BE Board:New event fund

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What's this?
Because of the way the BE board budget is set up, it can be difficult to find the money to support new and worthwhile events without reducing the funding for ongoing and recurring events. We believe that new events are a crucial way of keeping the board as a central community building organization within the BE graduate population.

We think that new events could be positively encouraged by setting up a fund that could only be used for activities that haven't been run before. Any money not used from the fund would return to the BE department at the end of the year.

If students were aware that there was money available specifically to organize new events it would encourage them to do so.

Proposal

Announcement

Video archive of all BE talks
Although I make it to every Thursday seminar, I know there are others that sometimes have scheduling conflicts. To help solve this problem, I suggest videotaping the seminars and hosting them through the BE board website. Thanks to Google Video, we don't have to worry about paying for bandwidth on the videos. Additionally, we'll be able to integrate them easily into the existing BE Board webpage on OWW, see an example of an integrated video here. Getting MIT A/V to videotape the talks is prohibitively expensive (~$500/seminar) so as an alternative we could buy a camera, lapel mike, and tripod and set it up ourselves before the talk. Uploading the digital video to Google after that and embedding it in the page is trivial, so I don't think this will be much work. I expect for ~$1000 we could get all the equipment we need (though still pricing it right now).

I think this would be a really great resource and the department would be leading the way in getting all of its talks archived, something every academic dept should be doing in my opinion. Thoughts or comments? --Jasonk 20:59, 15 May 2006 (EDT)