Dormcon GBM Minutes
Date: March 10, 2022
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Random
Food: come to find out!
(meetings courtesy of alan, ty alan)
Caragay: “we’re going to start this event. This thing that we’re at. This meeting.” Let’s start with updates from exec.
Alan: No real updates because I’ve been hosed. If your dorm is interested in mediation training via OSCCS, let me know; I’ll reach out soon.
Mateo: A RAC chat exists. Maseeh, MacGregor, and New need to be added. GTR will be finished and sent out soon to i3 chairs. New House specifically—needs to talk to someone about it, since the mailing list only includes like one RAC.
Kristina: I am also the RAC.
Mateo: I’ll talk to you all after. Other than that, that’s all the updates.
Ashley: Do the survey! Do the dining survey! We need more responses and it’s going to people who can actually do stuff about it. There are technical difficulties but eh.
Tina: are there more people filling out the survey?
Ashley: It’s about the same as it was. I would like more.
Caragay: Generally, if presidents can keep pubbing that to the residents, that’d be nice. (If you can’t hear, yell!)
Ashley: LaunchPad vendors are on the GET app now, so you can order ahead.
Shuli: How do you download it?
Meghana: GET. GET Mobile. It says GET in white.
Ashley: You can GET to it from the TechCash website.
Meghana: At some point, we will talk to the dining chairs of your dorm, so we
can remind them that we exist. We don’t have all of them.
Meghana + Ashley: That’s it!
Mohan: We have two new proposals for funding: the first is Burton-Conner DTYD.
Shuli: Let’s put the actual discussion of the proposals on the agenda; we’ll circle back.
Mohan: Some gym stuff is also happening.
Meghana: Baker + Maseeh, can you send me the dining chairs and our their mailing lists.
Zawad+Jordan: We have many updates, since we met with Housing. We told Housing about what we discussed a previous DormCon meetings about the priorities we value. We expressed our presidents interest in trying to get off the waitlist. They’re still hesitant (“we cannot make any guarantees”), but we’ll push them for it; we’ll have to see what the data looks like when the housing intent form ends. They’re also still reviewing requests for people who are going to be in BC leadership positions.
We brought up repairs. They are aware of the issues with the work-order system. “A better work-order system would be years in the making.” We pushed for making communications on those things better—”if you submit a work order, you’re giving people permission to come into your room,” but we’re hoping to get more . Housing managers are the first person to contact—then, reaching out to Rich and Dennis is good.
One of the big reasons all the laundry machines are broken is “the supply chain.” Apparently they can’t find parts, and they’re having staffing/knowledge-transfer issues.
Bookbinder: In Random, we’ve been getting emails when people are coming on floors. That’s good; we’re not sure if they’re general or just toptionality related.
Shuli/Zawad: Is it Keith Moser? He’s the one responsible for informing based on toptionality. You can also reach out further to your Housing Manager if you want further updates.
Zawad: We asked Housing to talk to Rich about this, but generally it would be nice.
Meghana: Would that mean assigning our HM homework for every work order filed?
Zawad: That’s the issue.
Ashley: I assume housing does not have enough staff.
Jordan: We continue to express disappointment about the canvases which were paintings-not murals. If you want to try new materials, you can start working with Dennis, Alice from EHS (fire safety), or your House Manager.
Ashley: If MacG wants to join this pilot, how could we?
Zawad: Housing is not interested in adding more dorms right now. It’d be nice to have it in place in a way that’s clearly working beforehand.
Shuli: Ideally, next semester it would no longer be a pilot.
Jordan: We brought this up—they mostly just want to make sure everything runs smoothly this semester. BC opening will be a continuation of this policy, and hopefully MacG can adopt it. We’ll inform them that there’s already interest.
Caragay: So, to be clear, there’ll be a new policy by the end of the semester.
Ashley: Is it worth my time to go talk to my Housing Manager?
Meghana: Yeah, the problem is also partially that citizens of Next and New don’t have time. So, it’s hard to see if it’s success.
Shuli/Caragay: How do they measure success?
