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So here it is: the week that will show whether or not OUSA is an organisation beyond repair or too resilient to change, and the week that will define my success in this role. This week we are asking students to vote in two referenda: one to reduce the size of the Executive and one to reform the Student General Meeting process.

Unfortunately there will be a couple of people on this campus (let in pre-limited entry) that will try to tell you I am doing this with some kind of malicious intent. They will argue that somehow, despite spending hours consulting with people, I am dead set on ruining student democracy. They will conveniently forget how farcical student general meetings have been and definitely won't tell you that they are defending the current unrepresentative and failing system because for years they have taken advantage of it. I would respond by asking why those people don't have confidence that increasing the amount of people required to pass a 'majority vote' and increasing the accessibility of our external policy setting process would lead to their motions going through. 
Others would argue that creating more specific sub committees and giving them authority, budget lines, and decision-making powers is going to take something away from people. To that I would be brutally honest and say that currently OUSA isn't effective enough in doing what it does. OUSA is trying to both be a governing board and a representative body. It is a well-established fact that the more people you have trying to make governing decisions around the table the less effective it is. So the Exec reduced to ten people and the role descriptions of the 'core executive' have been re-written around the core operations of OUSA.
As far as representation goes, to be effective you need far more reps than we currently have on the Executive. There are a number of areas that are missed out at the moment (a disabilities rep, for example) and in reality if an issue relating to representation comes up, currently those reps already take it to the Welfare committee to get dealt with. At present, there is no formal assurance that those issues will feed up to the Exec (but we have been making sure it happens anyway).
In the proposed structure we will involve more people, give a better framework to our education, welfare, postgraduate, international, (new) colleges, and internal operational committees, strengthen their ability to achieve their goals, and connect them with a whole lot more students.
I have done my best to make positive changes to OUSA and now I really need your support to bring them in. Jump on the website this week (before Thursday 4pm) and vote to make these changes happen. The result will be a far more efficient and effective OUSA and a much better way to represent you, provide you with the services you want, be more relevant, and respond to the ever-changing environment of our University.