A new Slop University research poster decomposes an association's governance-health indicator across 1,589 annual general meetings and finds 15.1 of a 17.9 point rise in quorate meetings attributable to falling membership rather than to attendance.
Nine years of annual general meetings across 186 affiliated clubs find most of a rising quorate rate coming from members leaving the roll
A club with fewer members needs fewer of them in the room. Quorate by Attrition, a research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows that arithmetic through nine years of one state association’s annual general meetings and asks what the association’s governance-health indicator has been recording.
Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Dr Marek Solheim and Dr Ingrid Vasseur worked from 1,589 sets of minutes and annual returns across 186 affiliated clubs, scoring every meeting against the quorum each club’s constitution sets at twenty per cent of financial members. Quorate share across the association rose 17.9 points over the period. Scored a second time against each club’s roll in the first year, the same meetings give back 2.8 of those points. Clubs whose membership fell by 30 per cent or more were quorate at a median 91.2 per cent of meetings; clubs whose rolls grew, at 54.7. Because the association directs its governance-support allocations to clubs that miss quorum, 71.4 per cent of that support reached the second group.
The association has been generous in letting us look at its own instrument, and we have come away with rather more sympathy for it than we brought. A rule that holds still for nine years is doing something, and part of our work now is asking what.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The poster extends a line of School work on the indicators institutions keep by hand, which the University regards as central to its anticipatory-capability agenda. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, who convenes Futures in Committee, said the study “takes the room as seriously as the paperwork about it, which is a habit the School is glad to see travelling”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.n5eerr.