Jordan: They mostly want it to just seem okay. It doesn’t necessarily have to be painted, it just has to work on the wall.
Shuli: Installation and sizing satisfaction would be nice. Happy residents is not key.
Meghana: Installation has been pushed off to us; i.e. finding canvases and materials. It’s not clear if all the kinks will be figured out by the end of this semester.
Jordan: Hopefully, we’ll get a repository of information. Once more dorms have the pilot, a central storage of parts and canvases would be good, so when a house manager asks for it, they can just requisition it and charge the house cost object at that time. We’re nowhere near that yet.
Zawad: The tricky thing is that we didn’t fully understand Next would want them to do a little of the figuring out. Pushing it off to Dennis
Meghana: Large canvases are expensive. This puts us back to all the other materials.
Zawad: The answer to that is yes. Talk to Alice about fire safety.
Meghana: What happened to the mounting conversation? Mounting was also the problem.
Shuli: Rather than Next House having to choose the material, it’d be nice if we could start by having one material type and installation approach, instead of rag-tag discussion from each dorm exec.
Zawad: We were actually going to meet with New and Next and talk to their residents. We’ll see if we can do this work first. Housing is very interested in having this move forward; they’re not really interested in one-by-one, just approving all mural locations at once.
Would DormCon be interested in funding this?
Mohan: How much are the materials in question?
Jordan/Shuli: We’ll think about it a little. This also relates to the gym conversation.
Jordan: Housing will have an expo during CPW. It will be optional.
Meghana: (So nobody will go.)
Jordan/Zawad: They’re also having a parent session the week before, virtually.
They’d be happy to have DormCon students there, if you’re interested.
Keith and Rich are creating a working group on security and guest list policies,
since they’ve noticed a lot of inconsistencies.
Alan: Honestly, on the guest list side, I’m more worried about the process. After another week, they finally told me they’d support the policy. It’s true that there are a lot of inconsistencies, but to each their own. I just want better communication.
Caragay: Yeah, getting and steering the working group away from unifying all guest policies and instead towards unifying and improving process would be nice.
Jordan: StarRez exists! It’s better! It’ll give the ability to self-report gender, hopefully, which will be nice, by taking the information from WebSIS.
Ashley: Will there be a non-binary option?
Jordan: Whatever’s on WebSIS? Is there non-binary there?
Theo: Yeah, they have a lot of options there. As long as they’re going with gender identity there, that’ll work.
Jordan: Yep!
Shuli: Nitpicking wording would also be good.
Jordan/Zawad: We’ve been testing the housing intent form rigorously, and we’ve checked out the wording. The housing intent form will go out March 14th, and it will finish after Spring Break so don’t forget to do it. We shortened the RAC timeline by a couple of days.
Zawad: We set up a meeting with Elizabeth Young about punting the inter-dorm housing switch by a day. There was an email about this, we’ll discuss later on the agenda.
Fatima: We had office hours. Two people came. We sent out event allocations. Trinidad says that we’re good to go on the $5000 on air mattresses, and that we can handle individual reimbursements. Can admissions give us the $5000 later?
Shuli/Mohan: Yeah.
Fatima: For masking during CPW, we can’t have a full mask mandate, but individual events can?
Shuli: I’m not sure if Trinidad is right about that. I think the 8 AM call indicates we can’t do that. Classes can’t even do that.
Caragay: That might be good to check-in with Trinidad. Sometimes CPW has special privileges, but it’s out of scope for them so they might not be aware.
Jordan: We can check with tomorrow on the call as well.
Fatima: Check-in will be a mask-mandate zone, but otherwise fine. “Rapid testing everyone would be a logistical nightmare.” They can leave their luggage before their tests come back though until 5 PM.
Ashley: To be clear, they’re testing everyone who arrives after 4 PM via rapid testing, but PCR before that?
Fatima: Yes. Medical knows and will increase bandwidth.
Meghana: How are the hosting numbers?
Fatima: We didn’t get an update. We’re asking chairs to get more hosts.
Shuli: Dorms@ will go to all dorm residents and mention that.
Tina: Lots of the CPW emails went to people’s spam, which was a problem.
