Erik Paulson's Blog

Here’s the email that went out to all graduate students at UW-Madison yesterday from ASM. The Herald’s sub-headline is misleading – there is no “group will meet to decide if new union will be formed by secret ballot or authorization cards” – whatever group they’re talking about doesn’t exist.  The only thing that is happening in the short term is the State is setting the rules for how the union formation process will eventually work. (Otherwise, the story was pretty accurate)

(ps to the Herald – why not link to primary sources when writing stories? I know you had a copy of this email!

================

Dear fellow graduate students -

We apologize for the length of this email, but we believe it is
important. For a top-level, plain language summary of where ASM
believes RA Unionization is now, please jump to the bottom.

==== DETAILED INFORMATION ON LATEST NEWS =====

As you may recall, this past summer the State of Wisconsin authorized
some research assistants at UW schools to organize themselves and
bargain collectively, if they so choose. At the beginning of the
school year, ASM shared with you the information it had collected,
with the assistance of the University Administration, the TAA, and the
Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. At that time, we promised
to update you when there were any new developments.

It has been a quiet fall and winter, but there is some recent news to
share with you. The Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission (WERC),
the state agency that regulates the relationship between employers and
employees, has issued its proposed rules for how an RA union could be
formed. While the broad scope and shape of the rules were defined by
the state legislature, WERC is responsible for filling in the details.

In the proposed regulations, WERC has clarified the use of
authorization cards to create a collective bargaining unit. State law
provides that if a majority of RAs sign authorization cards, no secret
ballot election is necessary and a collective bargaining unit is
automatically formed. WERC’s proposed rules provide that a secret
ballot election is still a permissible process for creating a
collective bargaining unit. The decision of which method to use is
left to the organization trying to become the representatives of the
RAs, and ultimately, to the RAs who are eligible to participate in a
collective bargaining unit.

WERC’s proposed rules have also clarified that they will not accept
any petitions before July 1, 2010. However, authorization cards
collected before that date would be valid, if their rules are adopted
as-is.

WERC is collecting feedback on their proposed rules. You can read them
online here:

http://werc.wi.gov/proposed_rules_text_2010.pdf

or a brief summary here:
http://werc.wi.gov/rules_hearing_notice_2010.pdf

You can provide written feedback by phone, by writing or emailing Peter
Davis at the WERC, or by attending an in-person hearing on Thursday, March
11th, at 10am at the WERC offices. All of the contact information for
Peter Davis, as well as directions to the WERC offices are found in
the rules_hearing_notice above, or at this link:

http://werc.wi.gov/selected_press_releases_and_werc_world_articles.htm#rules_hearing_2010

All feedback to WERC is due March 22nd, 2010.

Please note that the hearing and the written comments are for the
rules only, and not on the overarching issue of should UW-Madison RAs
unionize. That is a discussion for our campus.

WERC expects to have the final version of the rules published and in
place by July 1, 2010.

========= SHORT VERSION =========

ASM has made an effort to describe the process using cautious
language, reflecting all possible outcomes. We recognize that many of
you may prefer a simpler explanation of what is likely to occur.
Please keep in mind that this is just ASM’s best guess for future
events.

ASM does not expect that there will be any effort to collect
authorization cards, or otherwise begin the process to form an RA
Union, until at least the fall semester 2010. ASM believes the TAA is the only
organization that would consider being the offical representatives for
RAs. ASM has not heard of any other group that is interested in coming
to UW-Madison to represent RAs, nor has it heard of any group of
UW-Madison RAs interested in creating a separate “RAA” organization.

ASM does expect that a group of RAs will eventually come together,
under the auspices of the TAA, and begin the process of RA
unionization with the TAA as the representatives. ASM does not know if
they would pursue a secret ballot election or “card-check.” ASM has no
opinion on whether there should be a secret ballot election or
“card-check.”

