3/1     csua minutes: "Difficulty in recruitment:
        Right now our recruitment is in severe decline, what can we do to get
        people more interested in what we are doing.  Infosessions will help,
        but will be slow to develope.  This will be an open-ended discussion
        of things we can do to boost membership and more specifically
        active/interested membership."
        \_ Advice. Leave infosession to UCSEE and SWE that have traditionally
           dominated this area for the last two decades. You guys are
           stepping into dangerous territory and this turf war really
           sucks. Leave infosessions alone, bastards. If you seriously want
           to get more members, find a niche market, not something that
           steals from other established organisations. Do something new
           and innovative, like asking karen to do a bikini car wash drive.
           Hell, we'd pay for that.                     -anon ucsee rep
           \_ I don't even know what UCSEE stands for, and I want to have
              an infosession right now just to piss you off.  What a jackass
              attitude.
           \_ Uh, CSUA has been doing help sessions on stuff for quite a while.
              What's the difference between "infosessions" and "help sessions"?
              \_ i think one has students teaching unix shells and the other
                 has visitors from PIXR
          \_  UCSEE and SWE have traditionally dominated Infosessions for the
              last two decades?  Bullshit.  You're engaging in some pretty
              gross revision of history.  First off I *know* that UCSEE and
              SWE (did they used to be AWICSEE, or is that a different society
              for women engineering group?  Didn't AWICSEE's membership top
              out at like 6 people back in 2002?) had basically no physical
              presence in Soda Hall prior to 2005.  I find it highly unlikely
              that there's been a sea change in the last two years.  HKN,
              which does have a presence in Soda, always did a fair number of
              Infosessions, but it's usually hurting for original thinkers,
              and thus shamelessly rips off every good one the CSUA has (nb
              movies in 306 Soda--paolo, CSUA president circa 1999, startup
              jobs fair in the ASUC ballrom, i.e. a massive
              meta-infosession--jones, president circa 1998, I can go on...).
              UPE also used to have a hand in the Infosession game, but went
              into hibernation due to lack of interest circa 2004, has it
              reawakened?  The CSUA charter is to serve all students with an
              interest in computer science, and this is simply not true for
              UCSEE (only EECS students in COE, and arguably only those with
              an EE focus) or SWE (only Women in COE).  Furthermore, the CSUA
              provides services to the community that UCSEE and SWE don't
              including Help Sessions and Mentoring, and, in the past,
              received less money from the EECS department than either UCSEE
              or SWE.  So let me get this straight.  The CSUA serves a wider
              audience and provides more community services than UCSEE and SWE
              *combined*, but it should leave infosessions, which are
              conveniently the most profitable `service' a CS student group
              may offer to UCSEE and SWE.  Hogwash.  Nonsense.  Shite.  You
              don't like that the CSUA is reigning in on `your' turf?  Try
              matching the CSUA's services then you can talk.
              All that said, the groups don't necessarily need to fight over
              this.  The infosession landscape has at least one large,
              unfulfilled niche, which are smaller and/or startup companies
              that don't have the money to go through COE's industrial
              partnership program (the precise name escapes me).  The CSUA can
              and should bring these companies to campus.  Officially, they
              can't do `recruiting' events in Soda Hall, but there are plenty
              of worthwhile InfoSessions that are not de jure recruiting
              All that said, the groups don't necessarily need to fight over
              this.  The infosession landscape has at least one large,
              unfulfilled niche, which are smaller and/or startup companies
              that don't have the money to go through COE's industrial
              partnership program (the precise name escapes me).  The CSUA can
              and should bring these companies to campus.  Officially, they
              can't do `recruiting' events in Soda Hall, but there are plenty
              of worthwhile InfoSessions that are not de jure recruiting
              events, but serve the same purpose.  I did this with VMWare back
              when they were small and Zero Knowledge Systems (may it rest in
              peace) among others when I was CSUA president.  P.S. Sign your
              name instead of making thinly veiled, weak anonymous threats.
              -dans
              \_ Gee, I wondered why dans knew so much about meth.
                 \_ Gee, I wonder why the preceding passage would do anything
                    to dispell your wonder?  Have you read any of the minutes
                    I took for the CSUA? -dans
           \_ ucsee must be destroyed!
        \_ Interesting.  So what will happen to all us cranky alumni when five
           or six selfless individuals cannot be scrounged up to cater to our
           every whim?  What will we do without wall, motd, and email spools
           filled with 99.99% spam?!
           \_ We could start a fight club.
              \_ Why would anyone want to endure pain and medical bills?
                 Make it a Counter-Strike fight club.
                 \_ Every anti-social nerd dies.  Not every anti-social nerd
                    really lives.
