Comm ideas from Dean Stellini

Does everyone know that Dean Stellini has like a 14ft tall window in his office? Awesome.

Ok, onto the action: This afternoon I spoke with Dean Stellini for the first time about his thoughts on communication between the GSSC and the student body and introduced him to some of my directions and goals.

Dean Stellini's number one message about communication:

• Communication between the student body and the GSSC must improve

He suggests this might happen through frequent, fresh, relevant and easy to find minutes, agendas, surveys and town halls. He hopes that gslounge.com can become a way for more of the student body to offer instant critical feedback to the GSSC. Provided we meet his high standards, I think this is within the range of possibility.

I believe that Dean Stellini's emphasis on gathering active feedback from students points to the need to make a new, and special effort in this area. I am not sure what that effort would look like, but I am hoping that online forums are one answer.

An extremely interesting subject Dean Stellini mentioned was that a few years ago the GS administration put together a bulletin board for the student body that failed. Students never posted. He's not sure why. I will be asking around to hopefully learn enough to avoid pitfalls.

Finally, Dean Stellini wants the blogs of GSSC elected officials to be readable by anyone on the web. He feels that they represent an intelligent, vibrant voice to the student body and by extension, the public. By contrast, he feels that discussions, which are less structured and more challenging to moderate, should be private. Additionally he wants to make sure that all items that end up on the site calendar are official GSSC events or other officially approved events. He is exactly right; blogs should be public and student forums private and that all events should be 100% approved according to our constitution before they land on the calendar.

The next two weeks: Dean Stellini and I will meet before the end of the school year. We hope to meet with Dean Curtis Rodgers and Dean Allison Scola to talk about technical topics like WIND, problem escalation paths, and how they would like communication to improve from their point of view.

Thanks for reading and thanks for Dean Stellini for welcoming me with such great information and assistance,

Brody

ps. Dean Stellini and I spoke about WIND, but I am going to break that out into a separate post.