whether they still exist. This helped the Executive weed out almost twenty clubs on the list that have been dormant for years. With an updated Schedule A, it should improve the efficiency of future Executives for various tasks since they would not have to try and contact a bunch of clubs that do not exist.

As you may have noticed, I suggested amendments requiring the Treasurer and the President to review Schedule A at the end of term. The problem with the current system in the Constitution is that Schedule A is updated whenever a membership bid has been approved. But people will often neglect updating Schedule A when a member has been dormant since it is subtler when it happens. The old Schedule A was only half updated since it included the new clubs that have joined recently, but nobody ever took out the really old ones. Hopefully, this amendment will solve the problem.

CUSIDnet

Moderation

Fortunately, there were very few flamewars and none that needed intervention. In mid-January, however, there was a case of spam advertisement on the forums. A user by the name of “collegepokerchampionships” and signing off as “Peter” posted the same promotion of an online poker tournament on many of the public forums. While debaters announce non-debating events on CUSIDnet all the time, I think there was a clear distinction between spam and not-spam here. To continue the tradition of EDs defining moderation policy on wikipedia definitions:

A third form of Forum Spamming is where a person repeatedly posts about a certain subject in a manner that is unwanted by (and possibly annoying to) the general population of the forum….In a broader sense, advertising on forums where it is not wanted is known as spamming and is generally seen as an annoyance.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic))

The fact that this poster was clearly not a debater and created an account only to repeatedly advertise commercially the same message on several forums, I think, constitutes spam. I deleted those posts that had no replies or replies requesting the thread’s deletion but kept the one on the Community Billboard in case somebody really was interested and also the one on the CUSID Central forum since people started talking on it.

Software updates

The unexplainable behaviour of CUSIDnet about a year ago was caused by the phpbb package not being updated to the latest version. Since then, updates have continually been made and thankfully, no similar problems have occurred since then.

Webhosting Account

During December, our webhosting provider offered a Christmas Special that allowed us to buy one year of service and get another year free all with double the monthly bandwidth. They offer a Christmas Special annually, so a December renewal date will be very convenient. Since our account was up for renewal in March 2006 anyway, I decided to take advantage of this offer, which costs us a total of $127.12 including taxes. We now have a bandwidth of 80 GB per month, which is way above what we usually use (i.e., about 5-6 GB per month this year).

I also noticed that we were starting to run out of the 400 MB of webspace we had. Luckily for us, our webhosting provider recently upgraded their packages, so we now have 800 MB to use.

CUSID Open Letters

When the CUSID Executive took on the task of writing the open letters, I was in charge of designing a CUSID letterhead with the CUSID logo to give these letters a professional and polished look. The open letters were distributed in pdf format, but since the open letters will require yearly updating, a Word document version will be available for the Executive so that it can be edited. A blank version of the letterhead will also be passed on in case any future Executives find it useful.

Meeting Minutes

Although I was not able to attend every CUSID General meeting, I made sure that the minutes were taken. If full minutes weren’t readily available, I at least made sure that the results of the meeting were announced in the Points of Information within days after the meeting.

One election promise that I unfortunately could not fulfil was to retrieve the minutes from last year’s meetings. My pleading and Jess’s pleading came to no avail. I still think it is a worthy cause to retrieve these minutes and the future Executive Director might want to continue trying.

Recommendations

Presidents Mailing List

The idea of a mailing list that includes all the presidents or contacts for each CUSID member was suggested when it was clear that some schools do not read CUSIDnet and therefore are unaware when important announcements are made. I am fully in support of this idea. However, similar to my trouble with creating a complete contact list, I needed to figure out who should be included in this mailing list and the only way to do that was to make sure Schedule A was accurate. Given the lateness of the year, I will leave the creation of the mailing list to the incoming Executive Director since with new club executives being elected, the contact information will need to be changed very soon anyway.

For the next Executive Director

We all know that a background in computers and web maintenance is very valuable for the ED, but I think the ED should be equally, if not more, organized and diligent. The Executive Director is first and foremost the processor of large amounts of information and the facilitator of various levels of communication. The task can be overwhelming if the ED is not organized and is not consistently making updates. CUSID members can be left confused and lost if the information they find is not updated. Most of the job is about posting the latest information once it’s made available, responding to people’s questions, and fulfilling requests quickly and efficiently, so the ED should essentially expect to be on-call for CUSID.

It’s been fun!

I’d like to thank you, the CUSID community, for allowing me to serve you as Executive Director this year. It has been a very rewarding experience overall. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at ed@cusid.ca now or julieta_chan@hotmail.com if you still have any questions after my term.

Executive Director 2005-2006 Final Report
Julieta Chan

Throughout the term, I updated all sections of the website such as posting results and publishing the Points of Information in a timely manner. I was also actively involved in Executive discussions on issues concerning different areas of CUSID. Without boring you with all the little things I did, I would like to focus this report on a couple of projects that I carried out this year and issues that I encountered.

Website Updates

Schedule

Besides regularly updating the Schedule to include essential registration information, I added a link to the results of the tournament at the end of each tournament entry. This link shows the full tabs of the tournament or, if none is available, more detailed results than what is required of the Results page. This feature should be helpful for those who want to check some past tabs but do not want to go through pages of threads on the Announcements forum. Recently, some old tabs from ten or so years ago were posted on CUSIDnet and I took the liberty of organizing those results into the schedule as well. All available tabs from all years are now accessible through the Schedule.

