View source for Meeting:June 10th, 2026

00:04 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. I'm going to record the meeting. Is that okay with everyone here? Okay. Okay. Let's start the meeting. It is 10:30 a.m. I will be recording the meeting and using FFmpeg to transcribe it, then posting it on the wiki. Okay. I'm here. Jerry's here online. Polkit's here. Gavin's here. Ciel. is here. And Gregory Richards is here. Okay, so forthcoming, the acceptance of the agenda, additions and deletions, is there anything we want to add or delete from the agenda?

00:42 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah, actually I want to add a $35 budget to the agenda of today, and that's for the SSD upgrade for our main storage server. We have already bought the SSD and installed it, but we later found that the machine is missing an adapter card. Which is worth about $35. That's the only thing we are pending to migrate the whole user storage to SSD. And that's only a $35 budget, and we have some miscommunication when we are making the budget from the beginning of the term.

01:30 - Sourojeet Adhikari
But because there's a mass of council meeting next week, we want that we could be able to motion for the budget in the meeting. I want you to, like, if we can reach a decision today to do the budget. It's $35, but it falls part of the corresponding tables.

01:44 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay, then. Let's talk about that in 4.2 after we talk about the GPU purchase. Is that okay with you?

01:49 - Ciel Zhao
So everybody is okay with we are adding that to the agenda today? Okay, so we're good.

01:55 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay, all.

02:04 - Ciel Zhao
We should probably talk about the forthcoming really quickly.

02:16 - Sourojeet Adhikari
So there will be probably future meetings to discuss other issues. Like next week we might bring up website issues, clarifying who runs events in Progcom. Separating the constitution bylaws and potentially organizing office hours for officers. That support is coming for next week. We might want to look into preparing that. And now we can start talking about 4.1, the GPUs.

02:37 - Ciel Zhao
Would we have a wider range of time for selection next week? Because this week we only have a

2:45 - Souorojeet Adhikari: Yeah, it was just a bit constrained this week because we didn't have much time to talk about it. Is that okay with everyone? Yeah, that was fine.

03:07 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay, so now we can get to 4.1. Do you want to talk about things you wanted to talk about?

03:13 - Ciel Zhao
The things happened, like, I think it's still maybe the miscommunication in the past few days. We have the quotes ready to propose to Lori, and we have sent the codes to the exact mailing list. Maybe Gregor, maybe you are not included in that list, because that's a really high volume list that includes many of the spams of the club, right? I'd say there's a lot of spam.

03:43 - Sourojeet Adhikari
I think there's more spam than actually is.

03:45 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So I have sent the codes there for everyone to comment, but unfortunately I didn't receive any. So I will be presenting the codes to Laurie this Tuesday, I thought. But she actually told me, When we are going to meet lori in person or by email and I said we have previously talked on teams because sometimes lori

04:16 - Ciel Zhao
I feel lori is more comfortable when it's a not that formal setting so sometimes the email get unresponsive and I turned to him in person or by teams exit teams is more or less a substitution for in-person visits And he will give me the feedback about what's going wrong. what he was thinking about on the team's not in email. So that's the way how we have gotten the last math cooling and procurement done.

04:52 - Ciel Zhao
So what I suggested, we can do email confirmation as a record of decisions. After we have discussed on the team that was not very sufficient for accountability and transparency. So that's mainly the disagreement between us. Do you want to add anything up here? No, sounds good.

05:25 - Gavin Deane
Can I add something?

05:26 - Gavin Deane
Okay. Because by the sounds of it, the core for the GPUs is expiring on the 15th. Are you worried that if it expires, it's going to go up quite a bit the next time?

05:40 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah, the price is changing quite rapidly because of the market we all know about. So in the last two weeks when we are renewing our costs, it's already increased by $1,000. For the GPUs. So I don't want to risk losing the current price.

06:03 - Gavin Deane
Right, so basically you're wanting to make sure we jump on it and get it through before the quote expires.

06:11 - Ciel Zhao
Yes, and we need to allow two or three business days for Loury and the finance and procurement to actually issue the purchase order to the vendor. Yeah, okay. So it's like, we better decide the day. So the next day after Siracha (Sourojeet) is writing the issue to the console, actually before I actually see the email threads, because that day I was a little bit exhausted in the argument with Siracha (Sourojeet).

06:46 - Ciel Zhao
I have just sent a standard email with the carbon copy to everyone here, to the exact mailing list, sending the codes to Laurie and asking for feedback. I'm not sure who. Maybe talk that to Lori. Laurie said, I heard you have governance issues. So I checked other folders of my inbox.

