Editorial: Complaints go social

As promised by current Student Government Board President Gordon Louderback, since this year, every Pitt student has the opportunity to submit his or her ideas for campus improvement on the SGB website.

From the project’s inception in January to March 27, there have been six project submissions.

Interestingly, the University of Maryland also developed a program this year to take student suggestions for campus improvement.

From the start of the project in late March until now, the service, WTF UMD (what to fix University of Maryland), managed over Facebook and Twitter, has garnered more than 2,000 likes. The Facebook page sees dozens of requests a day, and the Twitter feed is active. The university newspaper, The Diamondback, has fully endorsed the program, and it seems to have garnered significant good will.

Pitt’s SGB needs to look to the University of Maryland and learn from its example. Get the project proposal idea off the SGB website. Get started on a WTF Pitt.

There are several advantages to the Facebook approach. For one, responses are very fast. Even with a huge amount of requests a day, it seems that a member of the student government or another member of the campus community answer most questions within a day. This platform allows for the public to see that response rates are fast.

Second, there’s a much lower criteria for submissions at WTF UMD. Pitt’s impressive, impersonal online form asks a lot from a student submitting a project. Students can submit costs, contact information, project details, academic major and other demographic details. Instead of just offering a suggestion, Pitt SGB asks students to offer actual proposals.

By raising the bar so high, Pitt’s SGB is not getting nearly as many suggestions and is receiving a far narrower range of ideas.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, WTF UMD allows students to act as an actual community. Not only can student government understand the problems of campus life, which are wide, ranging from serious topics such as diversity and safety to smaller concerns such as ice cream dispensers and leaky pipes, but students can understand other students’ problems.

This social element has allowed WTF UMD to bloom in the way Pitt Crushes and Pitt Compliments have grown in recent months. Only instead of jokes and warm feelings of affection, WTF UMD allows social media to actually act as a unifying voice.

It remains to be seen how many suggestions from WTF UMD are actually being fixed. The program is in its early inception.

But judging by its response rates and the broad embrace of the campus community, Pitt’s SGB should copy the model.

Creating the page would only take a couple of minutes. So what say you, SGB? Are you ready to really get Pitt students involved?