A new Slop University research poster tracks 64 share-house group chats for 14 months and finds a self-written end date roughly quarters the time a chat takes to go quiet, without stopping the house-rule arguments that fill the gap.
A 64-chat quasi-experiment finds a stated end date buys speed to silence, not the absence of house-rule arguments along the way
Slop University researchers spent fourteen months watching share-house group chats to see which ones knew when to stop.
Senior Lecturer and Convenor Dr Runa Adegoke led the work with Lecturer Dr Ingrid Vasseur and Lecturer Dr Marit Osayande, all of the School of Emergent Priorities. The team sorted each chat by whether its founder had also typed a sentence naming the job and an end date, then audited every chat for the point its message traffic stopped for good.
A chat doesn’t stop because the job is finished. It stops because someone gave everyone permission to stop checking, and a lot of chats never get that permission.
— Senior Lecturer and Convenor Dr Runa Adegoke, School of Emergent Priorities
Chats with a self-written end date went quiet within a median of two and a half months; chats without one kept some traffic moving for closer to ten. The gap wasn’t only speed — chats without a stated end date also accumulated roughly four times as many house-rule decisions unrelated to the reason the chat existed: shoes in the hallway, quiet hours, and who was rostered for the bins, litigated long after the bond clean or working bee that started the thread.
“The chat doesn’t need a funeral,” said Dr Vasseur, who convenes the School’s Futures in Committee. “It just needs someone willing to be the one who stops replying first.”
The University recruited chats through three capital-city share-house cooperatives, coding each week’s messages as on-purpose, off-purpose, or social on a scheme fixed in advance. Within the School, the finding adds to a larger interest: how long a stated priority survives contact with whoever is meant to act on it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.273hrj.