ASM is planning to hold a townhall meeting, discussing RA
Unionization, the Graduate School reorganization, segregated fees, and
the Natatorium renovations. That will be near the end of March, and
we’ll be sending another email announcing the date and location soon.

As always, ASM welcomes your feedback. Please feel free to contact any of us:

Colin Ingram, Chemistry
cjingram@wisc.edu

Erik Paulson, Computer Sciences
epaulson@cs.wisc.edu

Matthew Tobelmann, Chemical Engineering
tobelmann@wisc.edu

ps – for more information, please see the ASM RA CBR Info Center:
http://www.asm.wisc.edu/ra-collective-bargaining-home.html

The UW Administration maintains their own page
http://budget.wisc.edu/researchassistants.php

The day the Google Fiber announcement came out, I was very excited and had a lot of thoughts I wanted to put down in a blog post. At about the same time, I got a fellowship out in Washington, DC – starting March 1st, so blogging fell down the priority list as I put life on hold in Madison and headed out east for a few months. I managed to get about half of it done before I skipped town.

Because I am not known for my blogging brevity, I broke things up into four posts.

1.  Why is Google building this network in the first place? This post is a bit technical, though read the end for two good links on privacy and liberty in a world where everything you do produces computer data.

2. Why might Madison get the network? I cover a bit of why I think Madison might get the network, why Madison might not get the network, some background on MUFN – the Madison Unified Fiber Network, and MBI – the Madison Broadband Initiative, which is like MUFN but hasn’t been covered much or really at all in the press, and finally, some thoughts on what happens if Madison doesn’t get the network – should we just build it ourselves anyway?

3. How should Madison go about trying to get the network? What are we doing well with our application, what are we not doing well, what’s going on with the THRIVE and the Madison Economic Development Commission, and finally, how does this relate to Government 2.0, and citizen empowerment?

4. My original email to the Mayor and Alders. Just for completeness.

First, I assume I don’t need to explain the broader picture – Google wants to encourage the use of the Internet, especially to replace traditional media distribution systems, because Google stands a much better chance of making money if you watch video online than if you watch it on a TV. So, in that sense, a faster Internet means more use of the Internet, which means more money for Google.

There’s a deeper motivation for Google’s actions – simply put, they’re building a new Internet. They’re not starting from scratch, as some academic projects are considering, but instead they’re building incrementally. Some of what they’re building is parallel to the existing Internet, and some of it is through tweaks to the existing Internet. This is par for the course for Google – see Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, App Engine, and many, many more. But their work on the Internet is particularly interesting. Consider their moves in the Domain Name Service (DNS.) Google operates their own, public DNS Servers, and has proposed extensions to the protocol that would give a DNS server more information about what client is ultimately making the request. Both changes would allow Google more of an opportunity to where traffic goes on the Internet. Even better for Google, neither requires end users to make a change – for the most part, network administrators can make the change, who as a group are much smaller, more technical, and more Google-fawning than the population at large.

Where are they directing this traffic? To Google’s private Internet. In the 90s, in the dot-com boom, there was a huge explosion of installed fiber optic cable– way more than was needed. After the crash, Google (and others, including for example UW-Madison) bought up much of this cable, and likely laid a bit of their own to fill in the gaps. Some people refer to this network as GooglesNet, and they use it to connect their own data centers together, and to tie into larger ISPs directly. This has been a boon to Google; for example, it’s believed that Google doesn’t actually exchange much cash for YouTube video bandwidth, because they have agreements with ISPs to deliver it directly and they can bypass the large backbone providers.

That then brings us to why Google is considering getting into the ISP business: a serious roadblock to innovation is the exchange between Google’s private network and the ISP. By controlling both sides, Google can rapidly iterate and roll out new ideas quickly. Bob Cringley mostly gets this right, but I disagree with him a little bit: Bob thinks Google expects other companies to come up with the idea of what to do with all the new bandwidth, I suspect Google has the hubris to believe that it will be the primary driver of new applications. Cringley is certainly right about Google wanting to get deeper into the ISPs’ networks, though I don’t know that they’re going to go as far as actually placing data centers at the neighborhood/city level, even if they are only as big as one shipping container.

