Status: Complete
Proportional Petition Quota Requirement
With the great addition of the petition section on The Union website it should be expected that students petitioning The Union will be able to share their petition on social media. As such, this increase the petition's reach.
This will mean that that any petition is far more likely to be exposed to a larger proportion of the student population than if the petition required a physical signature on paper. With this in mind it seems that the quota of 250 students (~1% of The Union's membership) is extremely low. This figure was decided upon in a time when The Union's membership was far smaller.
As such, this is a proposal for the quota for petitions to be made directly proportional to The Union's membership. For example: at least 5% of students should sign the petition for its cause to be considered.
Careful research should be caried out to ensure that the percentage is chosen wisely. This would ensure that only petitions that a significant level of the student population care about would be considered, perhaps The Union can consult students undertaking statistics modules in order to have a good reasoning behind any figure.
Responses
I completely agree with you, 250 students is not a lot and is certainly easily reachable with the internet! There are benefits to this, as it means it is easy for the student body to trigger a call of action, such as a referendum, which is important as we are student led. Having said this, I do agree with you that the figure of 250 is largely a relic of when we were much smaller and doesn’t necessarily represent the entire student body. In fact, we recognised this in the recent Democratic reform where we increased quoracy of referenda to 10% of the student population, so I completely agree that we should look into the petition quota. It would be great if you could perhaps take this as an idea to discuss at Union Council on the 6th June, or if you can’t I’m happy to do it on your behalf. Please get in touch with me via facebook or by emailing vpdci@unionsouthampton.org
Thanks,
Kerry
VP Democracy and Creative Industries
Wednesday 25th May 2016 4:34pm
Actions
- Forwarded to Vice President Democracy and Creative Industries
Wednesday 25th May 2016 10:27am
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