07:15 - Ciel Zhao
I see, oh, there was a thread of the exact console yesterday, very late night. Sorry about putting everyone else into the thread in that time. So I... I'm sorry. Again, I'm sorry about the situation on Teams because he doesn't need to be quite open to discuss that in detail in email. I told him basically what we have been arguing in the last night and told him that if the things are going through all

07:54 - Ciel Zhao
entirely by email, it will be okay. Because that's one of the proposals Yancha has proposed to me, right? So Valerie seems still to be hesitating but I'm not sure what he's still waiting for.

08:14 - Gregor Richards
So I am a non-voting member. Nothing I say is binding. Blah blah blah. The impression I'm getting having been dragged in in the last moments is that there are many sort of Not ad hoc, but common law, let's call them, procedures, procedures set by precedent, that there's disagreements on what the procedure should be.

08:45 - Gregor Richards
And my, you know, my stance as the faculty advisor is that Anywhere where things have been informally done in one way and there's disagreement, the ultimate decider is the Constitution, which I have printed out and brought with me. The Syscom group does not actually have anything to do with procurement. The Syscom does maintenance, and there's sort of an obvious requirement to procure the things that are to be maintained.

09:18 - Gregor Richards
but anything that has to do with actual procurement, I would think that the, like, my careful reading of this... Any meeting that is ultimately to lead to a procurement, there's a very reasonable reason to want either the president, vice president, or treasurer there. And, you know, if that's inconvenient, then remember: this isn't your money. Who cares if the price goes up and you spend more of the university's money? They are my employer and your captor. Who cares? So...

09:49 - Gregor Richards
You know, it's good to be frugal, but if, you know, if there are disagreements and it ends up taking too long, let it go. Who cares?

10:02 - Sourojeet Adhikari
So thank you so much. It's my stance on the matter.

10:05 - Gregor Richards
Again, I'm a non-voting member. I'm just trying to keep the pace.

10:10 - Ciel Zhao
Procurement handler.

10:12 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Can I make a quick comment? So last year, we did also try to buy servers via MEF. We spent $38,000 on two servers, Teriyaki and Tahini. I did that procurement and coding all over email. There's one email with a guy named Ken from BD Computers, which I have over 150 emails with. All 50, every single one was CC'd Exec. All the ones to rovs were signing the invoice with CC'd Exec and signing with Massock and Moosa. But that was last year, and MEF ended up denying it because they said it was actually CSCF needed to procure it, not MEF, or not Massock. And so we had to go back to SLEF to go get money back.

10:44 - Sourojeet Adhikari
But I digress. Should we start talking about how to resolve this issue instead of...

10:50 - Ciel Zhao
Okay. Out of the topic, but maybe consider like establishing a finance mailing list for all the records to be sending without spamming everything to the exec.

11:03 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Yeah. We can consider that later. Next week, yeah. Okay, so for ways to resolve this, so one way that I propose to resolve it is to do it over Teams chat, because I think you said Lori seems a bit more comfortable with that.

11:18 - Ciel Zhao
Actually, I think he's more comfortable with the informal settings, so a group chat on Teams is also a kind of formal settings, so you'll know.

11:29 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay, then, so we have Teams chat and email.

11:33 - Ciel Zhao
Okay, I will prefer email as it leaves paper trail after even 90 days of retention. The team's history always got deleted after 90 days because maybe the university isn't paying Microsoft enough. I mean, that sounds like a pretty clear decider for email then, so paper trail is a requirement.

12:01 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. So are we okay with amending it to email?

12:04 - Gavin Deane
Yeah.

12:05 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. Okay, and then the second part is, who needs to sign off on it? I propose that the sysadmin, a member of syscom who's not an officer, and an officer needs to be present on the email thread. That can be resolved by cc'ing to exec and syscom. Is the sysadmin a member of syscom, who's not an officer, and an officer must be present on the email chain in this case? Is that okay with everyone here?

12:33 - Gregor Richards
Just, again, as a point of order, and holding the constitution here, A, the sysadmin is an officer, and B, a signing officer. Okay. And if I can just clarify, because in the recent change to the Constitution, it was for some reason made to be an actual decision who the signing officers are rather than it being de facto a certain

13:10 - Gregor Richards
set. Has it been decided this term who the signing officers are?

13:15 - Ciel Zhao
Could we add a motion today like deciding the signing officers? We can do it really quickly.

13:21 - Sourojeet Adhikari
It was decided on the day of election. I already sent in the day of election.

13:25 - Speaker 05
Yeah. Okay.

