Summertime Blues

Do you have the blues because summertime is almost at an end? Well never fear cause CSES is HERE!

As always, CSES will be back in your face with a smashing lineup of events and activities to wipe that summertime sleep from your eyes! EngFrosh starts it off so check out www.engfrosh.com to register or see the activities this year. The week after, there is a giant 67s hockey game and the always popular First Year Conference; and from there the good times keep on rolling! Check out the event lists on the site, the main page current events and getinvolved.engsoc.org!

Speaking about the website, there are going to be a few additions popping up this fall including a members only access section. This area will have the society minutes and a wide range of documentation for you to read up on. The increased honesty and transparency allowed by this security feature will reduce the likelihood that outside organizations can use the material against us with malicious intent. The public side of this will be populated by possible Executive reports and other official statements issued by the Society.

If you wish to see the minutes from the 2 Council meetings this summer, please email me and they will be sent to you as soon as possible.

Other than that, I have attended the ESSCO AGM and participated quiet heavily in the discussions there. I will also be attending the August teleconference in about... oh... 1 hour and 17 minutes. I will update on that come our next meeting, and it will be available once those minutes are published.

I was able to complete an unofficial Strat Plan for CSES, outlining some ambitious goals to achieve with membership, Society image and events attendance. The metrics of the strat plan will be heavily reliant on the statistics our VP Internal, Chris Fournier, has been seeking to help give us a better image of CSES. VP Publications, Jacob Hammer, has been working towards developing a survey to run this year, internally and externally. This will help provide us with a solid picture of where we stand with our members and the external population, hopefully providing us with some clear objectives to achieve in the next few years.

Jackets are all ready for the coming year as well, with the deadline being Wednesday, September 17th. There will be a fitting session run that day to make sure that the jacket size you want is right. There are jackets available for fitting in the Office, so stop by and try one on. Order forms are available on the website for printing.

I have also appointed my diversity director for the year, Max Turcotte-Novosedlik. The diversity initiative we will be focusing on this year is the GLBT segment of our membership. It is estimated that roughly 5-10% of our membership identifies with the GLBT community and has gone unrecognized within Carleton Engineering for a long time. With the creation of Q, it gives CSES the opportunity to support a new "diversity" group and develop the necessary connections to help provide the maximum support for all our members.

I am looking to establish a Diversity Initiative fund within the President's portfolio to fund events that increase the diversity of the society. I recognize that there may be fears this will be biased towards Q, but let me make my intentions clear. ANY and ALL diversity events can apply to me to get some funding for their events. It is not designated for any one group, and all are welcome to it. I will use it with discretion and try and give every opportunity for it to be spread around appropriately.

WISE has started up again at Carleton this year. The new Exec of WISE have been working extraordinarily hard to get ready for the coming year and membership drive. So far I have been lucky enough to have a few meetings and plenty of email conversations with Barbora, lending a hand whenever possible. It looks like this will be another great relationship between CSES and an external group to help our membership. They do have some big things planned, so if you are interested, head over to their temporary website or check out the Facebook group.

Virtual Ventures is still in the Office, running their day camps but they should be out by the end of next week. So if you've been dropping by to check out the latest CSES news and gossip, it'll be shut down until the end of August when we all get back and set up for the year. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank VV for taking such great care of the office and offering to lend a hand whenever we had something going on in the office, or a member of council needed to get in to do some work.

This post turned out to be pretty big, so I will cut it off here. I should get back to packing for my big move this weekend. Wish me luck!

Cheers!

Andrew 'Sportsock' Harte
CSES Prime Minister
pm@cses.carleton.ca

A New Beginning

Howdy All,

Welcome to my first blog post as President! Or should I say Prime Minister? Yes, I know this post has taken some time to roll around but thats OK, cause I have a tonne of things to update on.

Council has been uber enthusiastic this year and we have had some major progress towards the coming year. We met a few times before April was over to draw up rough plans for the coming year and sketch out a schedule for the summer.

Since the end of exams, Council has created an entire new way of managing the Society's documentation, organizing executive, council and the various committees we run. We have even managed to have 2 full Council Meetings and 2 unofficial discussions with about half of Council attending. To this date, we have re-instituted and modified all the policies (13) from last year, created 10 brand new ones, defined the role of the previous committees and struck 4 additional committees to help continue propelling CSES forward.

The committees that we now have are the following:
- EngFrosh Committee
- NEW (National Engineering Week) Committee
- Electoral Committee
- Equity Committee
- Constitutional Committee
- Public Relations (PR) Committee
- Party Planning Committee

If you have any questions on the purpose and functions of the various committees, please contact me. Also, if you want to get involved on any of these, don't hesitate to send me an email.

As for my portfolio as Prime Minister of CSES, I have been fairly busy attending various meetings with internal and external groups at Carleton to re-establish old relationships and make new ones. So far, have some potential plans with the Sprott Business Students' Society (SBSS) and the Carleton Computer Science Society (CCSS) this year and I had a meeting with CUSA President, Brittany Smyth, regarding possible collaboration.

