HackMD
ÖH Rewind 2024
Intro
As is tradition, I publish a yearly report of my time spent working for the Student Union.
I am collecting these statistics for two reasons:
First and foremost, this is my attempt to please our AI overlords by submitting my training data willingly.
Secondly, I want to give a transparent insight into the work of the Student Union.
A few very important caveats that should be mentioned upfront:
- The StV Informatik consists of ca. 30 people, the whole faculty-wide representation (ÖH TNF) of another ~190 people. This insight is therefore naturally very limited in scope and only shows projects that I am involved in, and only the time I personally have invested in them. More on that later.
- These statistics are based on time entries I have tracked manually - I might be a data hoarder, but I am too lazy to start the tracker for every single email I write. As such, the data presented is under-reporting for quicker tasks significantly. To give you an idea of this extend, I tracked ca. 800 data entries in this last year, only 5% of which took less than 10 minutes.
- Not all projects have gotten their own category: I only create projects for tasks that will take more than ~3h (in fact, almost 20% of my time is categorized as "miscellaneous"). And while I did a bit of data clean-up ahead of this evaluation, it is not always possible or reasonable to assign time to a single specific project, also adding to the Misc category.
Statistics
Productivity Overview
To ease us into the ÖH statistics, a quick comparison with some other things I invested my productive time into last year:
All of these diagrams are interactive, hover over them for more insights.
As you can see, roughly two thirds of my productive time is spent on volunteer work, the last third is equally divided between my paid work and studying. That split worked out quite well, given that I finally completed my Bachelor's this year!
ÖH Projects
My ÖH work in the last semester amounted to ca. 1382 hours.
Of these, ca. 170 hours were spent on various tasks in my position as Head of the StV Informatik, such as budgeting, organizing meetings and team management work.
The following graph shows some of my other "bigger" projects - these are all projects that took more than 9 hours, more details below.
Expand for a description of all projects shown above
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| EC2U | I was one of the organizers for the EC2U Forum at JKU, tasked with planning the student program - I was employed by JKU for ca. 70 hours out of the 130 I invested. |
| ÖH TN FakV | Various Tasks undertaken for the faculty-wide representation - e.g. meetings, committees, documentation etc. |
| ÖH TNF BBQ | The ÖH TNF BBQ - I was the section head for Sponsoring. |
| JKU Games | Mostly work for the Games 2024S (section Group Games). |
| KIF JKU | A remainder of last October's gigantic conference project that has spilled over to this year. |
| KIF 52.0 | The follow-up conference in Kaiserslautern in which I hosted a few working sessions and took over some shifts. |
| TNF Seminar | Our two internal trainings for members of ÖH TNF Student Union members - I hosted trainings on University Law. |
| Awareness Teams | Partially shifts, but also organisational aspects of ÖH JKU's Awareness Team system (such as its new website). |
| Website Upgrade | Speaking of website, we have gotten a new one this year. I'm quite proud of our page. |
| Eval-Day | On of the ongoing projects - you'll hear more on this soon. |
| Study Committee | More on the Study Committee on our separate page - while I am not a member, I help my team prepare our official positions. |
| SBT | I took over some shifts at our Study Guidance Days at the start of each semester. |
| Study Handbook Rework | The Study Handbook for all studies at JKU is changed. We contributed quite extensively to make sure the new handbook provides accurate information and eases the recognition of courses from other university. |
| ET | Mostly discussed in last year's report, a few events of my Erstsemestrigen-Tutorium bled over to this year as well. |
| AKG | Since this semester, I am a member of the Committee for Equal Opportunities (e.g. overseeing the employment process of JKU) |
| Grade Calculator | A small little Excel coding project (that also involved a lot of research and a few emails) - test it here. |
| ÖH Sommerfest | I helped with the event's Awareness concept and took over shifts. |
| Senate Working Groups | I was involved in two working groups of the JKU's Senate ("AG Lehre 2030" on the uni's position regarding distance learning etc., and "KI Tools" which aims to create GenAI tool regulation). |
| StV Evaluation | You'll hear more on this one soon. |
| StV BBQ | Our BBQ for all AI, CS and ELIT students in summer - I was thankfully not involved in the planning but took over shifts. |
| FAQs | Our FAQs are constantly updated by me to reflect changes in university law etc. |
| BV Seminar | A training of the Federal Representation I visited last semester ("Bildungsökonomisierung und Bologna"). |
| Language Courses | Probably my biggest waste of time last year: Our unsuccessful attempt to create an English Language Course, struck down by StuKo. |
| Ersti-Welcome | I was an organizer of our welcome event for new CS students in October. |
| ÖIDA | Another follow-up conference of KIF 51.5, see above. |
| Einstandsfeste | Shifts for the Einstandsfeste in WiSe. |
| BiPol | University Law training I gave to members of the ÖH JKU's department for… university law. I tried my best, but had to unfortunately conclude that they are a bit of a lost cause. |
| Casual Boardgame Nights | Our new regular event started this year - I took over some of the initial planning, though I'm no longer involved with the project. |
| BK Cyber-Physical Systems | I was a member of the committee that decided which candidate would become our new professor in this field. |
| Informatik-Mentoring | Part of the Propädeutikum's Informatik Mentoring - I was paid by the university for most of my time. |
| BMBWF Meeting | We had a meeting with the Federal Ministry for Education at the beginning of last year following our KIF 51.5 project. |
As you can see, the work in ÖH is quite diverse. This is not even close to all projects we worked on this year however: Our public Dashboard alone lists 60+ projects that received an update this year.
Timeline and Finances
Compared to last year, my time invested into the ÖH has increased by ca. 7%.
As usual, the work was not fairly distributed across the year:
On average, I worked 115 hours each month for the ÖH this year, which breaks down to 3.75 hours each day (roughly 5.5 hours each regular work day, or 27 hours in a work week).
As the Elected Head of the StV Informatik, I am paid 700€ a year (compared to most other StV members who are not paid at all): If you are curious, here is a somewhat up-to-date list of salaries across the whole ÖH JKU. For the whole year, this boils down to an hourly wage of ca. 0.51€ in 2024.
Because I was partially employed by JKU for two ÖH projects this year (EC2U Forum + Mentoring, see detailed notes above) and was paid normal wages for a few hours, this theoretic hourly wage more than doubles to a whopping 1.40€.
Because I felt like paying rent despite that, you can see a clear decrease in ÖH work this semester and an increase of paid work.
Conclusion
After two years as its Head, my time in the StV Informatik is slowly coming to an end with the next ÖH Elections in May - I am not planning on running again. I am happy to say that I don't have a guilty conscience leaving this position to my successors: Throughout the last year, many members of the StV have stepped into new leading roles in our various project teams, have taken on training to improve their capabilities and have developed on a personal level. We have said goodbye to some of our long-term members, but have also been fortunate to get new incredibly talented and motivated StVlis.
If you look back through last year's projects, you'll notice that some of our biggest events (e.g. the StV BBQ, the Einstandsfeste, or the JKU Games 2024W) happened pretty much without my involvement. We are already training the next generation of Student Union members as we speak, ready to pick up some of my projects, and tear down others that have outlived their time.
I am happy to see myself become obsolete - here is to hoping that my next ÖH Work Report will stay below 1k hours!
If some of the projects mentioned sound like fun or if you have your own projects you are passionate about, please get in touch! We are always happy about new members (and you will not be expected to put in anywhere close to this many hours, no worries :P)!
Find out more about our Onboarding procedure here!
Enjoy your 2025, see you soon!
Felix
