SGA Historian

To fulfill the long-overdue need for documenting events and updating news among the student body at AUC, last week (9/29/2010), the members of the Student Government Association at AUC amended the SGA bylaws and voted to add a new position to the executive board, the SGA Historian! The following new amendments describe the roles of the Historian:

(V) Historian
The Historian shall perform the following functions:
1. Keep accurate records of all previous and current members of the SGA council and executive board.
2. Serve as the SGA Webmaster and Editor.
3. Maintain and update AUCScope.com on a weekly basis.
4. With assistance from the SGA Secretary maintain a calendar of events.
5. Write and/or supervise the writing of any article or public event piece for any and all public forums.
6. Update and upkeep the SGA display case on a weekly basis

This is a position that is much needed, and I am very happy to hear about this news. I can forsee many improvements in the way the student body communicates with the addition of the Historian position:

  • As things are done currently, whenever student organizations or individuals wanted to make announcements to the whole school, they would have to send a request to our school’s registrar, who would then forward it via mass email to the whole school. Now, with The Scope being AUC’s new official student government website and student newsletter, student organizations and individuals may now directly post their own announcements and fliers online anytime they want, with no limits on adding uploaded pictures, links, videos… you name it.
  • As The Scope doubles as SGA’s website, the SGA Meeting Minutes may be posted and archived onto the site and available to all students who want to see them or refer back to.
  • In the past, student groups would have to wait until the SGA meetings on Wednesdays to vie with each other in setting dates for events on the calendar. The secretary would then have to sort it out on his or her own calendar. There was no centralized calendar that was accessible all the time to anyone. It was especially a hassle whenever groups wanted to change dates and do not know if it would conflict with another group’s events. Now with the Calendar on The Scope, groups can directly and autonomously add their own events on a first-come-first-serve basis, while at the same time seeing all the other events going on, making planning much less of a headache.
  • As things are going now, we often get news from the school via mass email and news from students (if you can call it that) from forums like ValueMD and personal blogs like my own. Now with The Scope, members of the student body may now generate their own news, in a more centralized, organized, professional, and non-anonymous way.
  • The student body at this school renews itself every two years. This makes looking into the past difficult. Whenever the students or the SGA want to do something and want to see if it has been done before in the past, and if and why it failed or succeeded, we have no place to reference for that history. We have no idea how the SGA ran things as little as 3 years ago and it is difficult to understand the historical context in which we are situated today at this school. For example, I had not even known there used to be a printed student newspaper at this school until I ran across a long-outdated post on a neglected bulletin board on campus. There is much we could learn if we knew when it started, who started it, how it was started, how it ran, how long it ran, and why it failed. From referencing the past, we can learn how to make the new newsletter successful. With the new Historian position, we can document this type of history, and this history can be kept on The Scope, accessible to anyone at any time.
  • That neglected bulletin board I mentioned was the SGA bulletin board. It had not been updated for who knows how many years, and the glass case that shielded the board make it seem like a museum piece, displaying evidence of a forgotten past. It is about time it is put back into good use by the new SGA historian!

I look forward to seeing where the SGA Historian role can take us as the student body and how The Scope can ease the way we communicate, plan events, and document history.