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papers-we-love / organizers

Materials for starting a local Papers We Love chapter
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Chapter Request: Berkeley, California #85

Closed saneeeee closed 2 years ago

saneeeee commented 2 years ago

Hello, my name is Saner and I am a EECS undergrad student at UC Berkeley, I love building personal projects, playing tennis, and solving puzzles (not only jigsaw hehe :) ) in my free time. Sadly I am not active on social media, but I guess you could find my semi active Linkedin account

I read about PWL in a stack overflow article, and I can honestly say that I am 100% in support of everything that PWL stands for: following my intellectual curiosities, having a platform to get help, helping others follow theirs, and creating a lively community where these interactions take place.

This is especially why I would love establishing a chapter at UCB: the campus offers a readily available venue to hold events of any sizes, a diverse and large demographic that's already interested in CS and research, other members of the campus community exploring possible interests in the field, many experts in the field, proximity to the Bay Area, and many more benefits. I think that in this sense a PWL chapter in UCB will be beneficial both ways, allowing both the campus community to explore/ showcase areas of interest and the PWL community to gain many high quality, engaged members.

I would be more than happy to help establish this community in our campus and organize events/forums with the help of other interested members. While we only need 4 enrolled students to establish an official student community at UCB, I think that a PWL chapter will experience an explosive growth when the word gets out and we start organizing events. I am hopeful that many others both at UCB and PWL are as excited as I am to get this journey started.

I have also read the code of conduct and proudly stand with all of the values that PWL outlines.

hakutsuru commented 2 years ago

@saneeeee Welcome. I hope to get to this soon, but I want to ask the team here if they have any concerns -- since I am not sure we have had organizers also operate as official school clubs before. Your chapter may need to add and transition organizers more often, due to academic club restrictions and such.

We are a very flexible organization though, so I do not foresee issues, just want to give our team a chance to discuss thoughts. We usually meet twice per month, and chat via slack, so it should not take much longer.

saneeeee commented 2 years ago

Hello @hakutsuru , it's great to hear back from you. I completely understand the differences/ concerns that a chapter also being an academic club brings. I should have addressed some points regarding this in my initial requests: foremost UCB has many clubs that organize events and gatherings that have many attendees outside of the college (like TedX Berkeley conferences), and many clubs have non college affiliated members (like Cal Hiking Society), so a chapter being a part of UCB won't in any way prevent other people to attend chapter meeting and events. As I pointed out before, the club needs 4 enrolled students as the official signatories for it to be recognized, which allows it to reserve space on campus and possibly obtain funding.

While these two factors will aid greatly in the success of the chapter, in my opinion another great advantage of a chapter being affiliated with UCB will be the university's recognition in the field, which may definitely help bring in more exciting speakers and members to events additional to the ones that the campus houses.

Im looking forward to your response.

hakutsuru commented 2 years ago

@saneeeee -- Berkeley is setup - https://github.com/papers-we-love/berkeley

Once you accept the invitation as collaborators, please update the Readme and Code of Conduct with your chapter's information. You have admin access on the repo, so add other organizers as required.

Hopefully, Berkeley group will thrive, and your readme can serve as an example for other academic environments on how to manage and document team changes over years.

With harassment frequently in the (North American) news, we hope every new chapter will embrace our mission to foster open and accepting communities -- so please read the Code of Conduct, and let us know if it can be improved (or made more culturally aware).

You are encouraged to join our slack -- http://papersweloveslack.herokuapp.com/

Welcome aboard.

saneeeee commented 2 years ago

@hakutsuru This is great to hear, perfect timing! With the finals ending this week, I'll proceed in getting the club officially recognized by the university too.

Thank you very much, best wishes!