A group of York students has won the opportunity to have their very own I-phone application developed after winning The App Challenge final, held at the Ron Cooke Hub on Wednesday, January 18.
YUSU Welfare officer Bob Hughes has warned students to be vigilant after a student loans phishing scam has been revealed.
Her Majesty the Queen will be visiting York on Maundy Thursday, 5th April, as part of the 800th anniversary of York’s Charter for the traditional “Royal Maundy” ceremony.
A flood caused by a heating system “failure” forced the university IT services to shut down many essential systems on Sunday night, causing problems for many students on the eve of their exams and assignment due-dates.
Daniel Carr has been acting GSA President since Luke Martin was disqualified for a breach of election rules at the end of last term. Due to the length of the interview, his answers will not be presented in straight Q&A form, but grouped into the main topics of discussion.
"On the first occasion the the problem was that [...] we exceeded the capacity of Edge when it came to voting and although that meant that the ballot box would be taken outside so that people who couldn’t get into Edge could vote, that wasn’t made clear enough and some people thought they had been turned away.
"The GSA should have electronic voting. It’s a system that ideally would’ve been in place long ago. We have now founded a democracy working group, it will report on its findings to the executive tomorrow, and one of those findings will be that we need to adopt online voting."
"Matt Beacham, our returning officer, was made aware of a complaint made against Rui Huang, that Rui had been using mass emails to garner support. Matt investigated this complaint and found it to be true. The rules for that election were very clear that mass emails would be penalised by disqualification. That meant that on the night of the election Luke Martin was thought to be the winner. This [Rui's disqualification] only came to light on the afternoon of the election and people were not informed until the evening of the election itself."
When asked whether, had people been informed of Rui's disqualification, the results might have been different, Carr said: "It’s a possibility, it’s difficult to speculate either way. That may have been an issue; however, given the other things that occurred it wasn’t something that we really had to make a decision about."
"Following further complaints it transpired that Luke had been campaigning using Facebook prior to the opening of campaigning, the rules clearly did not allow for this.
"It also transpired that Luke’s Facebook group had been sending invites to people who had not accepted them and who had therefore not given their support explicitly to Luke, something the returning officer said he believed was akin to mass emails. Therefore by Matt's definition Luke had also sent mass emails and it was necessary to disqualify him."
"The rules for the original election were fine, when it came to the second election, there was an amendment made to those rules which was not authorised by the executive committee.
"This essentially meant that constitutionally that amendment was invalid. Of course this is a very serious issue and the GSA has to fully apologise to both candidates and to its members for this situation."
Under the second set of rules, deemed invalid, Martin's use of Facebook for campaigning was not explicitly forbidden. Carr however stresses that, regardless, the end result would have been the same.
He said: "Under Matt Beacham’s interpretation of the new rules, Luke’s use of Facebook would still have been considered the use of mass emails. Therefore under both sets of rules, it would’ve been the same issue."
"The governance review was conducted over the summer of 2008, the report was published in September and the previous executive that was then in place chose not to make the report public.
"Upon the current executive becoming functional in November, we swiftly moved to form three working groups: a democracy working group, a governance working group and a finance working group."
"Hopefully the recommendations of the democracy working group will be passed at the executive tomorrow. This will fundamentally transform the way in which we are doing elections.
"It will mean we will get rid of the antiquated first past the post electoral system, it will mean that we will be conducting elections online, it will mean that our rules and regulations are far clearer, far better and far better informed by external bodies with the knowledge to do so.
"As for more fundamental changes, whilst the changes necessary to our constitution and overall government structure won’t be possible in the near future, we look to pass a new constitution in May at our second general meeting of the year, [and] we have made a number of fundamental changes in the past month.
"We’ve vastly increased our cooperation with YUSU [and] are now looking at enhancing our representation on university committees. We have had a rather large scale upgrade of our website and Mel Nichol, who is the academic and welfare coordinator at YUSU, is now going to be employed on an 8 hour a week contract by the GSA."
"We feel the organisation has moved forward dramatically. The past few months have been very difficult for the organisation, the accumulation of problems over a large span of time had gone too far and we ended up in a very undesirable position.
"However, over the course of the past month we’ve started to really make the changes that are necessary to get the organisation operating effectively and doing a very important job for graduate students.
"While we recognise the shortcomings of recent times and the serious problems outlined in the governance report and obvious to us as well, we feel that this organisation can, by October when this present executive will be broken up, become infinitely more effective, [and] provide a number of very valuable services to graduates."
"It also transpired that Luke’s facebook group had been sending invites to people who had not accepted them and who had therefore not given their support explicitly to Luke. Something the returning officer said he believed was akin to mass emails."
If that is true, then every single YUSU officer should be disqualified.
Why? The GSA and YUSU have different election rules so how does one interpretation of the GSA election rules apply to YUSU's as well?
YUSU rules also state that mass emails for campaign purposes are strictly forbidden. The penalty is disqualification.
If the GSA decided to interpret facebook invitations like that, then I do not see why it should be different for YUSU. One of the two is clearly making a mistake somewhere.
I see your point, but then I think it is up to the returning officer to decide isn't it?
Though it seems a bit unfair to decide after the fact. If both parties had known the rules going in maybe things would have been different.
Irrespective of the issues surrounding interpretation of Facebook invites and messages, I'm not sure it's right to say Rui and Luke were treated unfairly.
As far as I am aware Rui knowingly sent emails to his department mailing list (2nd election) and the Chinese Society email list (1st election), despite being fully aware that this was a breach of regulations in both sets of rules.
I also believe that Luke was actively using his Facebook group to reassert his policies prior to election campaigning being allowed in the second election, again a knowing breach of regulations.
So overall, I'm not really convinced either candidate was treated unfairly, though the issue of interpreting Facebook invites and messaging as mass emails needs to be sorted for the upcoming election.
YUSU election rules are different to GSA rules. In the past, all electronic campaigning was banned. Under current rules introduced before the last set of YUSU elections, mass emailing is banned, but social network sites are not. The regulations specifically state that facebook campaigning is ok, but that messages in support of a particular candidate must only be sent out to facebook groups set up for the sole purpose of campaigning. So sending out a message to members of the Hockey Club facebook group encouraging them to vote for a particular candidate would not be allowed. Inviting friends to a facebook group set up for the purpose of campaigning is allowed.
Also, contrary to #3, the penalty for breaking the mass-emailing rules is not automatic disqualification. It is at the discretion of the returning officer to either suspend a candidate from campaigning for a set period of time, or to disqualify the candidate. However, disqualification is reserved for very serious breaches of campaigning regulations. Candidates were suspended for breaching these regulations last year, although in both cases the breaches were carried out by their supporters rather than by the candidates themselves:
http://www.nouse.co.uk/2008/03/04/election-candidates-face-one-day-campaign-ban-after-breaching-regulations/
I do not know the wording of the GSA's election regulations, so I can't comment on whether invites should count as mass emailing under their regulations. However, I think it is important that the GSA clarifies the issue in time for their next elections, and that they make sure that all of the candidates fully understand the election regulations.
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