Internally, I have been helping Exec achieve their goals and get prepared for September. We still have to nail down the majority of our dates (social, academic and more) but they schedule so far looks promising. By the end of July, it looks like we will have almost everything ready for September 4th.

I have not been able to fill any of my directorships to date, though one does look promising. I have plans laid out for these positions to achieve some lofty but attainable goals. It should be fun. So, please take a cruise over to getinvolved.engsoc.org and look at the available directorships. Many of these require only minimal time commitments, but provide you the opportunity to gain experience in many new areas. There is also an online form at http://getinvolved.engsoc.org/form/ to make it even easier!


Thats all for now, but stay tuned because this is going to be an exciting year for CSES. You will see the traditions you have come to love plus fresh new initiatives that will help round out our services to you.



Andrew 'Sportsock' Harte
CSES Prime Minister
pm@cses.carleton.ca

First Blog of 2008!

So, it took until Reading Week for me to post a new blog...
Wow, I'm slow. Actually, I've just been working my butt off with school, competitions, and of course, CSES.

Elections stuff is up and running now, thanks to Cindy, so watch out for campaign posters soon!!!
Also, remember that we are running an online vote, using vote.engsoc.org, so remember to get out there and vote when the time comes!

One thing I should say: as it stands, there is no reason to have an emergency general meeting, despite what some fearmongers have been saying. There is one motion that goes against what the Dean considered acceptable to allow us to continue running (ie, take away our office space, funding, etc...), so it'll get voted down at a Council meeting, as per the Constitution.

So, that's it for me...
Looking forward to my tap routine at AGM!

Long time, no see!

Wow, so it has been a while since I've posted here, but with all that's been going on, it's kinda easy to see how I've been a little tied up. Anyway, there have been a lot of rumours saying that this person on Administration is trying to shut down such and such an event/service or whatever. I would like to assure you all that there is no danger of CSES (or any of it's events) being shut down permanently or otherwise. I would personally like to thank everyone for their collaborative efforts in helping work through the issues that were presented to us.

Now, for the fun stuff: wow, Whirlwind was a blast! It was obvious that a lotof people had a great time. Hats off to Bern (VP Social) and Haley (Formal Events Director) for putting together an awesome event!

So, we've decided that all of the charity efforts that we've put together to date for CHEO will go to purchasing toys and gifts for kids, and what we're hoping to do is have someone dressed up as Santa Claus go to CHEO to give the gifts to them.

Anyways, I think that's it for now, stay tuned for more exciting stuff from the Office of the President!

1-UP Charity LAN for CHEO

So, while I probably should have blogged while at the LAN, I just didn't think of it. Anywho, we managed to raise over $200 just by having a LAN Party. I think that this is the easiest way for anyone to have fun while donating to charities, because all you have to do is play video games.
One of the awesome parts of the LAN parties that we run is the LoL (Leo's on Location), that serves up your Leo's favorites (including sandwiches) at the LAN. Watch out for the next one in November, and keep in mind that GH3 might make an appearance there...

1-Up? What's that?

1-Up is the Charity branch of CSES. They're not a charity per se; they act more as the means for CSES to raise money for the charity of their choice. They've even got a cool new logo that will pop up more and more as time goes on. Watch out for how the progression of this fledgling service grows. The first thing that they're doing is located below:

The 1-Up Charity LAN and Console Party for CHEO is starting up next weekend. That means that October 20th and 21st, from 1:00-noon, find yourself in the Galleria (4th floor Unicentre) and get ready for an awesome time for charity. What better way to raise money for charity than to play your favorite video games? Tickets are on sale now for $10 in Leo's, get them now because seats are limited!
A reminder that the tickets are for people who want to set up a PC at the LAN, not to play consoles. However, we will ask for a small optional donation for the consoles. As for console selection, besides having practically whatever system you want on call, we'll have a XBox 360 with Halo 3 and a Wii with games like Wario Ware Smooth Moves and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption set up and ready to go!
If you want any more information about this, just give me a shout (in the hall or on the interwebs, your choice) and I'll let you know what's going on.

ESSCO PM: awesomesauce 2007...

Okay, so I just got back from a conference in enemy territory. That's right, I was over at U of/d' Ottawa over the weekend the President's Meeting of the ESSCO (Engineering Student Societies Council of Ontario). Now, I'm just kidding when I say I was in enemy territory, because I was treated better than I think I've ever been treated at a conference. I had a great time, learned some new things, changed the way some people look at Carleton (for the better, don't worry), and made some new connections with the newest cats on the block: UOIT (pronounced how you would spell it, not you-oite or you-owe-it), which stands for the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
U of/d' Ottawa definitely put together a great conference that made me re-evaluate how I think about them, and I look forward to seeing them more at conferences and such. If you want more information, feel free to e-mail me at president@cses.carleton.ca, but wait until you've seen my article on CFES PM and ESSCO PM in the Iron Times coming out soon!!