Shuli: We finally got to speak with Suzy. We talked with her about mask policies but lol. You know as much as we do about March 14th. One thing, the communication has been insufficient; we’ve been asking for explanation about “why that’s safe and why they chose to make that decision?” They’re having a call with people from medical to ask tomorrow, so that’s good—that will be on the dorms@
Mateo: Are the isolation policies changing?
Caragay/Shuli: Those remain the same. One light-hearted thing was that the DSL office will start to re-open again, hopefully; they donated all their money to the Banana Lounge, so they have no snacks anymore.
Tina: We (BL team) got a bunch of money back, do you know if we still need it?
Caragay/Shuli: You could tell Suzy to take their money back. You also all heard about the New Vassar Piazza. If you didn’t you can check dormspam, but the screenshots are terrible and if you read it you’ll feel bad. We were already talking to Suzy/DSL about bias training, so we’re trying to follow up on that.
They’re bringing in sustained dialogue (small student groups), as well as generally offering more bias training in dorms. We were wondering if you were looking for bias training specifically for leaders—if something happens in your dorm, what can and should you do. You as President or as hall chairs often feel a necessity to respond, but you have no training, so this would be to mitigate that.
Is this something you are all interested in?
Alan: I’m interested; I’ve talked to AD and asked her to escalate on her end as well.
Brendan: I want a PDF afterwards so I can cross-reference.
Caragay: Do you feel like this is a president-level thing or a general exec thing?
Mitali/Alan: Yes.
Meghana: If they repeat it, it would be nice to be evolving.
Shuli: We don’t want them to be the same every year.
Also, general pub; your area directors can help you respond to this since they have training. There are also proactive things you can do about this, like talking to your AD and thinking about it.
Tina: Can I talk more about New Vassar? (People generally agree.) Posts started
Monday. Our Piazza was fully anonymous. We saw the first post and deleted it
right away, but notifications still happen even in the two-hour digest. People
saw that we deleted it and decided to post it again, and then we deleted it, and
then they decided to put up a different text. The problem is that we needed a
response; Tina sent out an email, but none of the house team is on the Piazza,
so the house team filed an IDHR report outside. Suzy Nelson talked to us and
will set up a meeting as well.
Piazza is unfortunately anonymous. We’re trying to figure it out through Piazza
statistics.
Resident: I think they assign it to a random student so it becomes a random resident.
Mohan: They do stay the same for the anonymous.
Tina: Lots of admin are confused about “what is a Piazza?” We’re currently in that process as well. We’ve updated to be non-anonymous. We started it this semester, and it’s mainly been shitposts. Before, the shitposts were good. We’d deleted stuff, but it wasn’t anything serious.
Alan: We ban shitposts, because we give serious answers to every question. We ask for serious
Ashley: You can also start with every post default private as well. MacG did ban shitposting as well.
Caragay: Is there anything that could be helpful to you from us?
Tina: I’m not sure. Hopefully, Title IX will help with next steps and the house team.
Shuli: Definitely let us know if you want mutual support.
Ashley: we have a new MacG President, he’s not here. We’re doing a pi day contest and we’re running a donut-eating competition
Alan: we passed our budget within a hair of quorum, unanimously! We got a guest list. Today. After 2 months… we’re planning pi day event, generally planning for the future, housing lottery date set. Things are going. we will have a discussion about our piazza as well.
Tina: Other things we’re working on. For dorms with vending machines, how do you get one and who refills them?
[presidents]: nobody knows
Ashley: I think the same as for people on campus. We’ll talk to
Alan: I thought MacG is different.
Mohan: House manager is here.
Alan: I agree.
Ashley: Yeah, we’ll also talk to Mark.
Tina: Do your staff clean common areas or kitchen?
Shuli: They clean our hallways and our kitchen floor, but not the kitchen itself.
Theo: Yeah
Tina: there are study rooms that never get cleaned.
Ashley: those should be cleaned.
Meghana: our wing common spaces aren’t cleaned but that’s not for the whole house.