13:29 - Sourojeet Adhikari
So, be it resolved, the discussion with Lori on the GPU purchases occurs over email with a sysadmin, a member of syscom who's not an officer, and signing officers present. Quick question. So, CC syscom is actually resubstituted?

13:42 - Ciel Zhao
Okay.

13:42 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. And then the second part is, be it resolved, the sysadmin, president, and treasurer need to sign off. Is that OK with everyone?

13:50 - Ciel Zhao
So do we need to each send an email separately to Loury, or we can reach a conclusion internally and let one person to do it?

14:00 - Sourojeet Adhikari
We can let one person do it. So should we say it can be resolved over mailing list? OK. Sign off. Sign off.

14:13 - Ciel Zhao
Because we don't really want to spam him a lot.

14:16 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Yep.

14:18 - Ciel Zhao
I'm not sure if we are putting that into the motion, but I think the way we do the things is like we will discuss with Laurie about the codes and see if he accepts those and thinks they are feasible to buy, to procure. And after receiving his confirmation, maybe I turn back to all of you and say, okay, we have a clearance from Laurie and Are we going to sign off that and actually kick-starting the procurement?

14:51 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Is that okay?

14:54 - Gregor Richards
Stop looking at me. I'm not a voting member.

14:56 - Ciel Zhao
I'll interrupt if I have anything to say.

14:58 - Gregor Richards
It sounds good to me.

15:00 - Ciel Zhao
Do you guys have any comments? Because sometimes Laurie throws back the host with his new questions, new issues, so I don't want to bother everybody here every time I send in a new code to Laurie. Okay. As long as I'm Carbon copying everybody.

15:17 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK. Do you want to add in the hypertech code in case he gets annoyed? Because that is the supplier they used for the supercomputer in the basement.

15:36 - Ciel Zhao
Actually, the hypertech code is only one GPU. I think that's a major change to the original proposal, that we can get two anyway. OK. I really appreciate that, and I really want to thank you all for getting the codes, but anyway, the MIG-3 7G54 is so competitive, and I cannot deny it. Are there any other changes people want to make?

16:05 - Sourojeet Adhikari
I think for now, OK. Do you want to just quickly vote on it?

16:09 - Gavin Deane
Just to be clear, is this specifically for this quote, or future quotes above a large size?

16:18 - Sourojeet Adhikari
This is just specifically for this quote.

16:21 - Ciel Zhao
So the standing resolution should be a resolution. Standing is for some long-term governance that being effective for-Something that stands. Yeah. Each time something happens, like a routine procedure. We can establish an understanding resolution about the financial transparency and accountability next time. I think my understanding is a lot of the concern came with the amount of money that this is budgeted for and the speediness. Is this the single largest amount of money we have spent here?

16:55 - Gavin Deane
So far to my knowledge. Yeah. Yeah. I was looking at budget allocations from previous tables.

17:01 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah.

17:02 - Gavin Deane
It's like $70.

17:08 - Ciel Zhao
OK, are there any other questions on the motion? No?

17:20 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK, let's just do a quick vote. I'm for passing the motion. OK, we have four. OK. OK. The motion's passed. OK. Now let's quickly move on to 4.2, the card purchase. Do you want to quickly talk about it?

17:37 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah. In the last Mac proposal, we have purchased a bunch of SSDs and installed them to our CSC club nodes and storage nodes for the user storage that's shared on every machine. But later, we found out that the storage nodes Doesn't really have a SAS card on it so the new SSDs are not actually recognized by the operating system. There are six 4TB SSDs there.

18:09 - Ciel Zhao
Awaiting to be used for holding the whole user's storage. That will be a pretty significant performance improvement for the general use, especially for the IO-intensive tasks like firing up MVS code remote on the machines. So I really want this to be happening soon and there are other tasks waiting for the changes on the user's migration.

18:46 - Ciel Zhao
So I want this to be passing a little bit quicker. Could we get that budget motion on to the next Microsoft Council meeting next week? Yeah.

19:01 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. This is a little bit different, but how about as long as we get an email to the exec email relatively soon with what the specific item is and a potential link to it and maybe the cost, we can send it to them? Does that sound...

19:18 - Ciel Zhao
Okay, I didn't have a chance to send it, but I can describe them verbally here today. It's a $35 budget. It will be buying from China because it's the cheapest way. Buying from Canada or U.S. Will cost more than $100.

19:36 - Gavin Deane
Honestly, the details of exactly what it is for this meeting, I'll probably forget. But if you just put those details into an email in CCS, it's pretty easy to put that into a request for a budget, by my understanding. So just send the email with that information in CCS.

