Senate Technology Officer Report

Introduction

Table of Acronyms

CoC: Senate Faculty Member-At-Large Election

CoC: Academic Senate Committee Assignments

Notes for 2020-2021

Introduction

The job of the Senate Technology Officer has various responsibilities, nearly all of which involve voting and elections. This document describes those functions performed in the 2019-2020 academic year. I, David Moretti, was the STO for this academic year.

Table of Acronyms

Academic Senate – Monthly Changes

The STO is in charge of voting during meetings of the Academic Senate. The clickers that we use must be functional and votes must be recorded and given to the Senate Secretary.

This table shows all personnel changes in the Academic Senate this academic year. During the Spring 2020 semester, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the remaining Academic Senate meetings went remote via Cisco Webex

CoC: Senate Faculty Member-At-Large Election

Every spring the CoC runs an election to fill the one-third of the seats of the Members-At-Large whose three-year terms are expiring. The timeline for this election is shown in this table:

Academic Senate Faculty Members-At-Large (run by CoC)

Due to the College's Presidential search, the original dates were pushed back to afford HR and IT time to generate the eligible electorate list and populate the Big Pulse system.

The results of this election are seen here:

Senate Faculty Member-At-Large Election 2020

Report date: Monday 23 March 2020 17:05 EDT

Faculty Member-At-Large Candidates

Poll ID: 158612
As at Poll close: Monday 23 March 2020 17:00 EDT
Number of voters: 138 · Group size: 399 · Percentage voted: 34.59
Vote counting method: V1 FPTP (first-past-the-post)
Ranked by votes

Results generated by BigPulse Online Voting

These results were reported to the CoC as follows:

IOMAGE HERE

On Tuesday, April 22, 2020, a run-off election was held during the Academic Senate meeting for the thirteenth seat between Joan Petersen and Julian Stark both of Biological Sciences & Geology. Joan won the run-off.

On Tuesday, April 22, 2020, the Academic Senate voted to table the filling of the fourteenth faculty member-at-large seat pending the outcome of the chairperson election for the Department of Social Sciences. Azaden Aalai of Social Sciences, having the votes from the general election, would fill that seat providing an existing faculty member-at-large wins the chairperson position in Social Sciences.

CoC: Academic Senate Committee Assignments

Although the Academic Senate Committee Assignments do not involve an election, the CoC asks the STO to act as a middleman to have the database of eligible committee members generated.

The timeline for these assignments are seen in this table:

Senate Standing Committees* (run by CoC)

*Note: This is not run from BigPulse.

Notes for 2020-2021

The role of the STO changed dramatically when the Academic Senate went virtual for the remainder of the Spring 2020 academic semester. Rather than just conducting voting during the meetings, the STO became the host for the meetings which included a series of new tasks need to be completed prior to, during and at the conclusion of each Academic Senate meeting. Those tasks and duties included:

Conducting mock meetings on Webex for the Academic Senate Steering Committee to prepare for the Senate meeting

Conducted, facilitated, and ran mock meetings to Senators in order to prepare them for what was to come in the Senate meeting (eight mock sessions were held over three days)

Addressed daily emails in regards to troubleshooting access to Cisco Webex and how to participate in the voting (polling) process.

As a result, instructions were written up steps to assist Senators in using the Cisco Webex platform for the meeting.

As STO, with the entire campus community working remotely, this lead to Standing Committees of the Academic Senate going virtual. The STO performed the following:

Assisted the Academic Senate Steering Committee with presenting and demonstrating how to access new online annual committee template to Committee Chairs.

Assisted committee chairs with accessing and using Cascade, the college's web Content Management System.

Assisted committee chairs with using different online platforms to conduct their individual committee meetings.

While outside of the normal duties of the STO, the college was faced with an issue in conducting elections for department chair, department personnel & budget committees, and department CLT representatives to those respective P&B committees. At the request of the Administration (Sr. VP & COO Sherri Newcomb, Dean Liza Larios, and VP Stephen Di Dio), the STO undertook the process of conducting the elections for eight academic departments. This included setting up the various polls for each respective election, providing secure access with accepted parameters for all eligible voting members of a department. Training all designated Tellers for each election on how the process will happen took place at two different times. Mock elections with concerned department chairs and members were held to assuage their fears. The STO provided real-time technical support to all voting members in attendance, running of all department elections, and providing solutions to connectivity issues when they arose. The elections were held in two-hour blocks across five calendar days.

The process entailed conducting mock voting so that all eligible voting members had an opportunity to see the polling screen, respond to a poll, and identify if they had any technical issues.

Once the introductory speech and test polling concluded, the STO locked the meeting room to ensure each person occupied one account, all members were readily identifiable to others, and monitored the chat area to address questions or concerns that arose. Microphones were muted and the election process begun. Tellers were reminded to refrain from voting as a general practice and at the conclusion of each vote and review of the Tellers, the numerical results were made public with an explanation as to how a majority of votes was achieved. If there are X number of voting members, there would be X+3 people in the Webex meeting with X+2 (the two Tellers) having the ability to participate in the poll. In the case of one department, there were 52 eligible voters, 55 people in the meeting, but only 54 capable of participating in the poll (the host cannot participate). If a majority is half plus one, the in this example the majority was 27 / 54. The STO reminded all participants of how this worked as well as the Tellers so they could confirm the election results.

With the news the college is operating remotely for the Fall 2020 semester, the STO is in the process of looking at a different platform for the Academic Senate meetings as CUNY's Cisco Webex license expires on August 31, 2020.

This report was written by David Moretti on August 25, 2020.