Student Council hosted the pre-launch of Speak Up U.Va. — an online forum for student concerns — during its general body meeting Tuesday night.
Third-year College student Anna Cho, co-chair of the Marketing and Communications committee, described the platform as a place to aggregate student concerns and facilitate responses. Cho was also involved in planning the program’s launch party.
While the platform, a revamp of the previous online platform, will officially launch this Friday in Garden IX, Student Council invited members of the community to see the website’s interface in advance and provide feedback.
Chief Technology Officer Eric Xie, a second-year Engineering student, presented the program’s website to the body.
Xie compared the interface to those of Reddit and Yik Yak, because anyone can post a concern to the home page and people can vote them up or down. The posts with the most up-votes are automatically displayed first on the page. Each post can also be tagged so the appropriate student council committee members can view them.
“One of the features that I hope people don’t abuse is that posting can be totally anonymous,” Xie said. “It’s a way for people to just speak up about what they feel is going wrong or right or just needs a little more discussion about on Grounds.”
President Emily Lodge, a third-year Batten student, said the website would help Student Council better reflect the student body’s views.
“Within Student Council we can kinda try our best to come up with what big concerns are facing the University, but this can kinda give us the base of what the student body is thinking,” Lodge said. “We weren’t exactly held accountable for actually resolving community concerns before, so hopefully this will keep us more accountable.”
Lodge also said she hopes to expand upon the findings from SpeakUp U.Va. through additional survey data in the future.
The feedback brought up by the audience included adding options to flag an offensive post, automatically hiding the post until Student Council reviews it, creating an app, adding dining and about tabs and making the box for students to post more accessible on the website. Xie said he would consider implementing these changes.
Some students also voiced concerns about people using the website negatively or similarly to how Yik Yak is used.
“We’re able to moderate the site so we’ll have somebody constantly on that to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Lodge said in response.
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