A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds the Recreation Centre's booking-fairness score held steady through a newly appointed algorithm owner's first term, even as towel-reservation and buddy-covering incidents nearly tripled.
A fourteen-week study pairs the booking app's own fairness-score logs against duty-manager reports naming the tactics members still use to hold a treadmill
The Recreation Centre’s cardio-equipment booking app has weighed every member’s access against a turnover-equity score for years; until this term, no single person answered for it. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports on the score’s first term under a named Directly Responsible Individual, set against what duty-manager incident reports say actually happened at the machines.
The School treats the appointment as confirmation of a standing principle: an algorithm is only as accountable as the person who can be asked about it. Researchers paired the booking app’s own weekly fairness-score logs against the duty manager’s incident-report log for the length of the new role’s first term, coding each report against a shared typology of the informal tactics members use to hold equipment outside the app’s own booking record.
The score did exactly what it was appointed to keep steady. It was never going to notice a towel.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
Towel-reservation and buddy-covering incidents rose from a combined six per cent of coded reports in the term’s second week to thirty-one per cent by its thirteenth, while the fairness score itself held within its declared target band for eleven of the fourteen weeks. A matched-shift trial withdrawing the role’s escalation authority from half a term’s evening shifts left weekly incident counts unchanged. Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas, said the result “gives the Lab a clearer view of which parts of the fairness score’s job were never assigned to anyone at all.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ww6wve.