Senate Clerk

Congratulations on the new job, and welcome to ASUW! I hope that this year will be wonderful for you. I took this job not having any experience in the senate or ASUW and was hoping to gain some confidence in working with student advocacy, and it has honestly been everything I hoped in that respect. 

First and foremost, this job is what you make of it. My first quarter I was still getting settled in and learning the ropes, and I didn’t feel like the work I was doing was very fulfilling. In winter and spring quarters, I made it a priority to get involved in things that mattered more to me in student issues (I’ll talk more about that later in this document), and I was almost immediately more happy in my role. You may have totally different goals for this position and different things you want to get out of this job, and that’s ok! 

Second, you are the only hourly worker in the Senate office which makes you the most vulnerable to being asked to work far more than you’re getting paid for. Please speak up if you feel this is the case! Myself and the rest of Senate leadership will be more than happy to help out any way we can to make sure you’re not working more than your designated hours. Free labor is not worth it (and if anyone in ASUW tells you that you will likely be working overtime and not getting paid for it, please don’t listen. I never did a minute of work I wasn’t paid for and everything still got done). 

That being said, you are not by any means required to do anything outside of your job description, but Senate is a wonderful place to get involved in student issues and advocacy and learn about the way UW works. I sincerely hope you take advantage of this and get as much out of this position as I did! 

Overall, have fun and collaborate with senators and leadership. This job is great experience for other opportunities (in ASUW, the public sector, writing/editing, and beyond) and a fantastic way of getting acquainted with Senate’s operations and leadership if you want to advance to one of those positions (as I did). 

Please e-mail or text me with any questions you have between now and your start date (or at any point during the year obviously), I’ll be happy to help!

Email: schwalmy@uw.edu

Phone: (717)-951-8593

This section will be an overview of the rest of the document. Everything that you need are divided up below, so give it a scroll.

As you probably know, the majority of your job is to produce minutes for Senate floor and steering meetings. Depending on debates, this can absolutely be a task that takes up most of your office hours. You don’t need to offer an exact word-for-word transcript, but the more information the better. You’ll figure out your own way to do this as the year goes on, but essentially, feel free to paraphrase as long as you capture the essence of the debate/argument/speech/etc. That’s generally going to help you when people start speaking quickly or at length. The things that are required are specifically…

• Vote counts (for passage of the agenda, for passage of bills): any time we vote, you need to write that down in the format [yes-no-abstentions] (e.g., [45–4–10])
• Motions and who makes them

Each week you also have to update your hours on the ASUW website (hours.asuw.org) by midnight on Sunday. You may do 20% of your hours outside of the office, but if you do that, make sure you note that in the schedule so no one comes to find you at the Senate office.

You are automatically a senator however, doing the AA tasks, you won’t have a lot of time during meetings to be engaged. In my experience, it’s better to remain a neutral party as part of Senate leadership anyway. This has been a contested rule in the past so if someone says anything, the justification leadership this year used is that the Clerk is able to chair a meeting if the other members of leadership are gone and a committee chair can’t do it, so they have to be a voting senator. However, I almost never voted and this is mostly relevant for quorum (since all four members of leadership can count towards quorum). You do not have a vote at steering, but you’re definitely welcome to speak up if you have an opinion on something and you can “entertain the motion,” which essentially means to encourage the committee to take up some action, should you want to.

For your email and Google Drive, use:

NetID: asuwssse@uw.edu

Password: CLERK2122#

*If you want to change it, you can contact someone from OComm (most likely the Webmaster). This was my predecessor’s password and I never bothered, but definitely change it if you’d like!

If you have a computer in the office, use:

User: asuwssse

Password: hipstercat

Our office decided to forgo desktops and use our personal laptops for the most part (since we were obviously remote), but you can request the HUB put them back in the office, if they haven’t already. If you find it easier, feel free to use your own computer like we did. I recommend doing your ASUW work in incognito; otherwise, being logged into multiple UW accounts on Google can cause login problems.

*If the password doesn’t work, contact the Webmaster and ask them to reset your office computer password.

