SG Update 11/21/2014

On the November 21 Student Government (SG) meeting, a representative from Finance and Administration gave a presentation on their strategic plan, a presentation for a plan to bolster RITpedia and club websites was given and a resolution to various parking pass-related PawPrints petitions was amended and passed.

Finance and Administration Strategic Plan

James Watters, senior vice president of RIT Finance and Administration (F&A), came to SG to present his division's strategic plan and to answer any questions from the senators. Currently, $82,306 is spent every hour to operate RIT at its current capacity. With oversight by President Destler, Watters tries to take into account the burden tuition can have on students and families while still trying to operate and advance the Institute's needs and initiatives.

The strategic plan for his division has five major points that will drive F&A's spending for the next few years: mobile solutions, which involves finding apps and programs that will move RIT into a more mobile friendly status; robotics, for creating devices that will alleviate some of the work force on campus and the extendf the capabilities of humans; big data, which is used to analyze how students function in and out of RIT to help drive what the university should focus on in a variety of topics; global, to bring together the campuses around the world and make it easier for students to travel abroad; and professional development to assist in the creation of jobs and training opportunities.

RITpedia and SG Website Hosting

Nathan Castle, director of services for SG, presented a mid-year update on two new services that SG will offer to students. First, RITpedia has been acquired and a revamp has been planned to make the site the top resource for RIT culture and history. Currently, students can log in with their RIT username and password and edit the site at their leisure, similar to Wikipedia. There will also be a wiki editing event on December 3 to drive more content creation on the site before it officially launches. The second new service is SG free web hosting for clubs. The sites will be Wordpress-style, all technical maintenance will be handled by SG and the design and content will be driven by the website owners. The service began a little over a week ago, and clubs can request a site by contacting Castle through email.

Pawprints Resolution: Parking Permit

Nick Giordano, SG director of student relations, presented a drafted resolution for the issues of parking permits like their prices, implementation and future. As it stands, the parking permit policy was an idea put into place under RIT's new strategic plan in conjunction with President Destler's initiatives for containing costs and preventing the raise of tuition. Though there have been conversations with Parking and Transportation about the issue, Destler has the final say on whether a change is implemented or not. A large discussion between all of the senators ended with edits being made to the final portion of the document, turning it into a recommendation for Destler to change the students from a “Level 3” employee permit to a Level 1 in hopes to lower the cost of permits for students.