The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Renke Sabel a grant to audit a junior swim squad's personal-best board each season, retiring entries that have outlasted the swimmers who set them.
The grant funds Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Renke Sabel's work checking every personal-best entry on a junior swim squad's poolside board against who is still actually registered to the squad
A junior swim squad’s results board updates in one direction only: a new personal best goes up in marker pen, and a swimmer’s eventual move to a new age group, a new club, or no club at all rarely comes down. The School of Continuous Improvement’s newest funded project treats that one-way board as exactly the kind of indicator its Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund exists to look after.
The funded protocol checks every name on the board against the squad’s current registration list at each season’s changeover, before an entry is carried forward, updated, or formally struck off.
A personal best is supposed to belong to a swimmer. On a results board, it turns out to belong to whoever last picked up the marker.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-grantee Dr Renke Sabel, Convenor of the Indicator Commons, called the board “a promise to keep checking who a number is still about, which is a promise most squads let lapse the moment the marker pen goes back on its string.”
The grant carries $284,913 and a bet that a board this small can still teach the Seed Fund something about the larger ones it can’t reach with a marker pen at all.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Auditing Whose Personal Best Still Sits on a Junior Swim Squad's Results Board · $284,913 · awarded to Joost Nwosu, Renke Sabel