Tau Beta Pi
San Francisco Bay Area Alumnus Chapter

August 17, 2002

The meeting commenced at 1.21pm PT.

Those present were as follows:

Danny Tom, Yuhan Chen, Joe Epstein, Tony Chu, Gregory Chew, Eugene Chung, Alison Hu, Brandon Kuczenski, Michael Martin, Carl Wang, and Christina Yau.

First off, the project book. We're submitting it next year, when we've got more projects. Yes, even now we probably have at least as many, if not more, than some other chapters! But still, we're Bay Area Alumni. Gotta do better than that!

So June 2003, the project book will be sent out. In the meantime, everyone who has pictures for Rebuilding Together, Ski Trip, and 4th July send them to Gregory, drake@tbp.berkeley.edu.

Also in the meantime, the project report is going to go online on our new and improved, (though how COULD something be new and improved at the same time?) ultra-spiffy, completely modern, embodying all the Bohemian traditions of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and most important and above all else, Love , website.

Which Tony will put together.

With some help from Carl.

On the TBP CA A chapter's server for now, as a subpage on their domain, until we get our own domain name some time in the future. Possibly Nationals could help us in this respect? Tony should query about this.

And what to put on our new and improved, (there's that oxymoron again) ultra-spiffy, completely modern, embodying all the Bohemian traditions of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and most important and above all else, Love , website?

A new and improved Job Descriptions listing!
A new and improved Activities List!
A new and improved By-laws...ahem I mean, the By-laws we agreed upon after 6 hours worth of meetings. Which have NOT been "improved" upon in any way since. But they're still kinda new...
A new and improved Officers/Board Of Directors List!

Tony and Carl should get some semblance of a site up and running within the next few weeks, so that we can link to it when we put our ad out in PRISM, and reference it during future notices for activities. Oh yeah, and make it a nice page. A kindler, gentler page. Not as clumsy or random as some other pages, but an elegant page for a more civilised age.

And we should all act civilised during the upcoming Alumni and Inter-collegiate Mixers!
The Alumni Mixer is slated to be at Golden Gate Park. Hopefully we can get some kind of reservation for a BBQ pit in time, otherwise alternative venues will have to suffice, like Tilden Park, Marin, the roof of Etcheverry... In any case, we should first get the e-mails of alumni members from the various college chapters in order to get in touch with them and start spreading the word. And when details have been more finalised, we can put a notice in PRISM. Given the availability of facilities to reserve and the Convention and such, this Mixer will probably be set in late October.
Closely-related to this is the Inter-collegiate Mixer. Details of this are even more sketchy (ie. vague, not the OTHER kind of sketchy), but there remains the distinct possibility of merging it with the Alumni Mixer.
Thus killing two Mixers with one Cocktail, as they say in Weird Metaphors school.

As for why we'd want to have Inter-collegiate Mixers, well, we want to let the undergraduate chapters know that we do exist, and that we have services to offer them, from Industry contacts, to years and years and years and years of wisdom and experience.

An alternative to an actual Mixer is to arrange for a trip to some major event (like the Frungi Championships!), open invitation to all the chapters' members -- even if only a few members from each chapter turn up, at least our name's out there. Then we can follow that up with more specific activities targeted at different chapters, or groups of chapters. Preferably activities that will appeal to those chapter members, but which the chapters themselves are unable (or not easily able) to organise on their own. For example, an activity that requires a sizeable group to participate in, in which case the necessary numbers can be made up from more than one chapter. Like Frungi Championships!
And then when we are well-established, we can be assured a more successful Inter-collegiate Mixer.

And then Joe expounded on the state of our Treasury. Currently we do not have a bank account. We would like a bank account. In fact we need a bank account. The most ideal would be to get an account with Washington Mutual. They have no annual fees, no minimum balance requirements. But we need to have existed for at least a year and we need to show activity for at least three months in another bank . While Yuhan verifies the procedure for getting an account with Washington Mutual, we need a different bank account for three months.
Solution 1. Take the hit. Get an account with some bank and pay three months worth of account fees. Then we can go to Washington Mutual.
Solution 2. Members could loan our Treasury enough funds to meet a minimum balance requirement with some other bank. The loan would be repaid, with a predetermined amount of interest, when we transfer to Washington Mutual.
Solution 3. Use an online bank. Joe will investigate this.

Incidentally, we now have a grand total of $270 in the bank, figuratively speaking.

And finally, two announcements.

First, Nationals is compiling a resume book, and is asking for submissions from members. Anyone who would like to submit their resume, send it in Plain Text (ie .txt file) to Yuhan at ychen@tbp.berkeley.edu . The deadline is September 22 2002.

Second, San Francisco State University is trying to set up a TBP chapter of their own. They cannot get any official help from any TBP chapter, but anyone who wants to lend a hand on their own can volunteer by contacting Alison at thehu@yahoo.com .

Next meeting will be on October 12. There we will plan the Mixer.

Oh yeah, next installment of Clone Wars will come out soon. I promise.

That is all.

Meeting ends 2.19pm.

Quote of the Meeting: "Well not in the bank, in my wallet, which we'll talk about later."
-- Joe Epstein

Brandon Quote of the Meeting: "Use soda water to get out stains from carpets."
-- Brandon Kuczenski

Respectfully Ctrl-Eed

Gregory Chew