Maintaining Hacker Society

The Mission of Hacker Society

A time and place for people to learn about technology from each other, in order to build a community, to empower the individual, promote equality, and build an open society.

Open Society: An open society promotes freedom of thought and expression, personal responsibility, individualism, cooperation, and equality of all citizens.

Organizational Structure of Hacker Society

Hacker Society seeks to embody an open society. We have one servant in charge of ensuring the weekly lecture series continues called the Maintainer. Through our communication tools such as email lists other participants are encouraged to hold their own events.

ACM and IEEE are more traditional student groups at CWRU. They have money and hold LinkState and hackCWRU. In practice many of the officers of ACM and IEEE are also Hacker Society participants.

If you would like to hold an event or a lecture outside of the weekly ones organized by the maintainer here is how you do it. If you need money talk to ACM/IEEE, the EECS department, and/or invite companies to sponsor the event.

  1. Decide on a date and time.
  2. Decide on a location. Kim Yurchick (in the EECS office) or ACM/IEEE officers can assist you in booking a room.
  3. Announce the event on hackers-discuss@case.edu and ask the Maintainer to announce on cwru-hackers@case.edu
  4. Do other forms of advertisements (such as flyers)
  5. Send a reminder email day of.
  6. Hold the event!

Some Event Ideas:

  • A GPG public key signing party
  • A Linux or BSD install fest
  • A code golf competition
  • A quine competition
  • A hackathon
  • A capture the flag game (where the flag is a file on a computer and the teams have to break into the computer to “grab” the flag)

Major Responsibilities of the Maintainer

Every Semester

  • Send out an invite for people to give lectures. This should go out on the main list.
  • If you know any good companies (through internships etc...) attempt to invite someone to give a talk.
  • Consult friends and other members to recommendations on companies + contact information.
  • Create a schedule of talks using the Trello board. Each talk should get a card and go in the Spring 2016 list.
  • Make sure the room is reserved. We have been using Glennan 421 talk to Kim Yurchick to get it done.

Every Week

  • Make sure there is always a talk or other content each week. This means that you should have a backup talk that you yourself can give if everything falls through. Also know of other members (me for instance or Andrew Mason) who can be counted on to have a talk in a hurry.
  • Make sure the announcement email is sent. This is sometimes done by the ACM PR person but it is ultimately the responsibility of the Maintainer to advertise the weekly talk.
  • Make sure the speaker is good to go.
  • Day of send a reminder email that the talk is happening. Remember to include where and when.
  • Send email to the next week to confirm their talk.
  • Send email to 2 weeks out to confirm their talk.

In general make sure at minimum of 3 weeks out is always scheduled if possible. Especially at the beginning of the semester. It is ok if it falls off at the end or during midterms. Things get busy and attendance drops a little as well. The main job of the maintainer is to be organized. It is really not too much work but it is consistent over the course of the semester. You also can and should try and find ways to get people together after Hacker Society lectures and to have other smaller events.

Rules for Hacker Society Lectures

  1. Hacker Society is not a general forum, lectures are expected to be of a scientific, technical or educational nature. The maintainer reserves to the right to reject any talk not fitting with the mission of Hacker Society or which is deemed to be in bad taste. Hacker Society is not a forum for hate speech or other such language.
  2. Recruiting talks or “information sessions” are not allowed. All talks are expected to be technical.
  3. Recruiting pitches are limited to one slide.
  4. Lectures are expected to be conducted professionally.
  5. If it is your first time giving a talk at Hacker Society, we will ask to see your slides about two weeks in advance.
  6. CWRU’s policies on harassment are always in force on campus and at Hacker Society events.

Resources

Main email lists

Other Resources

Past Maintainers

  • Steve Dee [2007-2008]
  • Barbara Joy (Barbie) Jones [2008-2009]
  • Tim Henderson [2009-2010]
  • Stephen Johnson [2009-2010]
  • Josh Snyder [2011-2012]
  • Brian Stack [2011-2012]
  • John Dulin [2012-2013]
  • Brendan Higgins [2013-2014]
  • Jon Pfeil [Fall 2014]
  • Steph Hippo [Spring 2015]
  • Tim Henderson [Fall 2015]
  • Koby Picker [Spring 2016]
  • Yidi Huang [Spring 2016]