Except for those personally involved in the workings of the SGO-those elected to the Student Senate-most students are fairly ignorant of the activity of the SGO. It might be helpful-in bridging the gap between the SGO and the remainder of the student body-to make the minutes taken during meetings available to the whole campus. In the same vein, candidate's platforms and pertinent information about referendums should be made available to the students via either the SGO website or published packets prior to any election or vote.
The SGO should strive to get more students involved. Issues should be discussed not only exclusively within the SGO and its committees, but must be shared with the student body at large. More topics should be sent to referendum so that students can both express their individual opinions by voting on them and can learn about them as well.
It seems that the committees that deal with the issues on the referendum are often ineffective and unproductive. Could this have something to do with the structure of the SGO itself? Students elected to these committees may be uninterested in issues that don't really pertain to their individual committees.
A good response would be to model our school government after the "real" government and to elect SGO representatives based on where we live on campus. SGO members could represent dorms or groups of dorms and could be elected by their residents. In this way, students would not only better know their representatives, but might be able to approach them more easily with suggestions, questions or comments at dorm meetings or dorm events.
After elections, the SGO can further emulate our government by then appointing the elected students to specific committees. This would hopefully result in a better distribution of interests not only in the SGO as a whole, but also in specific committees.