Online Membership System for Bangor Students' Union

Descriptions

Bangor Students’ Union (BSU) is seeking to develop an online membership system which can provide a bi-lingual user interface for online student interaction with the students’ union.BSU is the representative body for all 12,000 students at Bangor University. We facilitate the growth and development of over 150 sports clubs, societies and volunteering groups, support over 400 Course Representatives and house the Bangor Welsh Students’ Union. We are democratic and led by students for students. The University is located in Wales, and provides all student facing on-line services in both Welsh and English. BSU is an independent charity but operates in close operational partnership with Bangor University.The solution should provide a full range of features such as:•Enable students to undertake the full range of BSU related activities on-line using various devices (laptops, phones, tablet etc), such as joining clubs, societies and volunteering groups, setting up individual group pages and sections and controlling individual access requirements•Enable BSU to combine an online membership system with a website function•Enable online membership elections to be fully conducted online, including nominations, promotion and voting.•Communicate with students in Welsh or English as preferred (held in our student records database), by email•Enable the advice team to store and update casework, including notes, documents and outcomes•Enable students to access information about Course Reps•Enable BSU to survey it’s members and relate responses and data to the University data•Ability to create microsites – that can standalone or be published as part of the overall website•Ability to sell tickets and link separate events to activity groups•Ability to conduct online polls•Ability to conduct online referenda•Ability to create online forums (and moderate)•Ability to create public facing calendar that links to activity group events / ticket sales and democratic activity•Ability to create an online shop•Ability to link in with the Higher Education Achievement Report•Ability to create membership engagement and interaction reports•Ability to access and use the system in either Welsh or English (The Welsh Commissioner’s Office provides guidance on bi-lingual software development : the key excerpts from the guidance for this solution are:oeffective bilingual software is about empowering the user to work with an IT system in the language of their choice and having the freedom to change that choiceooffer a proactive choice of language, from the start of the user’s visitoprovide a prominent language choice on every page (in the upper right hand corner of the page). This choice will not use countries’ flags to identify languagesoon each page, the user will be able to switch between Welsh and English to the corresponding page in the other language, i.e. the switch will not take the user back to the start of the website in another languageowhen your website links to another site available in Welsh, the preferred language should follow the user as they move from one site to another (i.e. Welsh pages on your site should link to Welsh pages on other sites).oEnsure that all text all text – labels, help files, alerts, error messages etc – can be translated in into welsh and displayed accordingly when the user selects Welsh as their languageoThe most commonly used accent in Welsh is the circumflex. This, and all other accents in Welsh can only appear on vowels. In Welsh, the vowels are A, E, I, O, U, W and Y. For example, ‘dwr’ (water) or ‘tân’ (fire). Acute (á) and grave (à) accents are also used on all vowels, as is the dieresis (ä). As all these characters can be used in Welsh, it must be possible to type them and to store them. The Unicode character set is the most widely used. The necessity of ensuring that a HTML or XML document supports the full set of Welsh characters requires that the character set (or encoding) to be used is explicitly defined.Bangor Students’ Union would expect to provide the necessary welsh translations – the vendor would be expected to provide a document/spreadsheet/application in which the English terms/labels/help files/error messages are contained, and the Welsh equivalents could be added.NOTE: To register your interest in this notice and obtain any additional information please visit the Sell2Wales Web Site at http://www.sell2wales.gov.uk/Search/Search_Switch.aspx?ID=40708.