Since we consider high school tournaments anyway when we are scheduling, I thought it would be a good idea to include a high school tournament section into the Schedule to list all the high school tournaments hosted by CUSID members. It was suggested that we could include other non-CUSID tournaments, especially high school title tournaments, but I decided against it since I wanted the schedule to remain a schedule of events hosted by or for CUSID members.

Contact Information and Schedule A

Updating the Contact list proved more difficult than I expected. First, I wasn’t sure which schools were supposed to be on the contact list, since the list of full members (a.k.a. Schedule A) had not been updated for a long time. So, I undertook the updating of Schedule A by trying to contact certain individual clubs and checking out whether they still exist. This helped the Executive weed out almost twenty clubs on the list that have been dormant for years. With an updated Schedule A, it should improve the efficiency of future Executives for various tasks since they would not have to try and contact a bunch of clubs that do not exist.

As you may have noticed, I suggested amendments requiring the Treasurer and the President to review Schedule A at the end of term. The problem with the current system in the Constitution is that Schedule A is updated whenever a membership bid has been approved. But people will often neglect updating Schedule A when a member has been dormant since it is subtler when it happens. The old Schedule A was only half updated since it included the new clubs that have joined recently, but nobody ever took out the really old ones. Hopefully, this amendment will solve the problem.

CUSIDnet

Moderation

Fortunately, there were very few flamewars and none that needed intervention. In mid-January, however, there was a case of spam advertisement on the forums. A user by the name of “collegepokerchampionships” and signing off as “Peter” posted the same promotion of an online poker tournament on many of the public forums. While debaters announce non-debating events on CUSIDnet all the time, I think there was a clear distinction between spam and not-spam here. To continue the tradition of EDs defining moderation policy on wikipedia definitions:

A third form of Forum Spamming is where a person repeatedly posts about a certain subject in a manner that is unwanted by (and possibly annoying to) the general population of the forum….In a broader sense, advertising on forums where it is not wanted is known as spamming and is generally seen as an annoyance.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic))

The fact that this poster was clearly not a debater and created an account only to repeatedly advertise commercially the same message on several forums, I think, constitutes spam. I deleted those posts that had no replies or replies requesting the thread’s deletion but kept the one on the Community Billboard in case somebody really was interested and also the one on the CUSID Central forum since people started talking on it.

Software updates

The unexplainable behaviour of CUSIDnet about a year ago was caused by the phpbb package not being updated to the latest version. Since then, updates have continually been made and thankfully, no similar problems have occurred since then.

Webhosting Account

During December, our webhosting provider offered a Christmas Special that allowed us to buy one year of service and get another year free all with double the monthly bandwidth. They offer a Christmas Special annually, so a December renewal date will be very convenient. Since our account was up for renewal in March 2006 anyway, I decided to take advantage of this offer, which costs us a total of $127.12 including taxes. We now have a bandwidth of 80 GB per month, which is way above what we usually use (i.e., about 5-6 GB per month this year).

I also noticed that we were starting to run out of the 400 MB of webspace we had. Luckily for us, our webhosting provider recently upgraded their packages, so we now have 800 MB to use.

CUSID Open Letters

When the CUSID Executive took on the task of writing the open letters, I was in charge of designing a CUSID letterhead with the CUSID logo to give these letters a professional and polished look. The open letters were distributed in pdf format, but since the open letters will require yearly updating, a Word document version will be available for the Executive so that it can be edited. A blank version of the letterhead will also be passed on in case any future Executives find it useful.

Meeting Minutes

Although I was not able to attend every CUSID General meeting, I made sure that the minutes were taken. If full minutes weren’t readily available, I at least made sure that the results of the meeting were announced in the Points of Information within days after the meeting.

One election promise that I unfortunately could not fulfil was to retrieve the minutes from last year’s meetings. My pleading and Jess’s pleading came to no avail. I still think it is a worthy cause to retrieve these minutes and the future Executive Director might want to continue trying.

Recommendations

Presidents Mailing List

The idea of a mailing list that includes all the presidents or contacts for each CUSID member was suggested when it was clear that some schools do not read CUSIDnet and therefore are unaware when important announcements are made. I am fully in support of this idea. However, similar to my trouble with creating a complete contact list, I needed to figure out who should be included in this mailing list and the only way to do that was to make sure Schedule A was accurate. Given the lateness of the year, I will leave the creation of the mailing list to the incoming Executive Director since with new club executives being elected, the contact information will need to be changed very soon anyway.

For the next Executive Director

We all know that a background in computers and web maintenance is very valuable for the ED, but I think the ED should be equally, if not more, organized and diligent. The Executive Director is first and foremost the processor of large amounts of information and the facilitator of various levels of communication. The task can be overwhelming if the ED is not organized and is not consistently making updates. CUSID members can be left confused and lost if the information they find is not updated. Most of the job is about posting the latest information once it’s made available, responding to people’s questions, and fulfilling requests quickly and efficiently, so the ED should essentially expect to be on-call for CUSID.

It’s been fun!

I’d like to thank you, the CUSID community, for allowing me to serve you as Executive Director this year. It has been a very rewarding experience overall. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at ed@cusid.ca now or julieta_chan@hotmail.com if you still have any questions after my term.