One of the ways that MIT tries to help its FSILGs (Fraternities, Sororities, and Independent Living Groups) is through the Independent Residence Development Fund, or IRDF. The IRDF provides a way for FSILG alumni to donate money to the FSILGs in a tax-exempt fashion. The money gets distributed to FSILGs through a couple different routes, the most common of which is probably the Educational Operating Grants.

The EOG itself is split into three components:

• The 100% reimbursable educational purchases
• The 100% reimbursable safety expenses
• The percentage reimbursable utility and other miscellaneous expenses

Each house gets to spend up to ten thousand dollars per year on educational equipment and supplies that will be located in an educational part of the house. Recently, ET used this money to buy Superconducktor (our server, with about 2TB of RAID5 disk, 16GB of RAM, and eight cores), our cluster machines, chairs, printers, ink, and paper. We've tried to get other things covered, with mixed success --- our projector we originally bought assuming it'd be covered, and we've tried on several occasions to get van expenses covered ("We need it to get to classes"). ET, at least, largely found a couple of years ago that we now had all the educational stuff that we wanted, so for the past few years we've sorta scrambled to find things to buy. We even buy paper now, which I think makes us one of few MIT groups that don't just take paper from the Athena clusters...

The second component is safety expenses. Starting this year, these are 100% reimbursable. This turns out to be pretty good timing, since this fall we had to do several thousand dollars worth of repair work on the sprinkler system. Two years ago, ET would have had to pay for it (well, 2/3 of it, anyway --- back then it probably would have been percentage reimbursable under the next category). This year, I think the IRDF will pay for all of it.

The third category is the percentage-reimbursable operating expenses. This includes things like water, sewer, gas, electricity, and insurance. For ET, this comes out to about $20,000 for the house and a similar amount (I think) for the corporation. The IRDF doesn't pay the whole cost, though; it reimburses a percentage of the costs equal to the percentage of the house's "assignable" space that is "educational".

Each individual room is assigned a category and an associated amount of educational floor space, based on the floorplans of the house. Non-assignable space --- corridors, utility or machine rooms, stairways, and our porch --- are ignored. The remaining space gets split up into categories like:

• "STUDY ROOM"
• "STUDY SERVICE" (e.g., closet off a study room)
• "TOILET OR BATH"
• "RECREATION FACILITY" (e.g., the Pit, the room that has ET's projector, couches, and such, and is always exempt from study conditions)
• "SLEEP STUDY SERVICE" (e.g., the laundry room)
• "TELECOM CLOSET"
• "FOOD FACILITY" (the dining room) and "FOOD FACILITY SERVICE" (the kitchen)
• "LOUNGE" (front rooms)
• "SLEEP STUDY W/O BATH" (the dorm)

Study rooms (and their associated closets) are educational spaces and their footage counts fully towards the educational footage, while nothing else seems to count at all. This turns out to be one of two ways (that I know about) that ET's setup is financially beneficial. Because the personal rooms lack beds, they count as fully educational. My understanding is that ET has the highest percentage educational space of any house... and beats the third place candidate by a factor of about two. (The second place candidate, I believe, is a bit closer.)

As I mentioned above, the front rooms are currently classified as "LOUNGE". Getting Chapter Room reclassified as a "LIBRARY" (if such a classification exists?) or "STUDY ROOM" would be worth about a thousand dollars (and might have nice second-order effects on the $10,000 grant, in that we could officially store things in Chapter Room). My feeling is that Chapter Room, at least, should be classifiable as educational --- it's generally a quiet room that people tool in with fair frequency, and I'm pretty sure that the piano has been used for music classes. Also... all those books must be educational, right? Chapter Room's 326.92 square feet of space is about 5.6% of ET's assignable square footage. At about $200 per percent per year, that's about a thousand dollars a year total. The living room, while slightly smaller, is still worth about a thousand dollars a year.

Most of the rest of the house couldn't be so lucrative --- it's either clearly not educational (the Pit, for example, is always exempt from study conditions) or tiny ("Oh boy, Outgoing's 7.21 square feet are educational? That's, like, 0.1% of the house!).

A few more numbers...

The nook under the stairs that houses ET's older printer (a printer so old, in fact, that it got donated by a couple of our alums... these days, we'd buy a printer with money the IRDF funneled from a bunch of anonymous alums) could earn the house about $35 a year if it was "STUDY SVC" instead of "SLEEP STUDY SVC"...

The tool room is currently classified as "SLEEP STUDY SVC" (an assignable non-educational designation). Converting it into "UTILITY/MECH RM" (a non-assignable designation) would be worth about $40 per year.

Sadly, the grant is a bit of a pain to apply for...

LJ HTML looks horrible. I'm sure there are better CSSy ways to do the whole thing, and also just the user links.

"If you read this, even if I don't speak to you often, you must post a memory of me.
It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad, earliest or recent, just as long as it happened. Then post this to your journal.
See what people remember about you."

(From convexbaka, fuurei, and ultrawaffle)

Hey, this my first LJ post. This is largely because my real blog is at https://dehnert.arctic.org/~alex/meta/news/, so I don't update this one. Sometime Real Soon Now (as Dan says), I plan to write an LJ cross-poster for my blog. For now, feel free to read it straight from my website.