The June 11th, 2014 Council meeting was uneventful, perhaps because it was sparsely populated. President Jason Nixon was unable to attend due to illness, and both the Vice-Presdent, Finance & Administration Corrina Green and Office Manager, Karyna McDonald were on their way up to the Convocation Ceremonies in Athabasca, so were unable to attend as well.
The policies dealt with revolved around AUSU’s hiring procedures for employees, and seemed to be entirely housekeeping issues to make sure that the policies were well organized and easier to understand for subsequent AUSU Councils. The only real change of note is that AUSU has eliminated the category of project positions, noting that these are more aptly described as either temporary positions or as consultants, neither of which were served by the limitations that had been placed on project positions.
After the policy section in the meeting comes the report section, and in this, also, there was little that council noted or sought extra explanation for, and with the President and Executive committee reports not being submitted (again, due to the illness of the president) was a fairly short section. The longest discussion occurred during the discussion of the Executive Director’s report, where she pointed out that their most recent mass-mail to students about e-texts had an open rate of 42%, which is an extremely impressive number for mass e-mails. A couple of councillors pointed out that they’d also been recently contacted by a graduate student who was doing her own research into e-texts, and some concerns were noted as to whether students might start to feel they were getting polled too much, even though it would be by two completely separate groups.
Council also expressed a desire to see if they could collaborate with the graduate student, both to help her data collection with what AUSU is collecting now, as well as to see what type of data she managed to gather.