• Minutes:
  • Finish Senate floor and steering minutes
  • Make edits according to Steering’s written amendments
  • Upload Senate and Steering minutes to the Senate website online (ideally within 1 week of the meeting; I often did them immediately after they were approved at steering)
    • Senate Minutes Record
    • Steering Minutes Record
    • All records will now be kept online in an online database. If a senator requests a paper copy, you must print it out for them.
• Hybrid Model Zoom Chats
  • This year we found out that all Senate meeting Zoom chats have to be stored on record. I have stored them in the ASUW Senate Clerk Google Drive in this folder: Zoom Chats
• Updating the Website:
  • The website was new this year and was programmed through WordPress. Here is the link that you as an administrator can log in (use senate clerk username/password) to update the website: Senate.asuw.org/wp-admin/
  • You must link the senate and steering agendas on the “ASUW STUDENT SENATE – Front Page” in WordPress
    • With a hybrid model, the Zoom link for senate meetings should also be on the front page
    • Post any updates (room changes, meeting alerts, etc.) on the front page as well
  • You will be in charge of updating the “Leadership” and “Committees” page with new photos and bios for the upcoming Senate Leadership and Committee Chairs
    • Leadership Page
    • Committee Chair Page
• Updating the Legislative Database:
  • Record the dates of first readings, committee debate, second readings, and final passage the link to the minutes for those dates
  • The legislative database is recorded automatically on the Senate website
• Maintaining the Voting Record:
  • The website automatically does this for you!
• Copy Editing passed legislation:
  • This can be shared with other members of Senate leadership if copy editing is not your thing, but typically after Senate legislation passed Board on Thursdays, the Vice Speaker would share it with me and I would just edit for grammar (pro tip: copy and paste every name from the forwarding clause into Google to make sure they’re spelled right, this is where 99% of mistakes are made)
  • Once you’re done make sure you share it with the Speaker so that they can send it out to the folks in the forwarding clause
• Other:
  • Update your office hours before Monday (hours.asuw.org– it’s a little difficult to use, but hopefully I can give you a tutorial in our transition meeting)
  • Input your hours into Workday (the site will send you an email reminder before each pay period ends if you forget)
    • If you have had an on-campus job before, this will be your existing Workday account
  • Assist on any other projects that the Senate team has
  • Reply to emails as needed
  • In my experience, you will have a lot of leftover hours some weeks (though if minutes are taking up that time, don’t feel bad and definitely don’t work overtime!). I ended up supplementing that time with some projects I was passionate about to improve Senate; I thought I’d leave some examples of what I did in case you’re interested in doing the same, but this is totally out of your job description so please don’t feel any pressure! My projects:
    • Women in Senate bondings
    • legislation organization
  • Previous Senate Clerk projects 
    • Creating legislation writing resources for the website
      • one-pagers
    • Working with senators on legislation (usually through legislation writing workshops but you can work outside of those too and cosponsor or sponsor a bill if you want!)
    • Rewriting the language in the Senate Rules and Bylaws
    • Planning the EAC Board forum in Senate (though this was more by necessity because the Speaker and Vice Speaker were running for positions)

Someone should reach out to you close to your start date (which is usually about a week before the quarter starts) to meet with you and get you all set up on pay roll. This year, we got pay the 10th and 25th of every month, but that might change. Workday should also have all the info for payroll and taxes and stuff if you’re looking for it!

You don’t have any hours in the summer, so you won’t get paid for anything you do before your official start date. The Senate Speaker, Senate Vice Speaker, and Senate Membership Coordinator are now all getting paid summer hours so they should take care of most senate business before the school year. They may ask you to meet with them once over the summer for introductions, but otherwise you have no requirements. The new website also requires a lot less work in terms of managing the roster. Basically, if you’re not getting paid, don’t feel like you have to do anything!

Personnel should go over flexing hours during orientation, but basically it means that if you’re having a rough week you don’t have to work your full hours. You can just email Rene and the Personnel Director letting them know that you’ll be working less and then make up the missed hours the next week. They’ll give a more in depth explanation, but I wanted to make you aware that you have the option to do this! This might be a bit different if you’re working hourly though.

Student Activities Office (SAO) Advisor:

Rene Singleton is our SAO advisor. She has been working at UW and with Senate for longer than we’ve been alive, and she has stories from Senate’s dark ages—ask her about the chair incident if you’re curious. Schedule a meeting with her if you have any issues or questions. She answers the quickest by phone and may not respond to your email, but keep in mind that she is a very busy woman and will probably take some time to get back to you. If you have trouble getting ahold of her, talk to your Speaker of Vice Speaker about getting her attention for you, as she tends to collaborate with them more consistently and more often.

*You may very well not be clear on what steering is. The Steering Committee is composed of the 3 elected members of Senate leadership, each of the committee chairs (which you can find information on in the Senate bylaws), and 2 members of the Board of Directors. They determine the agenda for each Senate meeting. They also go over Organic Acts (“OAs,” which you can also read about in the bylaws) that would change the bylaws, choose things like Senator of the Month, organize elections, etc. These meetings are run by Parliamentary Procedure (“Parli Pro”) just like Senate floor meetings. Steering meetings tend to take place on Wednesdays or Thursdays, scheduled to accommodate members’ schedules each quarter. Logistically, those are the best days, and just following steering is a convenient time to upload the newly-approved senate and steering minutes and put them in the records binder.

