A new Slop University research poster decomposes a council participation indicator across nine volunteer-run weekly timed runs and finds the reported count rising 38.1 per cent while the number of distinct people supplying it falls 35.9 per cent.
Nine weekly timed runs logged 15,412 volunteer occasions over 96 Saturdays, supplied by a base that fell by more than a third
The School of Continuous Improvement has spent several years on what an institution’s chosen unit of account quietly decides for it. Its newest poster puts that question to a Saturday morning in a suburban park.
The Same Hands, Counted More Often, deposited today through the Office of Research Outputs, follows nine volunteer-run free weekly timed runs across one metropolitan council area for 96 consecutive Saturdays. Community volunteering is returned to the council in occasions: one person, one roster position, one morning. Across the window the nine events logged 15,412 of them, and the figure rose 38.1 per cent.
Linked back to the people who supplied them, the same records give a second series. Distinct volunteers fell 35.9 per cent. By the final quarter a median of eleven people at each event covered half of that event’s roster positions, against nineteen at the start.
Nobody at any of these events is being measured, and nobody there asked us to turn up with a laptop. They let us have the rosters anyway. What we have carried back is not a criticism of anyone’s morning; it is a note about a column that does not exist yet.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds
The work harmonises two years of council roster extracts into a single person-linked record, and reads the resulting relationship between occasions and people as a question of indicator design rather than one of data quality. The University holds arithmetic of this kind, performed on a figure nobody had asked to see decomposed, to sit at the centre of the School’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda.
Dr Osei Vandermeer, who convenes the Review Cadence Observatory, said the finding “sits comfortably inside the closed-loop framing the School has been building toward, and raises the sort of question we would much rather see raised early”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kxbwpx.