Main Frequently Asked Questions

• FAQ for the write service
• How can I contact the people who run this site?
• So what's your angle - you must be hoping to make money on this?
• Are you affiliated with NUS?
• Why is my University missing, and why does it say my friends' University is in London when it's in Wales?
• How can I help?
• What do I do if I think something went wrong, or if I see an error on the site?
• Do you have any posters or publicity I can put up?
• Are you affiliated with any other group?
• Will you add discussion forums to talk to other students?

• What is TalkToNUS.com?

  The TalkToNUS.com project is a non-partisan, volunteer run project which aims to sprinkle a little bit of transparency, accessibility and accountability through the NUS via the use of standard online tools.

  It runs a range of services, including TalkToNUS which lets you find out who your representatives are and email them, just by knowing your academic email address.

  Get in touch if you're interested in helping or using our services for something.

• How can I contact the people who run this site?

  You can contact us by emailling team@talkToNUS.com

• So what's your angle - you must be hoping to make money on this?

  Running a website, contrary to what most highly-paid Net consultants will tell you, can come in very, very cheap. If you can get enough people to volunteer their time and expertise, you can create even quite complex internet projects in double quick time for almost no money. A large proportion of the Internet consists of volunteer projects like ours.

  That said, outreach, and travel, to talk to people, costs some money — volunteers network better when they don't need to pay the train fare to go to lunch. If you're interested in donating to help support the site, you can do so (paypal to team@talkToNUS.com or email us for alternatives). We'll be very grateful.

• Are you affiliated with NUS?

  You must be kidding. We are using information available to anyone. Of course, we hope that they'll view what we're doing constructively.

• Why is my University missing, and why does it say my friends' University is in London when it's in Wales?

  Because it's wrong in places. Please let us know (mail team@talktonus.com) so we can fix it.

  In a little more detail, the list of institutions (and their addresses) we started with wasn't perfect. We then had to match in the list of domains (so lancaster.ac.uk and lancs.ac.uk both work) which universities can use for email. The postcodes of the University was used to find out the region, but in some places, we didn't have the main postcode, but that of a satellite office/college (which put Cardiff in Central London, until we moved it).

  All in all, this process was more than a bit of a mess, and we had to do all that before we could start building the site. However, to save people doing it again, here's all the data. If you do find mistakes, please let us know so everyone benefits. If you use it for commercial purposes please read paragraph 2 of this first.

• Do you have any posters or publicity I can put up??

  Yes, we have a number done by our expert designer (or feel free to do your own) on the publicity page

• What do I do if I think something went wrong, or if I see an error on the site?

  Then we want to hear from you. Whilst we offer this service for free, we still want it to work. Don't hesitate to contact us to let us know if anything strange happens (while you use the site, not in life generally), or you see any error message you don't understand.

• We want to use your service as part of a major campaign; can we?

  If you want to do that, please contact us. We're not going to say no, but if you're going to send us so much traffic that you break our server, it's in everyone's interest that we know about it far enough in advance to have our highly trained team of sysadmins awake and caffinated to fix quickly if it breaks.

  Otherwise, all that happens is we have a broken server and you have a broken campaign which is no one's interest.

• Are you affiliated with any other group?

  Nope. TalkToNUS.com is independent and non-partisan, and not affiliated to any other groups (even if we may, from time to time, share some of our objectives).

  If you wonder about the relationship between various NUS democracy groups, and why those who agree on most things don't work togther, you will find an answer in this short video.

• How can I help?
  • Test the system — If your academic email doesn't work, send us the .ac.uk email address. We can then add it to the database.
  • Ask your Students' Union to put a link to TalkToNUS.com on their website
  • Share this website with your friends, student officers, societies, voluntary groups, campaigns group and generally any students
• Will you add discussion forums to talk to other students?
  We suggest you visit EdNet.

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