Survival Guide Student Branches October 29, 2014 The goal of this document is to provide answers for the most common questions that arise when managing a Student Branch in Portugal. 1
Contents 1 Getting Started Information 3 1.1 Communication with the Section................ 3 1.2 Associating IEEE Members with a Student Branch...... 3 1.3 Affinity Groups & Student Chapters.............. 3 1.4 Student Branch Email Alias................... 3 1.5 Managing Own Funds...................... 4 2 Reporting 4 2.1 Annual Activity Report..................... 4 2.2 Officer Report........................... 5 3 Rebates 5 4 Election Creation 5 5 Activities Support 6 5.1 Can I use my car for official travel?............... 6 6 Using Vtools to know and engage with your student members 7 7 Sharing your News 7 8 Important Activities 7 8.1 IEEE Student Paper Contest - Region 8............ 8 8.2 IEEEXtreme Programming Contest - IEEE Worldwide.... 8 8.3 IEEEmadC............................ 9 8.4 SBC - Region 8 Student Branch Congress........... 9 8.5 ISBC - Iberian Student Branch Congress............ 9 8.6 Leadership Camp - Portugal Section.............. 9 8.7 Borrow a Workshop - Portugal Section............. 10 2
1 Getting Started Information Student Branches are the backbone of the IEEE student program. They are a representation of IEEE in a given University, and are encouraged to host and develop interesting activities to promote IEEE. 1.1 Communication with the Section Communication with IEEE Portugal Section is performed always using the email students@ieee-pt.org. Feel free to contact us in case of any doubt. 1.2 Associating IEEE Members with a Student Branch Every Student Branch is composed by a given number of IEEE student members and a given University (uniquely identified by a geo-code ID). Every IEEE student member is required to be associated with an University. If the University has a Student Branch associated, then the student member will automatically appear as a member of the corresponding Student Branch. Consequently, associating a student member with a Student Branch requires merely updating the student member info in the ieee.org webpage with the correct University information. 1.3 Affinity Groups & Student Chapters Student Branches are encouraged to have technical chapters and affinity groups within the Student Branch. The advantages include having additional rebates (see Section 3) and activity support (via support of the Main Chapter / Affinity Group). However, maintaining a chapter requires additional reporting and an active Student Branch. More information: http://www.ieeer8.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/ 09/IEEESBChapters.pdf 1.4 Student Branch Email Alias Every Student Branch should have an official functional alias of the form sb.xxx@ieee.org. This alias is maintained by the IEEE and should be forwarded to an internal email address of the branch (as e.g. a mailing list or google group). Forwarding such alias to private email addresses should be avoided. Since this alias represents the official student branch email, the Student Branch needs to ensure the maintenance of the forwarding when electing new officers. An alias can be created in http://www.ieee.org/organizations/rab/ functionalalias.html 3
1.5 Managing Own Funds Each branch has access to its own sub-account with the section, where they get the HQ rebates (provided they submitted all required reporting - see Section 2 and Section 3) Use of funds held in each SB s sub-account aren t subject to budgeting/approval. These funds are administered by the SB ExCom, according to their own guidelines, and can be directly accessed by the SB Treasurer. Keep in mind, however, that IEEE is a non-profit and all funds should be used responsibly and in pursuit of our mission The access of funds is performed via reimbursement. Due to Portuguese tax law, this reimbursement requires the presentation of the original expense documents associated with the IEEE Portugal Section Fiscal Number (NIF). Reimbursement Instructions and more information on how to access this account in: http://goo.gl/muefbc 2 Reporting Reporting is a mandatory task of every Student Branch. This task includes the Annual Activity Report and the Officer Report 2.1 Annual Activity Report Submitted online, every year at the end of the school year. It should be submitted around May or June, and must be submitted before 1st September. Required in order to receive your annual funding from IEEE HQ, and to be eligible to participate in competitions and attend the SBC Where it asks Please let us know if your Student Branch would like IEEE MGA Administration to, please check the via the Section concentration bank account box. Checks incur in extra costs and, due to legal constraints, will be much harder to cash. The report asks you for the email address of the Section Chair and Section SSAC. Here use sec.portugal@ieee.org and students@ieee-pt.org, respectively. This is very important as, without this information, we cannot guarantee that the corresponding rebate will arrive to your Student Branch bank account. The annual activity report can be submitted in https://sbr.vtools. ieee.org 4
