AberCompSoc
This year I have become president of my university's computing society or "aberCompSoc". The society has a rich history with a website from the early 2000's still being hosted. In recent years the group somewhat slowed and became mostly a drinking society. From this, the previous committee asked me to run for president and run some more topical activities.
I was previously a member of my secondary schools "coding-club" and was very attached to it. It was a space for programmers to spend their lunch times working on projects and talking about their work with each other, providing a chance to meet like-minded individuals and work on projects with them. Since starting at Aberystwyth I felt that I missed that environment and being offered this role as president I felt that I had a chance to try and recreate it.
First week and general activities
Before the start of the new year, the committee (myself included) spent a long time planning events and communications with the computing department to bring in new members. We secured a 5 minute window at the start of welcome lectures for first and second years and sent an email out to the whole department. From this our first session resulted in 60 attendees, this was a lot more than we were expecting but it soon died down to a more manageable 20 or so which it has remained at since.
The group now meets weekly in a department computer room and spends 3 or so hours just talking and coding. These are our main sessions but we also run larger events every month or so, normally involving coding related games. We've previously run:
- 24 hour ASCII only game jams
- Gatherings where people take turns producing presentations where they incorrectly explain a computing concept
- Gatherings where people collectively create a website, freely pushing changes to it and having it update live
Additionally to our events, we are also a student chapter of the BCS. This means we somewhat work with the local branch, attending their monthly meetings and helping to organise events including hosting talks and "Show and Tell" events where programmers can run short talks about the work they've been doing.
FOSDEM trip
FOSDEM is a yearly open-source convention held in Brussels. A large portion of FOSDEM's organisers are AberCompSoc alumni and from this its become tradition to go there every year. As president I worked alongside the treasurer and organised the trip. My role involved organising flights and accommodation and communicating details of the trip while the treasurers role included managing the funds (tracking the account students paid into) and organising a sponsored coach from the university for the trip to and from the airport.
The trip ended up having 30 sign-ups which was double the amount we normally took so required somewhat more management than previous years. We ended up splitting the 30 into two groups of 15, each in their own accommodation and committee member. Each group organised themselves and ran internal trips and journeys themselves. The two only mixed once or twice for a large group meal and a group photo. This was a nicely scalable idea that kept things really manageable.
By the end of the trip we'd spent the full two days at the event and also spent 2 days doing tourism activities around Brussels including going to the atomium, a number of museums and some fun after-parties. A full description of the trip can be found on the society's website here.
I'm really proud of this trip, considering how many people came, I was sure something would go wrong but from that overly cautious mindset the entire trip ended up going relatively well with no major issues!
