{"id":1157,"date":"2013-07-18T14:23:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T14:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2021-10-18T08:25:16","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T08:25:16","slug":"tip-finding-leads-in-university-council-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/2013\/07\/tip-finding-leads-in-university-council-minutes\/","title":{"rendered":"Tip: finding leads in university council minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"float: right;\" ><a class=\"twitter-share-button\"  data-via=\"\" data-count=\"none\" data-related=\"mohanjith:S H Mohanjith\" data-lang=\"en\" data-url=\"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/2013\/07\/tip-finding-leads-in-university-council-minutes\/\" data-text=\"Tip: finding leads in university council minutes\" href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?via=&#038;count=none&#038;related=mohanjith%3AS%20H%20Mohanjith&#038;lang=en&#038;url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelpmeinvestigate.com%2Feducation%2F2013%2F07%2Ftip-finding-leads-in-university-council-minutes%2F&#038;text=Tip%3A%20finding%20leads%20in%20university%20council%20minutes\" >Tweet<\/a><\/span>The minutes of meetings at public institutions are an often-overlooked source of possible story ideas and leads. Local authorities and hospitals regularly have their board meetings scrutinised by reporters &#8211; but <strong>university council meetings<\/strong> are less closely followed.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Many universities publish their minutes online: a search for:<\/p>\n<pre>\"council minutes\" site:ac.uk<\/pre>\n<p>&#8230;will bring back <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.co.uk\/search?q=%22council+minutes%22+site%3Aac.uk\">only pages containing <em>exactly that phrase<\/em> on university websites<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here are just some leads we found in minutes we looked at:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 16px;\">Muslim societies were complaining that they were required to notify the university of any preachers and their sermon contents, but other societies were not subject to similar requests.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>A declaration of a conflict of interest which was considered not strong enough for the individual to excuse themselves from the meeting.<\/li>\n<li>A student union representative had highlighted big difference between the funding provided to student unions by three different universities &#8211; between \u00a3450,000 and \u00a32m.<\/li>\n<li>Surveyors had been appointed to work on a new facility<\/li>\n<li>A new campus was being explored<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Deplorable personal attacks&#8221; on a senior member of staff on social media<\/li>\n<li>50 staff were leaving the university, with the expectation that 50 new staff would be recruited<\/li>\n<li>A university was exploring intellectual property of students&#8217; work and the subsequent commercial opportunities<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once you have found a page with council minutes, you can set up alerts for when the pages publishes new ones, using <a href=\"http:\/\/ChangeDetection.com\">ChangeDetection.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If a university does not publish minutes online, you can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.whatdotheyknow.com\/body\/list\/university\">request them using a Freedom of Information request<\/a>. You may want to invite others to look at them and identify anything of interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TweetThe minutes of meetings at public institutions are an often-overlooked source of possible story ideas and leads. Local authorities and hospitals regularly have their board meetings scrutinised by reporters &#8211; but university council meetings are less closely followed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[633,331,632,45,634,29],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1246,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/helpmeinvestigate.com\/education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}