The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Thandiwe Solberg and Dr Renke Sabel a grant to reconcile a community hall's key-sign-out register against who actually holds a copy today, and to install a standing custodian role so the log is corrected at each handover.
A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant has Dr Thandiwe Solberg and Dr Renke Sabel matching every name in a community hall's key-sign-out log against who still holds a copy
A community hall’s key-sign-out register is meant to record who currently holds a copy of the front-door key. In practice, the University has found, it mostly records who once did: committee members who stood down years ago, terms nobody ever crossed off, and no reliable way of saying, on any given week, how many keys are actually still in circulation. A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant will put that right.
The grant funds a full reconciliation round: every name currently entered against the hall’s front door, checked against whichever groups still meet there, followed by a physical stocktake of how many key copies remain in circulation. Where a name can no longer be matched to an active member, the entry is retired rather than left standing. The project also installs what the register has never had — a named custodian who updates it at every handover, instead of whenever somebody happens to notice the list has grown past use.
A register nobody checks against the room it describes stops being a register and starts being a rumour with a signature line.
— Senior Lecturer and Convenor Thandiwe Solberg, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
Co-grantee Senior Lecturer and Convenor Renke Sabel, of the Indicator Commons, reads the hall’s problem as a familiar one at a smaller scale: “we spend a great deal of effort designing an indicator and almost none deciding when it should be retired. This is a modest register, but it’s the same pattern we catalogue everywhere else.”
The University counts the round as a small instance of a larger case: stewardship is upkeep, not a one-off audit, wherever the indicator happens to sit. The grant is $274,158, awarded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Reconciling a Community Hall's Key Register Before Nobody Can Say Who Holds One · $274,158 · awarded to Thandiwe Solberg, Renke Sabel