Alex Harries's diary

I've just come back from Ravelin Park, where SADO Ben Norman and RAG bods Jenny Leggott and Sarah Blatchford have been bedding down for the night with only cardboard, damp sleeping bags and tarpaulins (err, and each other...) for warmth.

No, they're not trying to recreate a summer picnic atmosphere - not at this time of year, anyway. The event is the University-organised "Sleepout", which has been planned to raise awareness for the homeless population of Portsmouth.

There were around 25 bods milling around when I left, including three Purple Door staff (one of which is Alice Hickman, the University's Volunteer and Work Experience Officer and Ben Norman's oppo, who I may have met before...), two security guards, and a full tea urn.

It looks like the choice spot for the night will be under a pair of large tarpaulins which have been erected between two trees in a loose-but-functional impersonation of a giant tent. The area surrounding the shelter was intertwined with the string holding the shelter up, leaving the whole area slightly resembling a giant spider's lair... Ewww, spiders...

Hopefully everyone will have a fun - if chilly - night and get some sleep into the bargain. This kind of event is good (as long as it serves its purpose to raise awareness for the homeless, naturally) and it would be great to see the University collaborating with the Union more often to publicise such events. Pugwash News is always available to help, of course.

Ms Blatchford has my camera at the moment, so once it's back I'll get some photos online. In the meantime, look out for pics and even (possibly) some footage on BBC South Today and in the Times Higher Education supplement - when the Uni want to promote something, they don't 'arf go for it... :o)

Find out more on the University's website.

Guess I got lucky with this pic - St. Paul's by night from Southbank:

:o) 

Last night in Kent...

It's inevitable that any student volunteering organisation will suffer some turnover - churn - among its membership throughout the year. Unfortunately, half way into the year, the Union's contributor teams are going through the stage where the workload is piling on, exam revision is taking over most people's lives, and the thought of having another five to six months of this, and having the responsibility for a newspaper and/or magazine's success, is naturally going to result in some team members realising they're running the risk of damaging their degrees because of the amount of time they spend working on the publications at the Union.

I don't want anyone to fail or even damage their degree mark just so the Union can put out its media, but its not always the case that you can see the error of your ways until the damage is done - this was always my problem and one of the main reasons it took me a whole three attempts to pass my second year...! 

This evening I've sent out a short e-mail to the editorial teams to remind them that they are still massively appreciated, and I've copied and pasted it here, both because it's an open letter, and because I think the message applies not only to our editors, but also to our entire base of contributors, as well as pretty much anyone else who altruistically volunteers their time and skills to make the Union - and through it the Portsmouth student experience - even better.

We've suffered a few losses over the last few weeks, with members realising their coursework load is incompatible with the amount of time they're putting into the Union, and while I'm gutted some have left, I appreciate all the hard efforts and totally understand that no-one wants to risk negatively impacting their coursework.

If you're still in, but you're having second thoughts about staying in, please come and have a chat with me. I'm out of the office until Monday, but will be happy to speak to you any time - my contact details are on the bottom of this e-mail. Most importantly, I urge you not to do anything hasty, but by the same token, please ferpetesake don't let the Union be the reason you have to stay here another year!

I'm aware that Pugwash and Pugwash News involves an awful lot of stick and not a lot of carrot, and I'm trying to think of ways to redress the balance. There's talk of a social event - maybe a pub crawl or paintballing day? - and if you have a suggestion, now's the time to speak!

Finally, I'd just like to repeat my earlier thanks for all your work: I know you all put a lot in to the Union's publications, and I sincerely hope that you will bear with me and the rest of the Union team while we get on top of the workload we're all fighting our various paths through.

Don't let the next few weeks stress you out, and I look forward to seeing you all at the next editorial meeting.

Best regards: Alex Harries, Media & Publications Officer"

For the record, I know this may well come across as a load of old horse s*** - I can't really do anything about that. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my teams, and hate the thought that some of them might be feeling pressurised because of their involvement in the Union.

There aren't any easy answers to the age-old balancing act of University vs. social life vs. work vs. extracurricular, but anything we as a Union can do to help should lie pretty close to the top of our list of priori...

I'm just grabbing two minutes' free time between meetings, so I thought I'd put a quick update on here about UPSU.net, which has seen a lot of new things going on over the last month or so, not least the new JobShop (which I'm going to do a full write-up about shortly).

The UPSU.net homepage has had a bit of a reshuffle; UPSU and BBC news headlines have been condensed into column 3, and column 4 has been freed up to make way for the forthcoming "latest photo galleries", reprioritised "forthcoming events listing"  and new "Social:Life" boxes, and - most importantly - a shiny new "JobShop" box has been added below blogs and forums in column 2, with the latest jobs and a mini tag cloud listing.

This should pave the way for the forthcoming news section reshuffle, which is proving to be a bit of a headache to work out at the moment, because it's very hard to find a balance between presenting a unified news section with navigation based on the content - for example news, features, reviews, etc - and a news section which presents articles based on which printed publication (or other media area - for example Pure FM) they're from.

Time to see what the experts would do, methinks... ;o)

Ttfn - Al