GPSA Finance Commission Comments

(Current) No policy.

(Proposed) To obtain funding for an event, the organization must submit the event details (such as time, location, program speakers and topic descriptions) to University Events Calendar and provide a link to GPSAFC Event Calendar 1 month before the event. GPSAFC will not reimburse groups that do not follow this rule.

I believe graduate students and the organizations they belong to do enough to post their events without being required to do so on the university website in order to obtain reimbursements. How often is the greater Cornell community going to find our events on the Cornell events calendar? I feel that this is a waste of website space and the time it would require to post all events.

Let me clearify the purpose of the posting request. It’s not for the community people outside Cornell, but for graduate students who pay student activity fee to sponsor these events, and want to see what is going on campus in each given day. They may not have enough time to become a member, or they may belong to a different school. But that should not be the reason to exclude them from a particular event.

We constantly hear the complain of a lack of communication among schools, organizations, and fields, especially since we have such a large campus and so diverse fields. A lot of time different schools run their events independently without knowing what’s going on in other parts of the university. We do not have a centralized place to collect all the events for graduate students. The big red barn has an email list, but it does not go to professional schools. We want to have a online place where all the events are centralized. Please don’t worry about lack of attention and waste of time. When the events calendar is full of interesting events, people will go there frequently to check things out. We can also ask the university to feature it on Cornell homepage once in a while. That way it will serve as a good place for groups to attract attention. It will be good publicity, and make the future member recruitment and fundraising much easier.

These are the initial intention of the posting request. We are open for discussion on specific request. For example, we may apply this posting request for large events and general interest events and waive the requirement for some small scale, group specific interest events. We can allow some room for the groups to learn and get used to it. When they see more attendants towards their posted events, they will be more willing to complian.

I appreciate the goals of better communication and increased publicity, but also really support the idea YU Yu raised that “we may apply this posting request for large events and general interest events and waive the requirement for some small scale, group specific interest events”. I think language to this effect should be included in any changes to the policy documents.

If some group has a social function, for example, it could destroy the purpose if a lot of unexpected people showed up for free food just because it was on the university calendar. I think posters targeting specific groups accomplish the goal of making events open to the entire University community, along with the goal of targeting a specific group of people.