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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Student issues go digital

J Street not up to standards? Smoke clouding the air?

Take it online with the Student Association’s new forum for grievances, where students can add issues to the SA’s agenda at any time of the day.

The Student Association created the digital discussion board for users to post campus concerns they want prioritized by the SA. Since G-Voice was launched last Wednesday, site visitors have cast 327 votes on 12 user-submitted posts.

The top concerns include adding lights to the Mount Vernon Campus athletic fields, restoring the free newspaper program and prohibiting smoking on campus. As of Oct. 12, users cast 87, 66 and 33 votes respectively for each issue.

Visitors to the website, distinguished by their computers’ IP addresses, can cast up to three votes per proposal and a total of 15 at one time. Users can submit an unlimited number of issues.

“The voting feature allows us to know what are the issues on campus in real time, but also what’s the order of importance of these issues,” SA President John Richardson said.

He looked to the University of Virginia’s student government forum, Speak Up UVA, as a model. Both GW’s and UVA’s websites are hosted by the online agency UserVoice.

Senator Michael Amesquita, GSEHD, who posted about the need for a bike rack outside Gelman Library, said G-Voice gives students an outlet to voice their concerns while pinpointing issues for administrators to target.

“Using G-Voice could only add to the leverage when approaching GW administration,” Amesquita said. “It is another way for SA to be in touch with the needs and demands of our student body.”

Voting chances will be recycled as issues are completed or removed from the site. Richardson and Executive Vice President Ted Costigan will moderate the forum, deleting vague or inappropriate posts.

Richardson said the team plans to organize issues by categories including housing, Gelman Library and community building to make the site more navigable for students.

Moderators are able to mark when the SA begins tackling an issue, such as the College Readership Program. The free paper service, which brought about 140,000 newspapers to campus last year, fell to budget cuts this fall. Students in the SA have led the fight to restore the daily deliveries.

A moderator on the site commented on the post that progress is already underway to provide discounted subscriptions to the New York Times online.

He said, as students continue to learn about G-Voice, the site will become a more powerful tool.

“We’re really trying to make sure this is something people know about and see as an effective channel to get things done,” Richardson said.

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