2.2 Officer Report This report needs to be submitted after each election and required so your new officers can perform their job, receive access to SAMIEEE, reporting, and other IEEE services. Officer reporting can be done in https://officers.vtools.ieee.org Please send a copy of the confirmation email to students@ieee-pt.org. 3 Rebates If the officer reporting is up to date, and the activity report of a given school year was submitted before September 1, then Student Branches are eligible to receive rebate. A rebates are payed based on the membership statistics as of 31 December 1. The rebate is US$2 per Student member of the Student Branch, and the allotment is either US$50 (for Branches with 49 or fewer members) or US$100 (for Student Branches with 50 or more members). Note that only the Student Branches that submitted the reports according to the instructions in Section 2 are eligible to receive the rebate. 4 Election Creation Every year the Student Branch must hold public elections for its executional committee (ExCom). Before holding elections, the past ExCom has the responsibility to invite all student branch members to run for ExCom positions, and become active volunteers. After having all the applications, elections are performed using the IEEE system vtools. To create an election, the current ExCom of the Student Branch needs to send an email to students@ieee-pt.org with the following information: Election Name Starting Date, Ending Date Election Description Email Address - to be used in case of problems/doubts Candidates IEEE Number 1 Annual Statistics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/membership_services/ membership/statistics/annual_statistics_index.html 5
Name Biography Position Text Body Email - to be sent by Vtools to the voters The election must run for at least 2 days, and the election information must be sent at least one week in advance. A Student Branch ExCom is composed by the positions: Chair, Vice- Chair, Secretary and Treasurer. If needed, the same person can occupy the position of Secretary and Treasurer (and in such cases, the ExCom is composed by 3 people). Additional positions can also be created. More information: http://vtools.ieee.org/tutorials/voting/volunteer/ BallotSetup.htm The Student Branch must report the new officers after the election takes place as mentioned in Section 2.2. 5 Activities Support IEEE Portugal Section can fund activities in Student Branch by request. Funding is generally performed via reimbursement and it requires the original expense documents associated with the IEEE Portugal Section Fiscal Number (NIF). Activity funding is looked at in a case-by-case basis and is restricted to technical activities. Social activities should generally turn a profit, and require no funding. Reimbursement instructions and more information can be found in Section 5.1.2 of http://goo.gl/muefbc. Moreover, every activity supported by the Section should be reported as appear in the Portugal Section News. With this in mind, Student Branches are responsible for sending a small news of the activity, in english, together with some pictures by email students@ieee-pt.org. 5.1 Can I use my car for official travel? Generally no. Usage of personal car should be avoided and is only reimbursed if previously approved by the Section. Usage of personal car is only acceptable when public transportation is unavailable or uneconomical, and thus it always needs to be appropriately justified. More information in: http://www.ieee-pt.org/student-branches/ sasupport/ 6
6 Using Vtools to know and engage with your student members IEEE provides important tools for Student Branches to know and engage with their members SAMIEEE is the database containing all the information about your members. It can be access by the Student Branch Chair in: http://www.ieee.org/about/volunteers/samieee/samieee_ preaccess_statement.html Note that care must be taken to ensure that the privacy of your members is respected enotice is a tool that allows a Student Branch to automatically send email information for all the Student Branch members (e.g. newsletter, election information, information about a new activity, etc.) It can be access in: https://enotice.vtools.ieee.org/ Surveys is a tool that can be used to ask questions to your members, and use this information to improve your activities, and make new ones. It can be access in https://surveys.vtools.ieee.org/ 7 Sharing your News As a Section, we want to hear about all of your Student Branch activities. While it is mandatory to write a report for all activities that are financial supported by the Portugal Section, Student Branches are encourage to submit reports for all their other activities (including social activities). Reported activities can appear in the Section s Newsletter and in the Section s website. News reports must be submitted in english by email to students@ieeept.org and should include pictures. Student Branches are also encouraged to submit their activity news to Region 8. More information on this, can be found in: http://ewh.ieee. org/reg/8/news/contributors.html 8 Important Activities As follows we present some of the most important existing activities of IEEE. The goal of this section is to illustrate (specially for the new officers) opportunities that IEEE Worldwide, IEEE Region 8, and IEEE Portugal Section have for Student Branches. 7
