For students looking for minutes from ASSU Undergraduate Senate committee meetings, where stances on student group funding, advocacy issues and ASSU operations are decided, their search may yield frustration.

There aren’t many minutes.

In a check-in by The Daily about the status of a quarter and a half’s worth of committee meeting minutes, Senate leaders acknowledged that, despite a requirement in the ASSU Constitution that minutes be made available electronically within seven days of approval, the body has failed to do so nearly all year.

Their justification?

“No one would read the minutes,” said Anton Zietsman ’12, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a recent interview.

“Not a chance,” Varun Sivaram ‘11, Senate chair, agreed.

Chairs of each of the Senate’s five committees said they have held at least seven or eight meetings since the beginning of their term last spring, but only one set of minutes, from a Jan. 26 Appropriations & Rules meeting, appears on the committees’ pages of the Senate’s Web site.

“No one was aware” that posting minutes is required by the Constitution, Zietsman said, adding that details of Appropriations meetings could be gleaned from funding bills the committee submits each week to the entire Senate; he said those bills serve as an adequate proxy for minutes.

Alex Katz ’12, who chairs the Administration and Rules Committee, acknowledged that the Senate is obligated to carry out all of its duties.

“I think our job is to follow the Constitution,” Katz said.

Minutes Taken on Ad Hoc Basis, Senator Says

What, then, explains the missing minutes?

“I wasn’t aware, to be honest,” said Lee Jackson ’12, chair of the Communications Committee. Jackson explained that the call for published meeting minutes in the constitution had escaped him.

He said it appears that even basic notes have not been taken during some committee meetings.

“Of the five committees, I’d say three of them take minutes,” Jackson said. “To put it bluntly, I think it’s just laziness . . . people tend to check out after the first few months.”

In an e-mail to The Daily, Zachary Warma ’11, Student Life, Housing & Education chair, said that he has held seven committee meetings since the start of his term last spring. The minutes for these meetings were “sporadic” at best, Warma said.

“For the meetings — when they’ve occurred — there has not been a designated secretary,” Warma said. “For a few of those I believe there [is] documentation, but the meetings have unfortunately been of a more ad hoc nature than they should have been.”

Earlier this year, financial officers of student groups questioned the Senate regarding the absence on its Web site of funding policies applicable to their groups.

Katz pointed to one set of minutes from an A&R meeting last month that was uploaded to the committee’s page. However, he said, much of his work with the committee has been completed on an individual basis, without formal substantive meetings.

“There’s really not very much to report,” Katz stated.

Committee minutes aside, even the posting of minutes from the Senate’s general meetings to its Web site have trickled to a standstill since Nov. 10.

Elaborating on the Web site challenges that have hindered the Senate’s communication capabilities, Jackson revealed that some parts of the Senate’s original site were erased; that information remains lost, he said.

Jackson added that minutes are expected to appear on the new Web site, which is set to debut on Mar. 1.

“The old [Web site] has kind of been abandoned,” Jackson said.

Website Challenges Continue to Hold Back Communication Efforts

Some chairs have suggested that the sparse nature of the Senate’s Web site is a reflection of Web site construction complications fielded by the Senate’s Webmaster, Leonard Parker ’10, hired in November. But others seem to acknowledge that the problem goes beyond a defunct Web site.

Warma said that “as a committee chair, I was remiss in both asking my ad-hoc note keepers to send me along their minutes, as well as passing them along to the necessary sources to have them put online.”

“I don’t think you can argue that this is some flagrant disregard,” said Brian Wanyoike ’12, chair of the Advocacy Committee.

Wanyoike suggested that the body strives to adhere to its constitution and that when requested by individuals, meeting minutes “were [made] available.”

Senate members cite other efforts this year to improve communication and transparency, including through the Senate’s Facebook page and weekly one-minute video summaries, Jackson noted.

Many chairs seem to acknowledge a collective responsibility to enforce formal note-taking at each meeting, followed by timely publication on the Web site.

“The Senate has screwed up in its Web capacity,” Warma said, implying that the body’s overall vigilance regarding the Web site’s status has been lacking thus far.

“The Senate can rightly be faulted for the past three months of our Web site not being up to date,” Warma said.

“We all ignorantly assumed [the Web site] was being updated,” he added.