Madison: we got exec t-shirts. We are trying to plan piano drop. Our house manager told us we had several pianos in store. Their house manager now tells them they have none. It’s not hard to find, but pianos are heavy and no regular moving company is going to move them. If you have any ideas, that would be great!
[resident]: If you pay residents to move it, they’d probably do it.
Madison: We just found one that doesn’t work anymore, but it’s only open weekdays.
Shuli: I think six people could move it.
Madison: We dropped one in the fall, but it was so heavy. There were eight of us and it was on wheels and it was heavy. Maybe we’ll incentivize them with lunch.
Kristina: For new house, we had our first exec meeting this past weekend. We talked about our budget. We’re getting CPW chairs to get events, and we’re having our first Presidents meeting this weekend, so more then.
Cameron: Things are going right along in BC. We had our GRA meet-and-greet last weekend, and started going through the process of giving feedback. We have Associate Heads of House and space for CPW—room 407—as well as the lounge, which they’re working on tap access for. They’re thinking about the floor placement process, and because not everybody’s been active. We’re thinking about a tiered process where we start with people who lived the building, then the ‘24s, and then the ‘25s; Annie Snyder’s working on an algorithm.
Carolina: Yeah that’s it. It’s Gale-Shapley of some var
iety.
Cameron: We’re trying to run an event that we need a space that isn’t the stud basement for. It’d be cool to have a space for that. If any dorm has communal space…
Alan: Next House has TFL.
Ashley: MacG has the dining hall.
Cameron: I can’t imagine it’ll be more than 20 people.
Michelle: We had our first traveling exec meeting. I would call it a success because we saw someone from Destiny and that’s the first time that’s happened all year. There was significant concern about the new COVID policies—formal or informal discussion on each floors will hopefully occur regarding masking and testing. We emailed their house team about it and got a lot of pushback; we’re meeting them on Friday.
Caragay: What kind of pushback?
Bookbinder: One building should not have a different policy from campus and eight different policies. “This is less of a policy issue and less about core Random values.”
Caragay: It might be helpful if it were framed as a discussion, like the roommate discussions. It’s not a rule; you’re not going to succeed.
Michelle: You should just have a discussion, yeah.
Ashley: Yeah, we have suite agreements. It’s a very different from the power dynamic of professors.
Caragay: These conversations will be helpful for both people who want and don’t want masks. Framing that will also be helpful.
Shuli: We’d be happy to talk more afterwards as well.
Bookbinder: It’s good to know that not just Random is facing this issue; as well as professors.
Michelle: We like, instituted a plan to ask committee chairs what they’d done that semester and what they spent money on, to try and maintain institutional knowledge.
Mohan: Simmons has no updates.
Theo: I’m the secretary for EC, because both President/VP can’t make it. There’s a large renovation updates of “they’re continuing to happen”; architects are looking more towards the realistic, so they’re taking less student input (i.e. so they can look at electrical wiring and whatnot). They’re pushing for pre-painting murals, and they’re also asking for a large budget for renovations to add a sixth floor, but they’ll see how that goes.
Meghana/Alan: what?
Theo: This is driven by first floors, it has a possibility of going further. We’re running into issues with Nightwatch and toptionality, possibly related to reasons for emails. Nightwatch has walked onto hall during the registered parties, and they’re not supposed to be doing that (i.e. relating to the policy); we’re working on that and trying to track down the lack of communication in regards to the policy. We’re trying to add a non-VP RAC to our constitution.
Something more general—MIT Medical pharmacy is closing. This has caused big concern at EC, since it’s lower cost and extremely close to EC and all dorms; there’s some pushback since there was no community feedback.
East Side Festival is happening; they’re meeting with stakeholders soon and we’re in the risk-management phase.
Margaret: McCormick doesn’t have that many updates. They had a musical celebration for International Women’s Day. They’re in the GRA interview phase; that’s it.
Emma: Maseeh updates: nothing crazy new. We had someone steal our last iron;
they’re getting a new one and they’re going to bolt it to the wall. One of our
two elevators is broken again (but this happens a lot). We’ve been having issues
with a particular resident on floor 3, which has been an issue since the fall
and the cleaning staff almost quit over it; we’re working with our HoH to deal
with it, but
Ashley: do you know who it is?