*The Floor and Steering minutes from the last meetings last year will need to be approved in the first Steering meeting of the year, and then uploaded to the records page once Steering has voted and signed them. They can be found here:

• May 24, 2022 Senate Floor Minutes
  • 5/24/22 Oversight Committee Meeting Minutes (in senate minutes as well)
• May 27, 2022 Steering Minutes
• May 31, 2022 Senate Floor Minutes

*On occasion, senators or others will have long amendments or presentations during the meetings. I encourage you to always ask for those materials, just to save yourself time. You can also access the record of changes made to Google Docs (like resolutions), so ask for editing privileges on those to access the language of amendments made during senate after the fact.

*One of the hardest parts of the learning curve is just getting everyone’s names. You’ll sit next to the Membership Coordinator during meetings (if they’re in person) and they should know everyone, so use them as a resource, but also remind your Speaker to ask for names when they aren’t said and to remind everyone to use their name placards, which are also helpful for getting people’s pronouns correctly. Zoom makes this easier, but I think the meetings will at least be partially in person this year; my predecessor used voice memo on her phone to record in person meetings, but that can be unreliable in picking up sound so get as much down as you can. We do have a Senate roster on the website and your MC will likely have a spreadsheet roster as well, so as long as you get a first or last name in the minutes, you can get the full name when you are editing them. I would recommend using only first or only last names when you’re typing the minutes in real time, and then you can find and replace their first/last name with their full name when you’re finishing up the minutes.

Senate Minutes Example

Steering Minutes Example

*If these links don’t work, you can just look in the Google Drive for last year’s documents and format accordingly!

*I have saved floor and steering templates that I begin with each meeting that can be found in the template gallery on Google Docs, or you can make your own based on the examples above. It make it easier to have a template that you make copies of each week and edit to match the agenda.

• RSO Resource Center

The Membership Coordinator usually prints name tags, but feel free to help out to make things go quicker. Name tags are printed on card stock and you can ask anyone in the RSO Resource Center for help. Our print code there is asuwsen-senate. Keep in mind that we do have a budget for the RSO Resource Center, and printing comes out of that, so check and make sure with everyone if you’re printing things from there. (I did not have to deal with any of this because we were remote, so all of this info is second hand, just fyi).

• The Office

Work materials (mainly minutes) can be printed in the ASUW office.

My predecessor printed all the minutes out in the ASUW office since it costs to use the printing budget, they don’t need to be on special paper, and it’s easier. This office printer is black and white and is located next to the microwave. It is for office/work use only. You can print from here through the office computers, as it is automatically set up. If you choose to use your own computer, you can connect wirelessly to the printer. I cannot give you the printer information; however, there is always someone in the office who knows how to hook it up apparently. I would recommend asking another member of leadership, the Systems Admin, or even the VP for technical help, depending on who is available. If it isn’t working, you can email the minutes to any of the Administrative Assistants at the front desk and ask them to print for you.

• SAO office (2nd floor of HUB)

You can apparently print here as well, although I’ve never used it. The code is 1219.

*Since the passage of a Session 26 OA, you are now required to post physical copies of the agendas on the window outside HUB 121. You can just print them and tape them up following or soon after steering meetings. Take a closer look at the OA for more detail. Obviously, we haven’t done this while remote, but it should be started back up as ASUW transitions to in-person. It is one of the first OAs passed in Session 26, and its sponsor was Mustapha Samateh.

⇣  ⇣  ⇣  ⇣  The information below is pretty obsolete since we don’t print agendas anymore, but I thought I’d keep it around for you in case you need it.  ⇣  ⇣  ⇣  ⇣

• Communications Building

For bigger orders like the Senate agendas (about 15 copies per Senate meeting), you’ll want to go to the print shop in the basement of the communications building. They’re very good about doing things in a timely manner, so just try to bring your things in about 4 hours before you need to pick them up (though you’re welcome to do it at any point before that as well). They have those little cards in the print shop called COPY SERVICE WORK REQUEST and you can fill it out when you go to drop the documents off. The most important thing is probably that you be explicit in what you want: stapled, double-sided, etc. However, there is another way to do this: Email the agenda or whatever work material need to be print to b042cmu@uw.edu, include instructions like double sided and black/white, provide the budget number (this will be provided by the Speaker/Vice Speaker), then ask them to have it ready by a certain time.