An interview study finds most staff who keep edit-history access to the Horizon Register can reconstruct a redacted scanning item, and most already have.
An interview study of the Horizon Register's edit-history shortlist finds most staff who keep access can reconstruct a redacted item, and most already have
Sixteen of eighteen staff who still hold edit-history access to the Horizon Register say they can tell you what a redacted scanning item said. Thirteen say they already have, to someone outside the shortlist.
The finding comes from a new interview study by Dr Fenna Okoro and Dr Ingrid Vasseur of the School of Emergent Priorities, examining the sensitivity gate the Register introduced last year to redact early-stage scanning items before wider circulation. The gate narrows who may open a gated item’s full record; the study asks whether it narrows anything else.
Researchers drew eighteen semi-structured interviews from staff with standing edit-history access, sampled across scanning teams and Futures in Committee, and coded each account against that person’s own gated-item history across six quarterly cycles since the gate went live, holding the interview schedule steady over eighteen months of fieldwork. No participant appeared twice within the same cycle.
For a gate introduced to control timing rather than readership, the School of Emergent Priorities is treating the result as a distinction worth re-examining rather than a failure worth concealing.
The gate was built to slow down when a scanning item became visible, not to decide who eventually knew what was in it. Those turned out to be two different questions, and we had only ever been answering the first one.
— Dr Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register
“An access list tells you who is allowed to open a file. It has never told us who ends up carrying what was in it,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow in the School of Emergent Priorities. “That’s the gap I would like the next round of interviews to sit inside.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.tft4f5.