Placing data centers that close is important for two reasons: latency and bandwidth. Latency doesn’t seem to be that painful in the current Internet, especially with smart clients, and HTML5 will only make that better. Bandwidth matters if the connection out of the city is limited – that was the thesis that Brilliant Cities, Inc made at the last Broadband Telecommunications Regulatory Board meeting. In their model, deploying local fiber is great, but ultimately is a waste because everyone with their 1 gigabit connection chokes when they try to leave Madison and access the Internet. (IE, if the Internet were streets, we can have a lot of cars out on the road at once, so long as they’re all on different side streets. If everyone is trying to get onto the I-90 onramp, traffic is slow.) In Brilliant Cities’ model, and in Cringley’s model, there is a local data center, so most of the data is served without having to get on to the Interstate. (The Interstate is actually a good analogy – the UW’s Internet connection runs parallel to I-94, and you can see a couple of repeater stations fenced off next to the highway)

Nearly all ISPs do something like this already, forcing all outgoing web traffic to first go through their own web proxy so they can cache popular items, and we’ve been doing that for 15 years. The problem is many things aren’t easy to cache with today’s protocols.

For Google, having the ability to place data centers deep in the network, or as far in as they choose could be very interesting, or they may have enough bandwidth on their private network to handle the traffic going back to their major data centers. Regardless, when they have the control, they can experiment and discover what works and what doesn’t, and can rewrite their applications to support whatever new features they deploy in the network. They can also redefine what it means to peer with a network. There is some really cool work out of the other UW (Washington) looking at sharing data between data centers. If Google gets the interface right, they can replica it with other ISPs, and they don’t have to try and run ISPs everywhere. Sometimes Google gets into things just to set the direction, too. Its made noise about getting into the 700MHz radio auction, and promised that if it won the bid it would run the network in a very open fashion. Ultimately, they decided not to bid, but not before the FCC incorporated many of Google’s ideas into the bid requirements.

Ultimately, what’s the big application that Google wants to get in on? Personalized, in-show TV advertising. It’s insane that the same ads are shown to every person watching the show, but there’s nothing better infrastructure-wise today. Even just with the basic demographics it would get from knowing the name on the cable bill, Google could do a better job of not showing me ads that I will convert on anytime soon (like, for example, AARP-branded insurance) – but Google can do much better than that. By combining search history, data from applications, and the rest of the data exhaust that we leave behind every day Google will know nearly exactly who’s likely to be watching the TV show, and what ads make sense to show. The $70 Billion dollars that are spent on TV advertising could be far more effective, and advertisers could know and test exactly what works and what doesn’t.  It could be a tremendous economic boon to the country. If Google builds a network that can deliver, advertisers will demand it from the other network providers. And because no one comes even close to Google in this area, the other ISPs/cable companies will naturally partner with Google, giving Google a cut without Google having to run the network itself.
And by the way, if the above paragraph didn’t make you nervous about privacy, it should. I, like others in the field, are starting to struggle with the implications of what we’re able to do. To really have your mind blown, read this, and consider turning your cell phone off.

Now, why does Madison stand a good shot at being a candidate city? First, Why not? It’s as good as any other city, and it’s doubtful that Google has candidates already in mind, unless they’re just looking to see how ridiculous cities are willing to go, to give them something to chuckle about at the Googleplex. Given that they haven’t announced any real criteria, or even how many networks they’re looking to build, at best we can make a few guesses from what they have said. In the end, for all we know they’re going to go with the city that the roommate of some engineer’s cousin thought has the best set of burger joints.

