The McMaster Students Union’s lack of communication

The paper focused a bit on this last week in the article entitled “Communicating with the SRA” in the News section, but there are a few points mentioned in that piece that continue to be an issue. The live stream continues to be a problem, and the inability to fulfill the “Communication & Outreach” section of the Student Representative Assembly’s operating policy persisted for the Sept. 24 meeting.

While the live stream was available for the meeting, there is a significant chunk cut out from the archives. The current video has just over an hour segment cut out from a much longer meeting. About 17 minutes of the available content is a break.

Individual SRA faculties did a good job of promoting the live stream when it was available, but few followed up stating the results of the meeting afterwards to little detail. The only mention from the MSU itself on any social media was a retweet from SRA Social Sciences a day in advance of the meeting.

For the most part, the MSU continued to fail in providing timely, accessible information to the public. Unfortunately, this appears to be one part of a much larger problem.

There seems to be minimal priority in any sort of communication with the public.

While I can certainly respect that a large priority has been placed on projects like the café in 1280 and the Student Activity Building, I cannot respect the lack of effort when it comes to updating the student body on these processes or on anything related to smaller projects or proceedings.

The fortunate part for this paper is that many of our news articles, no matter how big or small, are breaking stories. If it were not for their efforts, I would have only the tiniest idea about what any of the Board of Directors has actually done over the last five months besides set up vague plans for things.

The 2017-2018 Approved Minutes on their website should be a fine enough way to get information about what the student government is consistently up to. At the time of writing, this has some notes from the month of April and the meeting on June 18.

For this paper specifically, there are no minutes at all available from the entire 2016-2017 year and none from this year available on their website for our Board of Publication.

The President’s Page in our paper could be another good resource, but requires you to pick up the physical copy for that week. The MSU website is in a similar situation to the previous point with nothing from the entire 2016-2017 year and nothing from this year in their President’s Page Archives.

You deserve to know what is going on. Maybe the board of directors simply do not want to boast about their accomplishments. My main worry at this point is that they have few accomplishments to boast about in the first place.