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The first half of the year certainly has been a huge learning curve for me. As well as the big political things that have been going on, behind the scenes I have been rewriting OUSA’s strategic plan and working on some big internal changes.

 
Unfortunately it is only a one-year plan, as OUSA's future is relatively uncertain (VSM ref. #1). However, regardless of what happens, the new mission statement and core values defined will still apply. The mission statement is: “With a focus on comprehensive engagement and exceptional services OUSA will provide the ultimate student experience.”
The core values are: inclusive, responsible, engaging, and relevant. The mission and values are to be the root of everything OUSA does for its members from now on. Engaging OUSA members (all students) better and being more relevant is a particular focus this year, and a number of reviews have been initiated. The first of these is the governance structure review.
There has been a fair bit of criticism of the Executive’s size, efficacy and representativeness, and given that the Executive governs the organisation, the review has had a pretty wide scope.
The way we have gone about the structure review is not to sweat the small stuff and have a Survivor-style vote of who stays and who goes, but rather to go back to the drawing board and say: 
“If I were to design a student executive to govern an organisation that has an operational budget of $2 million, runs a whole raft of services and provides political representation to 20 000 diverse students, what would it look like?”
That's not an easy question to answer and our proposal is pretty sizeable. But given we want your opinions on it and we want you to vote to accept proposed changes, I thought I'd give you the heads-up as soon as possible.
From today, the official report of the Governance Structure Review Working Party has been released and is on the OUSA website. We would really appreciate your feedback and hope to consult with as many students and clubs as possible over the coming weeks. (Email president@ousa.org.nz to have your say).
I’m sure there will be full scrutiny in Critic in re-O Week (we changed the name back, officially) and at the end of the first week back we would like to hold a student forum to discuss the proposal, then open up voting (online) for a week.
As well as voting on changes, we will also be putting forward the constitutional changes required to have SGMs officially held online.
Thanks in advance for checking it out and telling me what you think!