Demographically, we’re about perfect: right in the middle of the population size they’re looking to target, education and income levels above national averages, which means Madisonians are more likely to be able to want and afford faster Internet access, and our particular geography on the isthmus makes us a bit denser than other cities, which means less fiber build-out. Without a doubt, our biggest asset is the University – it more than anything else in the area can be the source of new applications that need the high bandwidth. Many technology-enhanced learning proposals would make much more sense if there were more parity between off-campus network bandwidth and on-campus bandwidth. The UW is also such a disproportionately large employer, has many jobs that can telecommute, and can be nimble enough to believably say that its employees actually will telecommute. (The State of Wisconsin would be great too, but no one would believe it if it said it was going to drive applications or change work patterns that true high speed Internet might make available.) As much as possible, our application should talk about what we want to do with a high speed network, and not just hope that someday we’ll figure it out.

I don’t want to be too down on the local high-tech scene, because I think there are some great people who I consider friends here doing great work, and it’s only getting bigger and better, but it’s not really big enough to be credible. Certainly, we should mention it – but it’s not our lead. Epic is big, but it’s not a real driver of other technology companies. We don’t read enough about new companies “founded by former Epic Engineers.” Getting more people to quit Epic and start their own companies (with the knowledge that if they fail, Epic will still be there and they could go back) is something the region should be focused on for economic development.

MUFN is a big deal and should be emphasized. MUFN, the Madison Unified Fiber Network, is a “Middle Mile” network. (Borrowing agan the highway analogy, this would be like the East Washington Ave or Stoughton Road of network – not a lot of people live on them, but they’re vital for connecting an area. They feed smaller networks, and connect to larger networks.) MUFN was never intended to be a way for consumers to connect directly to the Internet. To quote DoIT staff who worked on MUFN, “The primary focus of the partnership is… for public sector gateway institutions, and the UW’s interest is in enhancing network connectivity for many units that are located on off campus locations in the metropolitan area.” I’ve never seen the full MUFN proposal, but there was a summary document from the school district that has some good information, and the “Fact Sheet” for MUFN from the BTOP program submissions from Wisconsin has some good information.

MUFN is only half of what we asked for, though – there is a companion request for the “Madison Broadband Initiative“. It’s a “Last Mile” proposal, ie it would actually connect consumers to the Internet. To quote, “The purpose of the Madison Broadband Initiative (MBI) is to provide free, low-cost or competitively priced broadband service to anchor tenants and vulnerable populations through fiber deployment and a Wi-Fi mesh network.” It wouldn’t cover the whole city, only some parts, like the northside and southside, where MadCityBroadband doesn’t currently provide service. (MadCityBroadband would operate the network to consumers.) The full application is here. I don’t think we’ve heard back from the Federal Government on whether or not MBI has been funded yet – we just heard back on MUFN, and they’re meant to be partner programs, so I think we’ve got a good chance on MBI. MBI is interesting for the Google app because it’s an opportunity for a partnership with Google. Google is only interested in fiber, but wireless can and should be part of a subscriber’s service, so it’s a way for Google to offer better service to their customers without having to build out a wireless network of their own.

Obviously, having the Google office in Madison helps, but I doubt it’s a big enough deal to make a serious impact.

So, are there strikes against Madison? Not a lot. The big one is “we’re as good as any other city”, which means that there are lots of other cities that could make a convincing case. If we have a strike, it’s probably our electricity fuel mix - Wisconsin relies disproportionately on coal for its power. If, as part of their network, Google wanted to open a large data center nearby, Wisconsin would be a less-likely choice, because when carbon is finally priced into the electricity bill, Wisconsin will suffer. It’s not clear that Google wants or needs to put a data center here, though.

In the end, if we don’t get it, does it really matter? Probably not. Hopefully, just by doing this, Google forces the rest of the industry to catch up. Google is good at that – does anyone remember how online mapping worked before Google Maps? In the first few years, it’ll be nice to have a leg up over other cities, and it’d be a temporary boon for the city to attract workers. (I’m sure there are people who would look at the availability of 1Gbs Internet access as a strong incentive to chose living in Madison, which would help our employers attract workers. If Google selected Madison and only covered the Isthmus, it’d probably spur some downtown condo sales, too) However, in the end, that high speed access will be the norm, not the exception.

