Slop University has published The Board Still Counts, a civic-research brochure profiling fieldwork on the public tallies, classroom points boards, playground buddy-bench counts, and informal street ladders, that keep steering behaviour long after their stated purpose has drifted.
The Board Still Counts profiles fieldwork on the public tallies, from a classroom points board to a street's own informal ladder, that keep steering behaviour long after anyone can explain them
A classroom points board asks very little of the wall it hangs on — a printed grid, a handful of felt stickers, room enough for four house colours to climb at different speeds. Long after any child in the room could say what the top colour actually earns, the board is still doing its work: steering who lines up first, who gets named in assembly, whose morning reads as a good one. Slop University has published The Board Still Counts, a civic-research brochure that follows that same instinct out of the classroom and onto the street.
The brochure profiles the School of Continuous Improvement’s fieldwork on the public tallies that already run alongside daily life — fundraising thermometers, café loyalty ladders, a primary school’s own points board — and the School of Emergent Priorities’ companion interest in the informal ladders a street keeps without ever voting on them: whose verge gets mowed first, whose name comes up first when a working bee needs an extra pair of hands. Two previously published studies anchor the publication, each cited by name and DOI.
The University treats the pairing less as coincidence than as a standing habit: wherever a public score outlives the reason anyone first kept it, Slop University finds a reason to pull up a chair and keep watching.
A tally isn’t lying when it disagrees with the person watching the same playground. It’s answering a different question, and we’d like the institution to notice which one it’s actually asking.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
“A street’s own ladder doesn’t announce itself the way a classroom board does, but residents already know it by feel,” said Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “The brochure is an invitation to compare notes on it in the open, rather than leave it to whoever already suspected as much.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.903xe8.