Explanation of New Structure

Presidents status:unchanged

The role and position of the two co-presidents remain the same as 2024 with no changes. If you have not kept up with DevSoc since last year note there are two president positions. One president will be Non-male identifying whilst the other is Non-Female identifying.

The Presidents will have a holistic role assisting the other executives in areas which are more busy. This may include Arc/SDGC forms, stakeholder relationship (CSESoc, School, Sponsors) and events.

Administrative Officer status:unchanged

The roles of the administrative officer remains the same as in 2024. This is the combined duties of the Secretary, Treasurer and Arc Delegate.

Whilst there has been a greater quantity of events in 2024 than expected, we believe that the workload is still manageable with good workload allocation amongst the other executitves. We also believe there is good synergy in keeping the Treasurer and Arc Delegate roles combined as Arc is a large source the club’s income.

If at any point the workload for administrative officer becomes too high, some duties could be delegated off to some other executive. In future this role can be split as necessary.

Vice-President Internals & Welfare Officer status:DIFFERENT

We believed that the naming of “Internals” fit better for teams which focused on it’s internal members and did not have an out-facing presence. This includes teams like HR and Training Program which run entierly within the society.

Upon reflecting on the 2024 year, we had noted that the GEDI workload was minimal and decided to combine GEDI duties with the VP overseeing HR. We believe this would work well as HR is the party mostly responsibility for ensuring all internal contributing members get along and are well-bonded.

To compensate for the extra duties of the GEDI Officer, this VP division is only in charge of 2 portfolios.

Vice-President Externals status:DIFFERENT

In 2024, DevSoc has decided to run more events than initially expected and the planning and running of these events mostly fell upon HR and the Executives. This gave both parties less time to contribute to internal bonding and executive duties (external communications, overseeing the society etc…) respectively which are the main roles of each team. As such, we believe it was necessary to manifest an Events team to handle the running of these events.

In a similar vein, across the joint sponsorship drive with CSESoc we believe DevSoc lacked a strong presence in this regard with respect to both the T1 sponsorship drive and communicating with sponsors throughout the year. We believe a dedicated sponsorship team (one that has strong communications with CSESoc) will be able to improve this process.

We decided to group Sponsorships, Marketing and Events together as these teams will be working the most together. Interactions between these portfolios will be the highest and therefore we felt it prudent that they be overseen by the same VP. We understand that Marketing work is different to Events work, however the role of VPs is to oversee, guide and advocate for their teams, and not necessarily do their work for them.

Vice-Presidents (Projects) status:DIFFERENT
Vice-President (Project Operations) status:DIFFERENT

Removing Projects

We have made the decision to terminate development on Jobsboard. Unlike other DevSoc projects, Jobsboard does not fill a unique niche within the university community, offering a service that more or less duplicates existing resources rather than providing something new or distinct. Since it’s creation in 2018, the project has failed to gain traction within the student body. Additionally, companies that were once posting job listings have disengaged following poor communication in previous years. These factors have led to the project’s stagnation, so we feel it would be more valuable to redirect resources to developing potential new initiatives.

Furthering this, Unilectives has become a complete app with no many more features to add. Freerooms also shares this similar state (as they are no longer pursuing the mobile app). However both these apps are still used by thousands of users and has had increased engagement this year. Both these apps are also accessible to students outside of CSE and provide benefits for all UNSW students. As such we have decided to combine them into a small maintenance team (Legacy Projects) which will be mainly adding small features, bug fixes and just ensure that the app remains running. This legacy projects team will be overseen by the VP of Project Operations alongside the Platform and UI/UX team which will remain as before. In the future as more projects reach maturity and the end of major feature work, the legacy team can take them in creating space for new project teams.

In future the intention is to move more projects into maintenance as they will be complete and not need any further major development. This will give more room for new emerging projects as explained the paragraph below.

Remaining Projects

That leaves only 4 remaining projects with room for new projects to emerge. We have decide to propose 2 project VP positions to oversee these 4 remaining projects and potentially 2 new projects. The 2 Projects VP’s will decide how they would like to oversee these portfolios amongst themselves (for example, 3 each). The intention is that these new projects slots can be filled during director hiring, where candidates can suggest new projects - come in for an interview and their idea can be considered for a new portfolio where they are one of the directors.

However this process will be led under the discretion of the 2025 Executive team.