UWSA website FAIL

There’s a by-election this week. Really. You can read about it in the current issue of The Uniter.

U of W students can be forgiven if they are unaware of the upcoming UWSA by-elections. Anyone checking the home, news, calendar or events page of the UWSA website would certainly have no idea. In fact, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single mention of the by-elections anywhere on the site.

Every year, candidates running for positions with the UWSA say they want to increase student awareness of the services the student association offers.  Often, this is the only goal. But every year communication is nil, and the next administration starts from scratch.

The UWSA just launched a spiffy new website. It looks pretty nice. This would have been a perfect opportunity to implement a real communication strategy, starting with keeping an up-to-date website with clear and obvious information about what the UWSA is up to. Instead, aside from a lonely Tweet from five days ago announcing by-election speeches in the Bulman Centre, there is no indication that an essential democratic function is even happening.

Students need to be aware of what their representatives are doing for the association to be democratic and for students to care about what it does. The UWSA is clearly aware of this, since they repeat this line every year at election time. It’s unfortunate they don’t heed their own message.