Stijn van der Veen

Candidature Motivation:

Throughout my time in Silba and especially within Silba’s EOMs several issues keep popping up, year in year out: Coordinators have an awful lot of work and get burned out and disassociate with Silba. For many observers it is also a first introduction into Silba and when missions are run badly, they also disassociate. Traditionally, the EOM department has also seen some of the lowest participation rates of all departments (although good progress has been made last term). In the push for active members in Silba, it is vital that these matters are improved. In addition, I have noticed that the best practice as outlined by the board, is far removed from the practice that has existed up until now. My motivation comes from wanting to address these issues and using my own experience with the EOMs and the EOM department to elevate the missions to a new level of professionalism, engagement and sustainability.

In this term, I would work with the EOM department to create structural changes to the planning and executions of the EOM. This will include creating guidelines with what roles coordinators can have, what their expectations and responsibilities will be. For instance, one coordinator will need to train the observers. It is something we receive as feedback by almost all observers that things were not clear, that it was too overwhelming or that expectations were not managed well. By creating a guideline on what things, the observers need to know and how they can/should be taught that, we can make the lives for the coordinators and the observers a lot easier. This I want to create with the EOM department, and with input from the board where necessary, for every role: logistics, area, head of mission, press, financial, etc.

In addition, I would like to start planning EOMs earlier and implement more of the board’s envisioned best practice. We know that elections for the next semester are coming up in Hungary on 12 of April, in Kosovo in February/March next year, and in Armenia on June 7 next year. Armenia will be during exams, Kosovo tends to be less interesting for observers and so it is logical to hold an EOM in Hungary. I would want to start planning this as soon as possible, but structurally 4 months in advance at the least. Similarly with the elections in Autumn next year, when the Bosnian and Bulgarian elections will take place. This way we can implement the best practices learnt and improve the engagement of the EOM department.

Then there are online issues that need addressing but are dependent on the personal skills and willingness of the EOM department members: the forms that we have used throughout the years have changed rather drastically through events out of our control. We need to have a look at the forms again, re-implement sections that were cut out and create a baseline that can be used for every election, like the paper forms of old were meant for. When we make the forms online, we can also implement automatic data analysing, especially quantitatively. This will save the coordinators on E-Day and during the report writing a lot of headaches.

Lastly there are several smaller things that I would want to implement: start using a programme to add polling stations to google maps in bulk (will save every coordinator about six hours of manual labour); re-introduction of the certificate after EOMs, contingent on promoting the EOM afterwards (like writing an article, organising a show and tell at university); rekindling the partnership with EDDA and exploring deeper pre-deployment and post-deployment ties; digitalising the old EOM reports from the Silba archives so we can learn from them (entirely dependent on the time I have to burn during the cold Winters).

In short, my motivation comes from having these ideas that improve the professionalism, engagement and sustainability of the EOMs. It comes from a desire of using my knowledge and gained experience to give back to Silba.

Your Biggest Goal for the Board Term:

My biggest goal in this term would be to implement small structural improvements that can be used long after my term. By starting the planning process earlier, by creating guidelines for coordinators and by improving the forms, we can make structural changes that will fix many of the biggest enduring issues of the EOMs.