Public Relations

Getting people to use UGCS is essential, both to making all our effort worthwhile and to our continued existence; we use up space and administrative energy and after the almost-shutdown this year we don't have the best track record.

Additionally, saying "we have X users, Y active" is very very helpful for seeking funding from any source, in particular MHF and/or ASCIT.

Build-out Feb. 2008

• February_2008_email

Neighbors

• Electronics Club (contact: Marc Grossman <marc@caltech.edu>)

Students

• Introducing people to UGCS: I remember when I was a frosh Ruthanne gave a short, hour long lecture during welcome week about all the services ITS offers and how to use them (And took general questions about what Tech was like, it was most amusing). Maybe we should do something similar? Tours? Sign up right then and there for an account? Damn, I sound like an army recruiter in a poor neighborhood!
• Building on the above, club fair presence?
• Offer prefrosh the opportunity to create an account as soon as they've matriculated (or as soon after as is posible, EG, waiting for a list from Admissions or something). Could be a security risk if done wrong, so be careful here. In particular, if we can hit them as prefrosh they'll be excited and bored (most likely) and more likely to put in a bit of time to set up PGP
• Craig suggests Marissa at the Tech would be interested that UGCS has been renovated and may want to run an article :-)
• UGCS (a few years ago) used to have the biggest monitors, most spacious desks, and fastest public computers on campus. I suspect that's no longer the case?

Faculty & Staff

• Publicize to faculty and staff that they, too, are eligible for UGCS accounts. Ideas?

Admissions/PR

• A student run unix cluster since 1989 is impressive PR. We make Caltech look better, they get us publicity. Additionally, the Admissions and PR offices can be helpful in locating funding sources in many cases.

Administration/IMSS

• Important to keep on good terms with them; we don't want any trouble later on. We are established but we want to keep communicating and address concerns as they come up. We really dropped the ball here, in that we got as far kicked out as we did before dialog was established.
• CS cluster seems to (errantly) believe our cluster is very very compromised. While it probably is, they tend to mistake logins to CS as hacking attempts, and our new cluster should hopefully be far more secure. So it's important that we maintain positive communication with them and with those above to prevent a misperception that we're not secure.