This list is non-exhaustive and is subject to change. Student Branches should always follow the websites ieee.org ieeer8.org and ieee-pt.org for more accurate information on activities. 8.1 IEEE Student Paper Contest - Region 8 Student Paper Contest (SPC) is a scientific paper contest for IEEE student or graduate student members who have not yet started their PhD, but have most likely already encountered some research topics or done Bachelor s or Master s thesis. Student Branches from Region 8 are encouraged to organize a local competition to determine the best Student Paper within the university. Afterwards, the winning Student Paper is sent to Region 8 SPC around December (check deadline 2014). Then the best five R8 SPC papers authors will go the Regional Oral finals in a top ranked IEEE conference (last edition was in IEEE R8 MELECON 2014 Conference, 13-16 April 2014, Beirut, Lebanon) Please see the Student Paper Contest page and SPC Rules page at Internet address http://www.ieeer8.org/category/student-activities/ awards-and-contests/student-paper-contest/ 8.2 IEEEXtreme Programming Contest - IEEE Worldwide IEEEXtreme is a global programming competition where teams compete during a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems. During the competition, teams are given a set approximately 20 problems, for which they have to write a program that solves the task. Choice of programming language is mostly free; the contest system supports Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby. The contest goes on for exactly 24 hours, simultaneously for every team. IEEEXtreme teams should be supported by a given Student Branch, and need to be advised and proctored by an IEEE senior member. This means that hosting IEEEXtreme requires finding a venue for the competition (e.g. a room in the University) and providing conditions for the participants (such as food and drinks). Participants must compete as part of a team. Teams are comprised of up to 3 IEEE student or graduate student members but should only include a maximum of 2 graduate student members per team. All team members must be IEEE student or graduate student members to register and compete in the competition. IEEE Membership numbers are required during the registration process. More information: http://www.ieee.org/xtreme 8
8.3 IEEEmadC IEEEmadC (Mobile Application Development Contest) is a Region 8 based student competition focused on developing mobile applications. In this competition, teams of up to three students are invited to devise and create mobile applications that will benefit IEEE in the terms stated in the Application focus areas chapter of this document. This competition was created to provide IEEE students with additional competitive activities in the scope of computer science. By competing, students would focus on developing their technical and social (team) skills, since the prizes are arranged in a way to encourage teamwork. The competition can provide Student Branches with an additional way of attracting the students to join IEEE since only active student members of IEEE will be eligible to compete. More information: http://ieeemadc.org/ 8.4 SBC - Region 8 Student Branch Congress The Student Branch Congress is a bi-annual event that gathers all Student Branches from Region 8. It represents the biggest IEEE event of Region 8 and attracts around 400 attendees from all corners of Europe, Middle East and Africa. IEEE Portugal Section will fund travel and registration for officers from portuguese student branches (rules of funding yet to define, depending on the budget available). However, conditions for eligible funding include reporting and elections being up to date. 8.5 ISBC - Iberian Student Branch Congress The Iberian Student Branch Congress is a bi-annual event that gathers all Student Branches from Iberian Region (Portugal and Spain). It is thus a similar event to SBC but in a smaller-scale. While SBC is in every even numbered year (as in 2014), ISBC occurs in odds years. Conditions for funding are similar to the ones for SBC. 8.6 Leadership Camp - Portugal Section This is a new activity from the Portugal Section that aims to gather all portuguese student branches for a weekend. The goal is to provide training for the new student branches officers and means for networking. IEEE Portugal Section will provide funding for registration for officers (2 per Student Branch and 1 for each Student Chapter/Affinity Group). Registration includes accommodation and food for the duration of the event. Transportation is not included and should be supported by the participants or by the Student Branch own funds. 9
8.7 Borrow a Workshop - Portugal Section Borrow a Workshop is an IEEE Portugal Section initiative that has as its main goals to promote collaboration between the Student Branches and increase the number of technical activities in each Branch. With this as the goal, Portuguese Student Branches can propose several technical activities to be outsourced for other branches, i.e. technical activities that can be developed by IEEE volunteers from one Student Branch in a different Student Branch, thereby contributing to an interchange of activities between Student Branches. More information in: http://www.ieee-pt.org/student-branches/ borrow-a-workshop/ 10