Emma: No.
Brendan: What is it?
Emma: They’re smearing poop on the walls.
[general concern from the room]
Shuli/Caragay: You can definitely escalate this further. Your house team should know. Sorry.
That’s really awful, and you should feel power to escalate this.
Emma: I learned that some presidents go to House Team meetings; so, gonna go to the House Team meetings and see if GRAs want to be involved. Working on their guest list; that’s going on, but I just need to reformat stuff.
We’re working on GRA selection!
[resident]: quick thought on the wall situation; if you’d be able to monitor who goes in and out
Bookbinder: literally 1984
Shuli: surveillance is usually not a good idea, but if there was such a situation, it would be this
[group breaks into chaos]
Emma: We put cleaning supplies outside of every bathroom, but that didn’t do anything, so this seems to just be somebody doing it maliciously.
Caragay: Has there been any kind of community conversation with that hall yet?
Emma: I don’t know if it’s come from the GRAs. At the last MHEC meeting, though, the House Manager said they’d ask the GRAs to have a meeting about it.
Shuli: Let us know if you need anything.
Caragay: We’re going to save the conversation with Zawad and we’ll manage the budget discussions.
Mohan: DYTD 53 - $5000 of our $15000 budget.
Shuli: We’ve historically funded DTYD, is it similar?
Carolina: In the past, we’ve asked 2-4000; this is more than usual, but DTYD is going to be more expensive since our contractors have gone under and some of the funding sources also no longer exist. The big one is that because of rapid closing of BC, thousands of dollars worth of our light equipment got trashed, so they’re trying to re-build it. We’re hoping that it won’t cost more in the future given we get back on our feet.
Meghana: Where?
Carolina: Walker!
Alexandria: That’ll be real fun.
Carolina: It’s April 23rd, and open to all undergrads. It’s not a frat, you don’t have to wait, we’ll just let you in.
Mohan: The budget is available on the exec updates notes.
Caragay: Any other questions?
Shuli: Any objections to funding it?
Mohan: Do we vote, white-ballot?
Mohan motions to white-ballot, someone seconds, the rules of order breaks down but nobody objects!
Mohan: Send me the receipts when you’re done! Okay, the gym proposal. Is $9000 DormCon, $9000 50%, etc.?
Zawad: during your update you said it wasn’t just McCormick?
Mohan: We’re waiting for Simmons.
Julian: It seems MindHandHeart likes to fund events, so we didn’t reach out. We’ve reached out for others, but it’s fine.
Shuli: I would be interested in creating a small continuous weight-room fund, but not to create a room.
Tina: why half and not all?
Michelle: something about safety?
Shuli: It’s a general policy. We could go to them about it.
Bookbinder: I’ve heard that 50% is because the price is increased because MIT has higher safety standards. They didn’t use to fund any of it, so this might be an increase.
Julian: Scale of this Simmons might be anomalous, but we’re backlogged. Nika talks about the fact that sometimes repairs are.
Alan: I don’t want to fund these. I don’t think it’s DormCon’s job.
Mohan: We’re operating at a $12000 loss per semester rn. So that’s not great. This will be viable for a few semesters, though. Even if we go all out with the excess.
Alan: I’d rather fund CPW at elevated rates than dorm weight rooms.
Caragay: Do we want a formal vote?
Margaret: We did request $9000. It’s the left-over from what HRS won’t fund.
Mohan: I know it was an itemized budget; if it seems that there’s stuff they don’t actually need, you could revamp it.
Julian: If there are multiple dorms working at once they have more discounts.
We vote on the proposal. We have seven dorms nos (EC, BC, MacG, New, Next, NV, Random), two dorm yes (McC, Maseeh), one abstain (Simmons), one absent (Baker).
Shuli: We’ve not decided if we should fund continued, but not creation. We’ll talk about things later.
Margaret: We want to know what size is approvable.
Shuli: Let’s discuss more later.
Meeting is adjourned.