Some of you may be aware that I’ve been working on a ‘Democratic Review’ with our Student Voice Team. This review is intended to make the decision making processes at KeeleSU more accessible, understandable and transparent.
The key issues we found were that our processes were hard to understand for most students, that our decision making process required students to have a solution to an issue they wanted to raise and that students unable to attend are pretty much cut out of the process. Importantly one strength of our existing processes is a core of engaged and clued up students who want to be involved.
For our first Union General Meeting of the year we’re going to try something different. Instead of massive, inaccessibly debates with amendments and parliamentary language - we’re going to just sit around tables and talk about the issues you’ve told us about and what you want us to do about them. We’ll be running four table discussions in parallel, themed around student submitted issues, that anyone can take part in easily.
|
Block
|
Union Development
|
Community
|
Welfare and Inclusion
|
Education
|
|
1
|
|
Water fountains
|
She should run - KeeleSU Election diversity
|
Employability
|
|
2
|
Transparency of KeeleSU finances
|
Plastic cups
|
How should noise complaints be handled?
|
Entrepreneurship for international students
|
|
3
|
SU Events
|
Parking
|
|
Examination Resits
|
Students who can’t make the meeting can still have their say. We’re running online discussions right now that all students can take part in so that when we’re having the discussions we can have a fuller understanding of what it is that students think about the issue and what ideas they have to solve it. Any comments submitted online will be printed out and used to inform our discussions. Link to all that here.
This will require students who attend the meetings to make decisions about what table discussions they go to - but if you have ideas about multiple issues that are on at the same time you’re free to move tables during the same ‘block’ of discussions or submit your thoughts online beforehand.
Any decisions made in our UGM will require a two third majority to be fully approved, anything with less support than this will be ratified online in a vote all students can take part in.
These ideas are quite new and different. But our hope is that this will make our meetings more accessible, more efficient and more considered in their discussion. This first meeting us just a trial so if it doesn’t quite work we’re going to tweak it until we have something that works for everyone.
Please do come along and have your say on issues that matter to you - or at least have your say online!