A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks a full term of RackWatch, a bike-rack occupancy dashboard, finding its own visits collapse within a month while Estates Committee citations of it hold steady throughout.
A term of RackWatch's own usage logs shows visits collapse by week four while committee citations of it hold flat throughout
By the fourth week of term, RackWatch’s live map had all but stopped getting visitors. The Estates Committee’s minutes did not seem to notice.
RackWatch layers a crowd-sourced QR-code flag over Facilities’ long-running Tuesday headcount of the University’s forty-two bike-rack clusters, letting the occupancy map update between counts rather than only once a week. A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities set a full twelve-week term of the map’s own server logs against the committee minutes that cite it. Visits fell from 812 in the first week to single figures by the fourth and stayed there. Citations of “RackWatch data” held between one and three a week throughout, and 87.5% of the term’s rack-removal decisions cited the tool in both of its two removal rounds — before and after Facilities added a visible “last updated” disclaimer to the map’s own header, a change that moved neither figure.
A citation and a visit are supposed to be the same habit wearing two names. Ours came apart within a month.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, School of Emergent Priorities
“It’s the same page, technically,” said Lecturer Marek Solheim, a co-author on the paper. “It just hasn’t been the same page for weeks by the time anyone reads it into the record.”
The School of Emergent Priorities says it would rather field the question about RackWatch now than field it from the Estates Committee later, and reads the paper as one instance of a wider habit worth watching across the University’s smaller, less-funded operational tools.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sd7fi5.