CAOS: 2003-2004

[Jerry]

Well, July is here and for those of us not in class we hope it never ends. But it will.

So, let's start a discussion on what we would like to do in the coming academic year.

We have a great set of officers led by Prez Myra, so with a little help from the membership CAOS could do some interesting things. I'll start with a few ideas, but feel free to chime in on anything like speakers, technical events, social events, fun events, competitions, and fundraisers.

Here's some ideas, add to them or comment on the ones you like:

1. Invite Dr. White to give a talk about SIGGraph

2. Invite an ACM speaker http://www.acm.org/top/lect-topic.html

3. Movie and Commentary Night: Schedule a tech movie (like Westworld or Lawnmower Man) and ask a prof to do commentary on it or on computers in the popular culture.

4. Cyberstorm

5. Sell CAOS or SIUE CS "Computer Bugs" as keeps sakes. Get some old chips, wire, and some eyes to make computer bugs. Stamp them with a "Have you hugged your bug today?" or "Only the best computer bugs come from SIUE". Sell them at Open House.

6. Invite a Wash U. prof to come talk about their research. A few of us have personal contacts at Wash. U. (Dr. Waxman, Dr. Dooley, me)

7. Have Elizabeth Weber give a talk on "Computing Adventures in Argentina: Life of an exchange student".

8. Invite someone from IBM/AB/Edward Jones/Boeing/Monsanto/Masercard to come talk about what they do, or some specific tech topic they deal with.

[Stiffler]

A few of mine:

1. I think we need to have a discussion on how the Governor is ruining the
   Colleges by cutting the flow of money. Especially how it effects the CS Department,
   and if we can still expect the same great education.



2. Do a fund raiser where all prcedes help out the Professors salery. Even
   go toward a sign-on bonus for a new professor. I hear one is leaving our
   ranks...



3. Sponser a robot tech review, where we demonstrate all the cool thing that
   can be done with them. Other schools' ACM Groups invited.



4. Hold a fund raiser to make money to hold one gigantic ACM party, social,
   whatever at the lovely SIUE Park. It's big enough to hold a lot of ppl. This
   would be great to meet ppl from other schools :)

Well, what do you think.

Jon

[William Grim]

I like all the ideas :-)

I still would like for a company to come to SIUE; I think Rob Mills was talking with Apple.  He always mentioned it at the officer meetings.

I'm going to go contact IBM now and see what they can do.

I'd like to hear Liz talk about Argentina and for us to pick out an ACM speaker to speak for us.  I just don't know which one would be good yet.  Some of them seem kinda drab, while others seem interesting.  Perhaps a vote is in order if we decide to do this?

I've always like the Cyberstorm thing, even if I'm a poor student.

Seeing a tech movie would be great!  I liked it when we did that last.  Even though it was a movie and everything, I think everyone got relaxed enough to talk to each other.  Plus, everyone got to complain about how cheesy Hackers was; it gave us something in common.

Heh, the computer bugs idea sounds good too.


This is probably hard to setup and all, but what if we had a programming thing where we got a few small teams of programmers (2 or 3 per group) and made some sort of simple web server or something?  At the end of a week or whatever, we could have a judging on the best web server?  Only code generated 100% by the teams should be acceptable for entry, even if they could hack up a small server using some Apache code ;-)  I don't care if we do a webserver or not; anything sounds good and ideas are welcome.


What about another game thing setup in the SIUE CS labs?  I enjoyed playing Quake 3 Arena during Open House.  Maybe a $2 entry could be made to play on the machines and take part in some sort of tournament?  Of course, the prize wouldn't be expensive ... maybe a computer bug? :-D


Just a couple ideas that came to mind.

[Jerry]

How about a membership drive?  

Say we give a prize away, like a book store gift certificate, to any current member that gets a freshman or sophemore to join. And we put their name into a drawing for a larger prize.