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OUSA’s Governance and Representation Review is now “not necessarily” expected to be complete by the end of the year, says OUSA President Francisco Hernandez.

Hernandez told Critic that since recommendations made by the Governance and Representation Review Working Party (the Fun Party) “would not come into effect until next year anyway, it was worthwhile potentially carrying it on until next year.”

However, this would be dependent on the incoming OUSA Executive and as such the Fun Party has “some recommendations,” which will be set out at the next Executive meeting.

“Obviously, we will be looking at implementing some of those and if any future Executive wanted to carry on with it, then they will.”

Hernandez felt that the one-semester timeframe given for the review was “probably over-optimistic” considering that OUSA’s last governance review took roughly two years. “But we will be in a position to make recommendations at Tuesday’s Executive meeting, so I think it’s done its job.”

The Fun Party has been beset with difficulties this semester, including a constantly changing ambit and a notable lack of enthusiasm from the majority of its members. Hernandez came into office promising a comprehensive governance review. This was then narrowed in scope after members of the Executive considered another major review pointless, given that the last review only finished in 2010.

However, once the Fun Party was set up and given autonomy from the Executive, Hernandez again pushed for a comprehensive review. This was once again narrowed in scope in the face of slow progress; the Fun Party lagged more than a month behind schedule, met only fortnightly, and barely met quorum when it did meet.
“We did a brief review but we didn’t really look into the more tricky questions about the nature of student representation or that sort of blue sky thinking sort of stuff. We just did a ‘what are the impacts of the changes?’”

Despite this, Hernandez described the result of the Fun Party as “mission accomplished,” perhaps because its mission was to waste everybody's time.

Hernandez hoped to avoid being part of any future Fun Party work. “This is a worthwhile process but it’s painful and difficult,” he said. “If I lose the Council election, it’s probably as a direct result of this governance review. This just swallows up a massive black hole of your time; I’ve had zero time to do other stuff as I wanted to.”

A draft paper of proposed changes will go to a Fun Party meeting on Monday. Here, the Committee will suggest changes and give feedback to be included when it is presented to the Executive on Tuesday afternoon.