        \_ Does the CSUA still do a lot of social activities (BBQs, RISK
           tourneys, volleyball, etc.?)  Maybe asking if any CS profs will
           let you announce that sort of thing after lectures might help. -John
           \_ CSUA used to be fun in the early 90s. From reading the minutes
              however, it seems like people there have gotten a lot more
              serious.  They're trying to do mentoring, help sessions, info
              sessions, and other serious events that many other organizations
              (like UCSEE) have been doing long before CSUA started doing the
              same thing just recently (recent as in past 5 years?).  I don't
              know why this is the case. I suspect it is probably
              the same reason why there are fewer war protests and
              peace activists on Telegraph and Sproul Hall today than a
              few decades ago.
              \_ Speaking of which, I found Rick Starr.  He now performs (but
                 mostly just begs for change) in front of the 20th St. exit
                 of 19th St. Oakland BART.  His outfits are now significantly
                 on the side of bizarre and tattered, rather than just
                 tattered, and he seems to have lost significant spark.  Poor
                 Rick Starr.
              \_ I was wondering about this--I guess it's partly due to a
                 mixture of people getting into CS for $$$ in the late 90s,
                 more competitiveness and lower wages in the industry, and
                 the decline of the labs as people got PCs in dorms and
                 apartments.  -John
              \_ The CSUA has been doing serious events like help sessions
                 since antiquity.  Although other organizations offer
                 tutoring, no other organization offers anything like the
                 mentoring program.  While the CSUA may have been light on
                 infosessions prior to 1998, its history of corporate outreach
                 goes way back.  Soda Mark VI was donated by AMD.  If you look
                 \_ Through no fault of the CSUA's.  A UCB alum was working in
                    developer relations at AMD and offered MKVI to the CSUA.
                 in the circa 1990 CSUA t-shirt in the office you'll see an
                 EDS logo in the lower-right corner.  Do you think it got
                 there because the CSUA membership at the time just really dug
                 EDS?  Going all the way back to the birth of the CSUA, Soda
                 Mark I was a donated by Apollo Computer.  What other
                 `serious' events have other student orgs done since before
                 2000?  The faculty retreat?  I know we've been involved with
                 that since 1998, probably earlier, and I largely wrote the
                 joint presentation for two years (2001-2002?) -dans
        \_ I have a question.  What actions currently seem to bring people
           into the CSUA?  I joined the CSUA because there was an arcade
           game in the lounge and I wanted to fiddle with it.  I stuck
           around because I like crazy people, and paolo and dans were
           there.  I don't think I am normal. None of my mentees joined.
           In fact, I think the only person I ever successful recruited
           was ajaffe. So, why do people join? -jrleek
           \_ Easy. Someone told me you can get a free lifetime Berkeley
              account, so I went and signed up. I still use it. It's
              great to have that "berkeley.edu" stamp on the top of
              your resume, it says a lot and catches attention at a glance.
           \_ What is the mentee -> active member conversion rate anyway?  I
              joined because paolo showed me the glory that was the CSUA
              lounge when we were both taking 61B, and I was thus able to
              escape the pits that are the labs.  I also had hopes that I
              could find and/or recruit others to hack on projects, but, for
              the most part, this did not pan out. -dans
           \_ For 3.5 years I knew the CSUA existed, but didn't really
              know anyone in it, what they did, why they were there, etc.
              Then Paolo brought Mortal Kombat 2 into the office in an
              attempt to get his TA to spend more time there, and it
              worked swimmingly. Once I hung out there a lot and got to
              know the people, joining seemed like a good idea. You
              need to get people in there in the first place,
              in a setting where they can meet people, and that's going
              to happen with social events like BBQs, volleyball, and
              game tourneys. Heck, a weekly poker game might draw a
              crowd. -bz
           \_ I had just arrived on campus and called a high school friend. He
              happened to have root and gave me an account over the phone. It's
              been my primary account for 13 years. I've never taken a single
              computer science course. I have occasionally been an motd
              annoyance. I'm not sure which better qualifies for CSUA
              membership. People are welcome to email me about engineering
              hydraulics, though. -- ulysses
           \_ I definitely got involved with the CSUA because the people
              involved in it seemed a lot more interesting and fun than the
              drones huddled in the labs.  It might have also had something
              to do with (president at the time) Seano, who I believe just
              wanted someone around that he could beat at Netrek.  --lye
        \_ On mentoring, how is it currently advertised?  Just flyers?
           Could we get into the normal CS student orientations?  When I
           joined the CSUA was helping out with the transfer student
           orientations.  Could we get into those? (Transfer
           students generally need all the help they can get.) -jrleek