punditry.ca — uncovering DSU elections

So the campaign is underway, which means candidates have been active on campus and active online.  If you, like me, ignored the LAWL SKIPPY JOINED THE ‘VOTE ME 4 DSU *’ messages on Facebook, we’re here to help.  The various punditry.ca one-site-to-inform-them-all features are now current.  This means:

• In the sidebar on the right, near the bottom, there is a list of candidates along with links to their online resources (website, Facebook, twitter, and the candidate bios from dsuelections.ca)
  • Caveat 1: I expended effort to find everything, but the list may not be complete.  Use the Submit News link to let me know of missing information.
  • Caveat 2: As of right now, Neil Bailey is splashing his url around campus, but I can’t open the page; I put the link up anyway assuming it will work, one day
  • Caveat 3: dsuelections.ca bios are not up yet, but will be at some point I assume.
  • Note: As far as I can tell,  Debogorski, Dempsey, and Blake have no online elections presence, at all.  Meanwhile, all four Senate candidates have fairly extensive presences.
• The Twitter Aggregation page includes tweets from candidates and pundits, as well as the DSU Elections twitter feed.  If you use twitter personally, punditry maintains a Twitter list you can follow.  Both options allow you to be informed while making it easy to de-clutter your reader/client/twitter account post-election.
• Similarly, the blog aggregation page collects posts from every candidate that has a blog-like website, as well as from punditry.  Both blogs and twitter aggregation are available as RSS feeds, if that’s how you roll.
  • These are, of course, subject to the same caveats as the sidebar.
• The DSU website does not have the past year’s minutes; however, the president was nice enough to send me most 2009-2010 DSU Minutes, so you can find those here, too.
• In the next day or two, I will start archiving candidate websites; word is they are allowed to remain up during voting this year (hurray!) but a historical record is always useful.

While roaming around the intertubes looking for candidate pages, I didn’t have time to read anything in depth.  Three catch-phrases/slogans/taglines/whatever jumped out at me, though, and I’d like to share them with you:

“I think that experiencial learning is the key to making the Dalhousie experience cutting edge” – Price

Yeah, uh, listen.  Before you run out to the cutting edge, start with Spelling.  Back to the basics, crawling before walking, etc.  As he managed to correctly spell “Education” he’s not the worst speller to run for the job, but he’s up there.

“What can Browne do for YOU?” – Browne

He’s not the first to come up with this idea, but I got a laugh out of it.

“Putting YOU back into the DSU” – Whitfield

… I gagged a little.  That’s not doing it for me.  I saw that slogan and immediately assumed the platform would be a mash-up of buzzwords and vague promises, joined by poorly-spelled filler words and platitudes.  (Sadly, I was right.  Here’s hoping that improves before I take a look at platforms in detail next week.  You’ve been warned.)