19:54 - Ciel Zhao
OK.

19:54 - Gavin Deane
Sounds good.

19:56 - Ciel Zhao
OK. So are we going to do the motion here today? Oh, we just decided to fly out of the meeting on the exact email.

20:09 - Gavin Deane
I think the motion is getting altered to you just send an email describing it. It seems like a pretty reasonable expense. Yeah.

20:34 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK.

20:35 - Gavin Deane
OK.

20:37 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK.

20:39 - Gavin Deane
It results in an email. OK.

20:43 - Ciel Zhao
OK. I will learn to email. Are we voting yes, no? Yes. Shall we proceed with this motion?

20:53 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Yeah. Yes. OK. So everyone agrees to pass that.

21:00 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK, yeah.

21:01 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Four or five people.

21:03 - Sourojeet Adhikari
OK. OK. So it's passed. Is there anything else before we end?

21:10 - Ciel Zhao
I think there's no more movement on the agenda. OK. That's fine.

21:17 - Gavin Deane
I think there was a concern about, I'm not sure if there's a thing for this meeting or the future meeting, about what Whether we want to do CC'ing all members for all expenses or only expenses above a certain monetary value. That sounds like it might be a thing for the next Constitution meeting.

21:42 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. I'm just going to add it in the field.

21:46 - Gavin Deane
I don't think this is necessary to discuss right now. Because that seemed like it was the core of where the conflict was.

22:00 - Gregor Richards
Coming from. There should be some line between a case of Coke for the fridge and St. Churchill (I do not know what was said here, and the audio wasn't great). And a five-figure purchase.

22:17 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Add a discussion item next week about at what point you need to ask permission to spend money.

22:22 - Ciel Zhao
Yeah, sure. That could be a standing arrest. That's the right thing for a standing arrest. Yeah.

22:38 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay. Is there any other comments or concerns? None from me. None okay then I guess I'll end the meeting at 10:53 a.m. Okay it's been adjourned yeah is everything okay on discord?

22:59 - Gregor Richards
Discord is picking up radio signals Jerry

23:06 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Yeah?

23:07 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Uh, the meeting's adjourned. Oh, I know that, I know that.

23:11 - Ciel Zhao
I'm trying to pick up any other chatter. Oh, okay.

23:15 - Sourojeet Adhikari
Okay, sounds good. Anyways, if you guys are gone, bye. Alright, bye. Um, yeah.

23:27 - Ciel Zhao
Uh.. so, that's all the action.


Agenda:
CSC Executive Council Meeting
Date: 2026/06/10
Location: MC 3036
Time: 10:30am
(I just copied the computer graphics lab)
Note: I will be recording the meeting minutes, and using ffmpeg to transcribe, then posting on
the wiki.
0. Introduction of Council Members & Attendance
Sourojeet Adhikari - Present
Jerry Zhu - Present
Pulkit Garg - Present
Gavin Deane - Present
Ciel Zhao - Present
Gregor Richards (non-voting) - Present
1. Acceptance of the Agenda – Additions or deletions
During the meeting with Professor Gregor Richards, Gavin had taken a few notes. Be it resolved
we publish a modified version of the notes
Note: This is subject to Gavin’s consent
2. Forthcoming
I think this is for future meetings, next week (date TBD) Sourojeet Adhikari will chair the
meeting.
Items to prepare for next week: Website updates, Clarifying who runs Events/Progcom,
Separating the constitution & Bylaws, and Organizing office hours.
3. Technical Presentation (we can do this next week)
4. Discussion Items
4.1 - GPU Server Purchase, Sourojeet Adhikari, Passed
Questions:
Where does the discussion with Lori occur for the GPU server purchase?
Who needs to sign off on the purchase?
Should someone have veto over the purchase, and if so who?
Action Items:
Be it resolved, the discussion with Lori on the GPU purchase occurs over a email with the
Sysadmin, a member of Syscom (who is not an Officer), and a Signing Officer present.
Be it resolved the Sysadmin, President, and Treasurer need to sign off and it can be resolved
via exec mailing list.
4.2 - Card Purchase, Resolution, Ciel Zhao, Passed
Action items be it resolved Ciel sends an email to exec@csclub.uwaterloo.ca with the cost &
description of the item, and we send it along to MathSoc in a reasonable time frame.
5. Conclusion of meeting.
Motion to adjourn Passed/Defeated
Time of Adjournment: 10:53am.
Notes: Add in discussion item next week about ‘at what point do you need to ask permission to
spend money’