As a final note, one of the most exciting things about Madison completing this RFI and collecting the supporting information will be to see how excited people are for more faster Internet access, and to talk about how by building this infrastructure, we’ll be unleashing a lot of economic potential that’s been just waiting below the surface – potential we’ve always known was there. It’s not like it’s a technical challenge to build what Google’s proposing to do. That invites the question – why haven’t we done this earlier? Instead of waiting for a white knight from the marketplace to save us, why didn’t we do this for ourselves? We briefly explored this on the BRTB, trying to find a way to build a fiber network for Madison. The reason we can’t? Republicans pushed through a law, straight from industry playbooks, preventing cities from building their own broadband network and offering it to consumers. It was supposed to make it possible for competition to come in, but it’s been six years, and nothing has happened. Instead, it’s just protected the profits of the incumbents, who are content to just enjoy the revenue stream. There’s good reason to believe that a “public option” for a fiber network would spur competition.

If, at the end of this process, we amass overwhelming evidence that high speed Internet access would create jobs and grow our economy, and Google doesn’t select us, will we shrug and say “Oh well”, or will we find the courage and political will and do ourselves what we say is needed?

One of the advantages of taking forever in actually finishing this set of blog posts is that the “what should Madison do” part got a lot easier, because we’re actually doing some of it.

Obviously, the first concern a month ago was just getting Madison to apply. That seems to be covered.

The next question is, what should be in our application? The answer to that is, “we don’t know.” Frankly, the only people who do know all work at Google, and they’re not saying. Dane101 unhelpfully blasted the Madison application process as “bureaucratic.” That’s not really fair, because for all we know that’s exactly what Google is looking for. In fact, we do know that’s some of what Google is looking for – detailed bureaucratic technical information that the city is in the best position to provide. That’s all that Google has clearly asked for, so in that sense, the bureaucratic answer had better be damned good, because that might be all that counts. (In fact, if you look at the questions Google has actually answered in any detail, they’re all bureaucratic)

Now, Google is also looking for community support, but what exactly does that mean? Certainly, there’s not going to be a community that says “Nah, we don’t want a company to come in and offer a service thats an order of magnitude better than our existing service, on their own risk”. Personally, I think the best thing we can do is to stress the UW as an application driver, and to get consistent messaging between the city, community groups, and citizens who are nominating Madison, but that’s just a wild guess, and I haven’t seen anyone with a factual basis for why their guess is better than mine.

My advice for the process is the same advice you give your friend – you know, the who’s having trouble dating, but you’re pretty sure he or she can and will find the right person with a bit of luck: “just be yourself”. So, Madison, let’s not stress what the application should or shouldn’t have in it, because we don’t know. Trying to read Google tea leaves is pointless. Let’s just put in our application whatever we’d put in if we ourselves were evaluating it, and if it works out, great. Google will either fall in love with us or they won’t, and there’s no point in trying to be someone we’re not.

If we’re not doing something well, it’s that we’re not being very transparent in what our application will look like. There’s information flowing into the city, but not much coming out. We can’t, as a community, come up with a response if we never get to see a draft of what’s being included. If we’re looking for new and innovative ideas for what to include, the best way to encourage people to think of things is to let them see what other people are thinking, so they can riff off of those ideas. We should be completely fine if other cities “steal” our ideas, because ultimately, if they’re good ideas we want to see them implemented. Of course, maybe this will all change in a few days with the community meeting, but I don’t get the impression that the city is looking to make that meeting a two-way street.

I don’t want to say that there’s been failed leadership here, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s been muddled leadership from the city. Who, actually, is in charge? The IT director? Mark Clear? The Mayor should have put Rachel Strauch-Nelson as the lead on this project, because she does a good job of communicating, and has the time and authority over city staff to do so, unlike Alders.

