Meeting minutes:

Mar 2, 2004
Feb 24, 2004

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Brief minutes from today's meeting and the resulting "to-do" list. Thanks to everyone for coming.

Takuro raised the suggestion of developing a 1-unit policy discussion class primarily organized by students. Lisa Shaffer would be willing to serve as advisor to a 1-unit discussion class, if the department will let her! More discussion needed.

Logo - Marah has a great idea, would like feedback or competing ideas. We need to come up with a good name.

New students - can put in an info sheet in the packets students get, can try to get time next fall at the intro session. Marah, Sheila, and Katie are coordinating on this one. We need to have 50 copies of the flyer to Alice by next Wed. March 10.

Heather - a big round of applause for the new web site! We will shortly be working with her to get basic things like an updated list of seminars, model invitation letter, useful links, etc.

Alex led a brief discussion of several recent interesting articles. Links for these articles are now on the website. The report by the Union of Concerned Scientists was highlighted as the most important one to look at.

TO DO:
Davey - inviting a contact from World Bank for May
Sheila - arranging for Heidi to speak at end of April
Aaron - arranging for someone from Sierra Club to speak about the immigration issue and divisiveness within the club
Katie - arranging for Environmental Impact Assessment woman to come
Marah - will see about arranging for Donna Frye to come speak
Katie/Tegan: Try to schedule a meeting with Kathleen Ritzman about inviting government people
Everyone: continue to think about names

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Attendees: Chad English, Katie Phillips, Tegan Blaine, Heather Graven, Takuro Kobashi, Sheila Walsh, Steven Smriga, Marah Newman, Pat Masters, Lisa Shaffer, JJ Becker, Alex Ruane.

Some ideas for expanding the environmental policy group:
- create an environmental science and science policy group. The seminar series will be one activity of this group
- meet every two weeks for some business (plans for upcoming seminars) then discussion on a current policy-related issue (for example, attaching relevant news articles to the web site for a short talk/discussion)
- have a retreat/workshop in which students can talk about making their research or their careers more policy-oriented, practice talking to a crowd of non-scientists and getting feedback about their work (i.e. learning to be more dynamic speakers to a non-science crowd), other creative ideas?
- choose a topic and do a joint paper to submit to a journal on social science areas
- put together a student journal (though this may not be anything different from what JED currently does)
- approach former speakers for suggestions for other relevant speakers

Funding issues:
- At this time, we've decided to put off fundraising until next September and instead concentrate on building a good list of speakers/activities
- GSA does have money for student groups for which we may be eligible (group needs to be declared through SOLO office)

KATIE P: will speak to Alice about doing a talk at Open House
MARA and SHEILA: will help design an insert for the Open House Folder
HEATHER: designing a web page
ALEX: will contact people at USD for suggestions for speakers, will send first web site links to Heather
MARAH: will look into possible political candidates to invite (mayoral candidates, Susan Davis, etc.)
JJ: offered to contact former speakers for other suggestions if sent the contact list (JJ, I need to finish putting together contact information on this list before I send it to you)
ALL: brainstorm better group names!