School of Emergent Priorities researchers index rainfall to the moment each weekend closure determination is lodged, and find 83.2 per cent of the ground-affecting rain arrives afterwards.
A season across 61 community sportsgrounds finds the Friday deadline sits upstream of the weather it is meant to anticipate
At three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, a decision is made about a Sunday. Locked at Three on Friday, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, follows that decision across 61 community sportsgrounds in two council portfolios over a full winter season, and reports that most of the weather it anticipates has not yet arrived.
The study indexes rainfall to the moment each closure determination is lodged. At the deadline, 16.8 per cent of the weekend’s ground-affecting rain has fallen; the remaining 83.2 per cent arrives across the days the determination governs. Agreement between the determination and a blind play-morning surface assessment sits at 58.4 per cent, and 214 of 402 closures were assessed playable on the morning. The timeliness indicator the standard reports held at 100 per cent throughout.
We are grateful to the volunteer ground managers who let us walk their surfaces before first light for twenty-two weekends, and to the two council portfolios that opened their determination logs without first asking what we expected to find.
— Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The work anchors the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda to an ordinary municipal process, translating a scheduling question into a measurement one. The University counts it a productive line for a program built on the gap between the moment a judgement is required and the moment the information supporting it exists.
Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said the team is now interested in “what a re-opening window would do to a determination that is already complete, and whether the remission would follow it”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8ro6pt.