This process has exposed some what I think are pretty serious weaknesses in how we respond as a community to these sorts of opportunities. For one, we have organizations that are supposed to jump at these sorts of things. Where the heck is THRIVE in all of this? They should be organizing a community response. The Economic Development Commission discussion was embarrassing. I once wanted to be on the EDC, but now having sat in on a couple of meetings, and read Brenda’s recap of others, I have to wonder, what is the point? The EDC doesn’t strike me as actually accomplishing anything.

The most impressive efforts have been by the local high-tech community, which is trying to organize itself to be able to respond, and is leading the charge with the Facebook page – but there’s that ambiguity in leadership again. We think we need citizen action to pull this off, but citizens need some coordination to make it happen. This is where government can and should play a role – what Tim O’Reilly is talking about when he says “government is a convener and an enabler–ultimately, it is a vehicle for coordinating the collective action of citizens.” The government is legally authorized and empowered to bring people together. That’s the broader picture of Government 2.0: It’s not just the government providing crime data so people can build Google Maps mashups, it’s envisioning a new way of thinking about government, where citizens create what they need. It doesn’t replace elected officials – it’s completely compatible with a republican form of government, with elected representatives who call on the citizen experts to assist.

I strongly suspect that some of the vocabulary might be a little bit different, but the Gov 2.0 underlying principals of citizen participation are already the norm in Madison and in Wisconsin, thanks to progressive ideas from the beginning of the 20th century. It’s other cities where they are just now discovering the value of active citizen engagement that makes Gov 2.0 so exciting for so many people. That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are some twists that we haven’t considered, and we certainly need the technology upgrades to bring those principals into the 21st century. One of the things I want to do while I’m out here in DC for the next few months is to meet up with the local Gov 2.0 folks here, and bring that back with me to Madison to get a “Madison Gov2.0″ group going. One of the results of the Google Fiber submission is going to be a collection of people who on March 26th are sitting around saying “now what?”. If Madison gets Google Fiber, or if it doesn’t, we shouldn’t let this group scatter back to the wind. Technologically, I think it’d be fun to get a some people together and say “let’s stop waiting and just build something for Madison” – maybe a new iphone bus tracker app, or a decent iphone problem reporter, or the start of an open 311 system. From a civic engagement perspective, I think it’s part of the way to have a larger conversation about what we want out of our citizens in governing Madison.

===============

I’ll have more to say about this soon, but this is really cool:

Think big with a gig: Our experimental fiber network

This is a great opportunity for Madison, and we shouldn’t let it pass us by. Unfortunately, outside of the City, I’m not sure there’s a group that can respond. We need to change that, too.

Keeping track of what all’s going on with Housing/Tenant Stuff in ASM in the 2009-2010 school year can be a bit confusing, so I thought I’d try and lay it all out there.

The Student Tenant Union was/is a GSSF-funded group for the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years. They recieved “eligibilty” in the fall of 2007, which meant they could recieve seg fees starting July 1, 2008. Unfortunately for them, no one was actually around in the fall of 2008 to start the group. (See the comment by Alex on that post.) Even more of a problem for the STU, no one was around in the fall of 2008 to submit a budget a proper for the 2009-2010 school year, and so the SSFC was forced to fund them at the minimal level, which is $4000. Later in the fall of 2008, Kyle Szarzynski took over the STU and it actually came to life a bit during the spring of 2009. Unfortunately for the STU, on July 1 2009 the $4000 budget took over. I don’t believe anyone is actively claiming to represent the STU, and its $4000 budget will simply go back into the Seg fee pot on June 30th, 2010.

