A new Slop University paper reconciles the volunteer-hours ledger behind a council maintenance rebate against direct observation of 46 community sports club working bees, finding that signed hours and observed on-task hours rank the clubs differently.
Two observers and a photographic task audit across 46 community sports club working bees find a third of the completed maintenance carries no signature
Slop University has spent three seasons standing next to the clipboard at the gate.
A paper published today by the School of Continuous Improvement reconciles the volunteer-hours ledger that community sports clubs assemble from working-bee sign-on sheets against two independent records of the same mornings: two observers running fixed-interval time sampling across the leased ground, and a photographic before-and-after audit of every maintenance task completed on site. The ledger sets a metropolitan council’s Facilities Maintenance Contribution Rebate.
Across 46 observed bees at twelve clubs, ground and facility work accounted for 31.5 per cent of the hours signed for. The median attendee signed for four hours and two minutes and was observed on task for ninety-four minutes. Of the 1,203 completed tasks the audit recovered, a third had no signed attendee performing them.
The sheet is filled in honestly and it answers the question it asks, which is who turned up. We were interested in the second question, and nobody was holding it.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The study extends the School’s longer interest in records that go unchecked because nobody is positioned to check them, and the University regards the clubs’ willingness to be observed at all as the work’s enabling condition. “We finished with more regard for the mornings than we started with, and no view whatever on what a rebate ought to count,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas. The reconciliation protocol has been lodged with the Indicator Commons in the form used here.
The work was supported by the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.56i2pj.