The Silver Times

During this morning’s plenary, the new Liaison officers were announced and ratified. Our special reporter Salme Kaljurand had an i with some of them last night during the party.

How are you feeling about being elected for this position?
In the beginning I felt very [emotion1], but now I feel [emotion2]

Why did you decide to become an Liaison officer?
[Personal story about youth]

Most people think that Liaison officers are just CV hunters. For how many of the current LOs is it true?
[Long monoloque with slight disgust towards even suggesting that this is a thing]

Which tangible results did you produce in the past year?
Well, we achieved [Goal 1], [Goal 2] and [Goal 35]. That’s [Percentage] of the goals we had!

How much work in hours per month does the LO job require?
[Vague story about variation and difficult to keep track]

Do you have advice for AEGEE to improve it?
No.

This morning, a silent disco was held during the morning plenary. Many participants rented a wireless headphone and listened to music in stead of to the plenary. Sunmoon from Nijmegen was a big fan: “I really loved the music, and it was very good to have some distraction from the discussion on wether the Schulze or de Jorge method should be used.”

There were three channels participants could choose from, one being ‘Roll Call Reggaeton’, and the other ‘Gunnars Greatest’. The third channel ‘AEGEEan Anthems’, played music like Key to Europe, Europe on Track , but also several regional and local anthems, like Brabant and Noorderplantsoen. Like with AEGEE itself, national anthems are not allowed.

Franz from AEGEE-Bielefeld loved the idea: “I really loved listening to all the 70’s and 80’s classics played by DJ Gunnar. We were dancing with our whole row to Take on Me.” The present members of Les Anciens d’AEGEE members were also all tuned in to this channel.

The silent disco was a big hit: About 80 visitors and 20 delegates rented a pair of headphones. Both Veva and Timo from the Chair team confirmed they are wearing a special invisible earpiece tuned in to Roll Call Reggaeton. It is unknown if Timo is wearing it in his left or right ear.

If you missed yesterday’s most important news, here it is: After a difficult procedure, the Autumn Agora 2020 is finally confirmed to be in Vladivostok! Today during the evening plenary, the Agora ratified the decision to hold the Agora at the venue of our easternmost antenna!

Misha Kavronov, main organizer of the Agora: “It is so great we’re finally able to organize an Agora in Russia. We are part of Europe too and we’re really glad to be able to share our Eastern European culture with you while hosting a really great statutory event. To share our enthousiasm with the network, we will soon release our AEGEE-Vladivostok song: Stranger in Vladivostok!”

Participant will be transported between the Plenary hall and the Gym in St. Petersburg by Trans Siberian Express, and to accomodate for this, the Agora will take 2.5 months.

Funny detail: After some fake news from the Golden Times, AEGEE-Moskva accidentally claimed the agora to be theirs and launched a campaign called #agoramoscow.

Writing minutes for the plenary sessions is a very difficult and intensive task. It requires a lot of fast typing to include all that was said in real time. Some people wondered how they are able to do this so well, and our reporter Anna Pamplona was sent to investigate.

We asked Secretary of the Autumn Agora Salerno 2019, Tomislav, to reveal us some secrets: “It’s quite a bit of work, but we actually have a lot of automated things. We have a special text editor that allows for faster writing and has an automated formatting tool. Aside from this, we have a lot of shortcuts for frequently asked questions, so we don’t have to type them out every single time.”

It turns out, there are quite some shortcuts. For example, when Tomislav types Ctrl-Shift+E, it enters ‘Education’ into the minutes. Ctrl+Shift+Q stands for “Question Line closed”, Ctrl-Shift+B stands for ‘Belgium Law’ and Ctrl-Shift+W for ‘wrap up please’. Further more, some people have their own shortcut. David from AEGEE-Aachen has Ctrl-Shift+🍺.

Actually, all 26 letters of the alphabet combined with Shift + Ctrl + Alt are in use just for Dutchies who ask a lot of question. There is one even more special exception: “Marlijn from AEGEE-Delft has a special shortcut that inserts 5 blank questions at once. During one prytania, I once had to press it three times in a row!”

During the lunch break today, Daniël held an autographing session for his self-written Harry Potter fan fiction. We already knew that the President of AEGEE-Europe is a great fan of the Harry Potter universe after he misspoke while reading the statement of principles, but it’s new to us that he is actually writing his own stories.

“I really love the works of J.K. Rowling. I often dream about the CD house being Hogwarts, and that I have to deal with all the magical challenges, together with my friends Hanna being Hermione and Oksana being Ginny, to name a few examples.”

A lot of people were waiting in line to finally get an autographed copy of ‘Harry Potter and the Magic Antenna’, and the session was a big success.

If you missed out, no worries! Tomorrow you can get your autographed copy of the book in the Gryffindor house on the Delegates camping, between 21:00 and 22:30, just before European Night!

During this Agora, a new sponsorship deal that AEGEE made with Swedish Furniture Giant IKEA will be presented. The Silver Times has the first scoop and can announce that IKEA will soon be adding a new chair to their catalog. It will be one of the three displayed types, and in an unique experiment, AEGEE members will be able to vote on which one will be added to the Chair Team of IKEA.

The chosen chair will be announced later during Agora Salerno!

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During Agora Salerno, it happened quite a few times that presentations on screen were slow or not working at all. Unnamed sources from within the IT Committee told our investigative reporter Anna Pamplona that these problems are mostly caused by yet another bricked firewall.

The firewall is supposed to stop intruders from Berlin from tearing down that wall in order to interfere and influence our elections, but apparently also sometimes stops presentations from working just like when member of the Comité Directeur Monika presented her candidature for head of the Chair team.

The anonymous IT Committee member explains: “When we arrived in Salerno last week we found that they were still using a firewall from 1961, which was actually already breached in 1989. We’ve been working day and night to get a new firewall in place, but sometimes the old hardware bricks.”

They are working really hard to get everything in place: “Just about every day, we manage to take another brick off the firewall. It’s already safe and secure enough to mostly properly work during Agora Salerno, and we expect it to be fully finished on the 9th of November.”

The IT Committee has the full support from the members of the Comité Directeur and the Chair team into fixing these problems.