The Student Tenant Resource Center was a “new” group, founded by Szarzynski, that applied for eligibility in the fall of 2009. They were denied, on the grounds that they were in fact the Student Tenant Union, and as the Student Tenant Union had incurred a number of violations, the STRC was responsible for the violations. Kyle disagrees and then some.  However, a few days later, they were denied eligibility again.  (Read the comments, not the story). I thought that they had appealed again, but apparently not, or at least I can’t find it online, and even then I’m pretty sure that everything has been resolved, and the STRC is not getting any GSSF money in the 2010-2011 school year. (They can, of course, get money from the 2009-2010 budget for travel, events, and operations, from the ASM Finance Committee)

The Madison Property Rating Website, ie the Tenant Rating Website, ie the Landlord Rating website, is an independent project separate from the STU/STRC. Originally proposed by Eli Judge, (see 2:00 into the video) ASM ultimately took the plunge and allocated funding for its creation in the 2008-2009 school year (I think about $8000) and put in about $2300 to run it in the 2009-2010 (July 1 to June 30th, 2010) school year. For the 2010-2011 budget that ASM is currently discussing, the operational money remains about $2300. Obviously, the isn’t up and running yet, but hopefully the final understandings can be reached in the University soon and ASM can actually spend the money, and the site could be up and running late this spring. Ideally, there’d be a good advertising push by the MPR Oversight Board, and people would start actually rating Landlords, so the website is useful in the Fall of 2010, when potential renters will start to actually need it.

The MPR website is somewhat of a duplication of a program by the STU, (see the comments) but the STU never actually spent the money allocated to create such a website, much less delivered an operating website, so concerns about duplications were resolved. I still have deep concerns that ASM hasn’t put enough money into the MPR operations budget to effectively run it, but until ASM gets it up and going we’re not going to know what it takes.

After watching the GSSF process fail to deliver Tenant Services year after year (after year) I thought there must be a better way to do this, so I proposed a line item in the 2010-2011 ASM Budget to just go out and buy Tenant and Housing support services. It wouldn’t start until July 1 2010 at the earliest, and more likely several months later. We’d create a list of services we want, and solicit bids through the state purchasing process, just like ASM does with the Rape Crisis Center. Exactly what services would be provided is a bit hard to say – we don’t know what they cost until we ask for bids, but we can’t know what we can afford until we know what they cost. The state can easily handle this sort of bidding process with a “Best Value” bidding process – ASM provide a menu of choices in its “Request for Proposals”, potential providers will tell us what they cost, and then ASM will rank bids based on the “Value” of items and their costs. Until ASM has a ballpark of what it will fund this at, it’s pointless to try and create a Request for Proposals, because if our budget is $50,000 we’re going to create a very different proposal than if we get a $10,000 budget.

I don’t know who would be the provider – obviously, I expect the Tenant Resource Center to bid, but I think Porchlight, the Salvation Army, and the YWCA are other area non-profits that would be interested as well, and I’m sure there are others.

The SSFC cut this line item when they edited the ASM budget. This line item has nothing to do with the Student Tenant Union, or the Student Tenant Resource Center. It might have something to do with the MPR website: until we actually start running the MPR website we’re not going to know exactly what the best way to run the website will be, and I could see the MPR website operations being transferred to our Tenant Services Provider. (Note that ASM would still pay for the initial construction – the $8000). More likely the MPR website will be run the way its currently set up to be: with a Oversight board, with some ASM Student Council members and the rest UW Madison students who may or maynot be otherwise involved with ASM.

The Tenant Support Services money could also be used to help fund some of Bryon Eagon’s ideas about Tenant/Landlord mediation

Even if the money for the Tenant Support Services doesn’t happen, there’s one idea that I want to have happen anyway, which is the Housing Fair. (I wrote about this for the Herald, too, because I hated my diversity piece and needed a last-minute substitution) It seems that the Legislative Affairs Committee is interested in taking this on as a project with one of their interns, which is fine by me. The fair is another example of something that we could outsource to Tenant Support Services Provider, but we can do it ourselves, too.

Finally, Legislative Affairs is going to get involved in Maniaci’s Lease Renewal Timeline ordinance. (See also the minutes of the Jan 25th, 2010 meeting). This won’t take any money, just lobbying by ASM.

I think that’s everything that’s going on.

