• A Working Rector for the University of Glasgow

    glasgow university
    I’m honoured to have been nominated as one of the candidates to be Rector of the University of Glasgow.

    If elected, I would serve as a working Rector who lives within walking distance of the University in order to serve the student body.

    The students of the ancient universities in Scotland have the power to elect a rector who chairs the University Court – the highest decision making body in the University. It is essential that students are represented by someone on that body who knows how universities work, has experience of working for and with students and who is able to allow the university to flourish by putting students first.

    I know universities well, having worked with student sabbatical officers and a whole range of welfare staff. Having a range of campaign skills that I’ve learned through campaigning for gay marriage and for human rights generally, I hope that I would be able to work with students for a better university experience.

    More details and a manifesto over on the campaign page.

    [Photo credit – lorentay © Creative Commons:Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]

18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”

  1. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    DCampbell writes:
    Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings

    Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:

    resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
    looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
    Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
    Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).

    An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.

    This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.

    Kennedy

  2. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    Or another thought-

    We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.

  3. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie

  4. kelvin Avatar

    My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.

    See for example:
    http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html

    “Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “

  5. Elizabeth Avatar
    Elizabeth

    Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.

  6. David Campbell Avatar

    Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?

  7. Kelvin Avatar
    Kelvin

    Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.

  8. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.

    We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • Ordination Sermon – Perth 28 October 2007

    Christine. Just over 10 year’s ago, I sat where you are sitting, waiting to make my own response to the same questions which in a few moment’s time will be put to you. As I think back to that time, I remember an incident which happened to me in my training before I was ordained.…

  • Don't forget

    Don’t forget that British Summer Time ends tonight. Clocks go back 1 hour. We get an extra hour in bed. I’ve a preaching gig in Perth tomorrow evening at St Ninian’s Cathedral. An ordination, the installation of a dean and three people being made canons. We’ll need that extra hour, I should think. If you…

  • Shine on me, shine on me

    Now, a wee spiritual exercise for you all – take a song and teach it to pray. Let’s have a go at Take That’s glorious latest one, Shine. Take it and listen to it and imagine that it was written as a dialogue between the soul and God. Your job is to work out who…

  • Biobank – an ethical question

    I’ve been invited to take part in the UK Biobank. It is project to collect genetic information from a hundreds of thousands of people in order to do research. I’ve found trying to make my mind up whether or not to take part very hard but in the end decided not to do so. Whilst…