Democracy Zone (25th February 2015)

Megan welcomed everyone to the meeting. Apologies were received from Katie Lightowler. Emily Shepherd was absent without apologies. 

The following Union members were also in attendance:

Edmund Baird, Shruti Verma, Jade Head and Frazer Delves.

The committee reviewed the minutes from the last meeting held on 29th January. The committee moved to a vote; 2 voted for. The minutes were approved.

Chris McGeehan provided the group with a brief update on the Student Groups Committee. In their last meeting, the Northern Ireland Society were re-affiliated as they had been accidently disafiliated in a previous meeting. Funding Round three has now closed and Zone Committees are currently arranging funding meetings to review and allocate funding to groups. 

The next meeting is on Wednesday 18th March and this will be an affiliation meeting.

Frazer Delves presented this paper. The Union Councillor elections should include RON so that they can be brought in line with the Sabbatical, Student Leader and Student Trustee elections; this would give the voters more options on how they can cast their vote. The addition of RON in these elections would not impact negatively on how the elections are run from an administrative side. 

Section 6.2 of Rule 7 (Elections) would be amended to include "Union Councillors" in the list of positions.

The Committee moved to a vote; 2 voted for. The Rule change was approved. The change will now be taken to the next Union Council for final approval. 

Sabb/Student Leader 1:1s

Edmund expressed an interest in introducing a policy or Rule change that stated that Sabbatical Officers and their Student Leader (SL) meet on a regular basis. Jade agreed that this would be good idea as she has heard from past SLs that there is a lack of support provided to them, which in some cases has lead to resignations. Shruti added that Committee Zone meetings are not enough contact and that SLs would like to feel more consulted on what is going on in their area. Chris Small explained that there will be a more in depth investigation into the amount of support we offer our Officers (both elected and not elected) which can inform any ideas going forward. 

Megan explained that she has pushed this idea to be included in the Sabbatical handover document. David flagged up some issues surrounding the practicialities of arranging and attending these meetings, for example how would Officers take into account holiday periods if the rules states that they should meet fortnightly. There is also the number of SLs in each Zone to consider.

The group agreed that any process that is put into action should be easily enforced but also flexible to suit the needs of Sabbs and SLs. Megan suggested that she should meet up with Ed and Chris Small to work on developing this idea further.

Student Leader Forum

Megan asked the groups opinions and thoughts on having a SL forum; she explained that the purpose of such meetings would be about collaboration and discussion rather then updates from each SL as it was thought that these would have poor attendance. The following ideas for the forum were suggested:

• themes for meetings
• the sessions could high levels of interaction and an element of passive learning
• there should be some informal discussion so that SLs have the opportunity to speak to eachother about upcoming projects with the aim of facilitating collaboration.

Megan volunteered to meet up with interested SLs to discuss and create a draft format for an SL Forum. Shruti asked to be included in these meetings. 

The date of the AGM is 13th May. The General Election is on 7th May and exams start on 18th May. Ideally, the advertising for the AGM should not clash with any other publicity, however due to the short amount of time between the General Elections and the AGM, this is inevitable. Megan asked the group if they had any ideas on this matter. The group decided that the current schedule is the best option. However, to avoid publicity clashes, promotion of the AGM could start earlier before the elections and ideas submission could be opened earlier as well.

AOB: Recording how members of Union Council vote individually - David Mendoza-Wolfson.

David asked if it was possible to record the way individual members of Council vote as students should know how their elected representatives are voting. It is not known whether we have the capacity to do this and so the equipment used will be trialled at the next Union Council for testing purposes. The results will not be published. If it is successful, we will look into taking this on in the long term.

There was no other business and the meeting ended at 3.40pm. The next meeting is TBC.