The new semester starts in a few days. This past fall, some members have privately grumbled that they didn’t like that I showed up with ideas out of nowhere, and that they wished they I had let more people know ahead of time what I was thinking. Fair enough.

During meetings, I’ve made repeated mention of my ASM to-do list. Rather than just picking things off it each meeting and showing up with them, I’ll lay out what’s left on my list for the spring.

Over break, every ASM chair had to create a similar list of committee goals for the spring semester. Hopefully those lists/reports will all be made public soon. It’d be nice if the other ASM council members put something together as well, and got it out to the public. I don’t care how they do it – starting or using their own blog, a ton of Twitter updates, a Facebook note, a letter to the editor in either Herald or Cardinal, or just get Ken to post it on the ASM blog, whatever. Whatever you do, just don’t send it as an email only to the rest of ASM. That doesn’t help anyone.

So, here’s what I want to do this semester. It’s not super-ambitious; graduation is more of a priority for me than ASM. My goal is to finish things before 17th session takes over, or leave things with such a neatly-wrapped bow that 17th session doesn’t have much of an excuse for not doing something.

Of course, if something comes up, I reserve the right to add to this list during the semester. I apologize for the all of the jargon, but these are all outlines of what I want to do, not final descriptions of specific proposals.

To make it readable, I’ve broken it up into five different posts.

Funding issues – Tenant Services RFP, Creative Works fund, Centers funding stream, Print Media funding stream

Action items – Housing Fair, Graduate Student Town Halls

ASM jobs – ASM Foundation, Webmaster job, Chief of Staff, eliminate ASM Secretary

Bylaws and Constitutional Changes – United Council amendment, Term start date amendment, Stipend acceptance bylaw, First Meeting agenda bylaws, Vacant seat bylaws, overall scrubbing of bylaws

ASM Organizational efficiency – Integration of Shared Gov appointees, Consent Agenda, Data and Documents availability, Streaming broadcast of Council meetings, delegation meetings with Deans, and inviting the Chancellor to council meetings.

[This is part of my series of ASM goals for Spring Semester. Read them all here]

We need to think a little bit harder about how to integrate the Shared Gov appointees with the rest of ASM and campus. This does not mean we use Shared Gov appointees as policy tools by trying to tell them how to vote – instead, they should be resources. We need to keep in mind that the Shared Gov appointees work for campus and their committees, not for ASM, and putting too many burdens on the appointees isn’t likely to get us anywhere. I don’t have any great ideas here, it’s just something that could be better. (Off the top of my head, have a shared gov meeting where all the appointees break up into their clusters, then get Council/Leg Affairs/AcAffairs/Diversity to all attend that afternoon and just meet the appointees?)

It’s not a super-high priority for me, and I may not actually do anything with it this semester, but I would love to sign on with someone else bringing something forward.

I’d like to operate meetings under a “consent agenda”, to save time. This is real simple – in one quick vote, we get all the non-controversial stuff out of the way with no discussion and no waste of time. It could cut an hour or more off of council meetings, which god knows everyone would appreciate.

We need to do a better job of getting documents and data out and available. It’s embarrassing that none of our minutes are posted. The archives of the student council email list server, and the coordinating council list server should be easily online. ASM should stop using “the server”, and instead access more data through the ASM website. There’s no better way to ensure the public has full transparent access than to insist ASM uses the same process to access documents as everyone else – to eat our own dogfood, as the saying goes.

We should stream our meetings online. Even if it’s crappy, it’s better than nothing. $99 buys us Adobe Connect. We stick a couple of microphones around the table, and it’s probably not too bad. (Even better would be talking WSUM into steaming the meeting for us, since they’re on the other side of the wall)

We should insist that all delegations meet with their Deans at least once a semester. This just seems like a no-brainer.

We should also get the Chancellor and Dean of Students to come to a meeting or two a semester, as a regular event, just to give us an update and to give council members  a chance to ask them questions.