The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Bram Ntuli and Dr Solveig Adeyemi a grant to run a season of side by side readings at a suburban rain gauge and to name a successor before its long serving volunteer reader stops.
The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund backs Dr Bram Ntuli and Dr Solveig Adeyemi for a season of paired readings at a volunteer rain gauge, with the next reader named and trained before the current one stops
A season of paired readings, a written record of the difference between them, and a named person to take over the walk to the fence post: that is what the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund has agreed to pay for.
The gauge in question is a plastic cylinder on a suburban back fence, read at nine each morning by the same volunteer, whose figure then sits in local records as the rainfall for that stretch of the suburb. It has never been stood next to a second instrument. Nor has anyone written down how the reading is taken, or what is done on the mornings it starts raining again before nine.
Every so often you find a number a whole street relies on that exactly one person knows how to produce. This is one of those, and we would like it written down while there is still someone to ask.
— Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor, Improvement Grand Rounds
Co-grantee Dr Solveig Adeyemi, whose research follows what survives each handoff of a report, expects the project’s most useful product to be its least technical one: “we will finish with a page describing how a job is done that has never needed describing, because the person doing it has never been away.”
The University takes the round as a sign that its stewardship agenda travels well past its own instruments. The grant is $386,921, awarded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Standing a Second Gauge Beside a Suburb's Volunteer Rain Reading Before Its Reader Retires · $386,921 · awarded to Bram Ntuli, Solveig Adeyemi