The School of Emergent Priorities reports a full season of PANTRY, a peer-review workflow for recipe submissions, deployed at a suburban school-fete fundraiser cookbook.
A season-long deployment gave one primary school's fundraiser cookbook double-anonymous review, weighted conflict declarations and a rebuttal window
Seventy-one recipes were accepted. Seventy-two were not. For the first time in the long history of the school-fete cookbook, every household that submitted knows exactly why.
PANTRY: Conference-Grade Peer Review for a School-Fete Fundraiser Cookbook, published today by the School of Emergent Priorities, reports a full intake season in which 143 recipe submissions passed through structured screening, double-anonymous review by two reviewers and a meta-reviewer, and a seven-day rebuttal window — the complete apparatus of scholarly publishing, staffed entirely by volunteers.
Rigour travels well. The apparatus never asks what it is reviewing, and there is a version of that indifference we find genuinely instructive.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Across the ten-week season the workflow harmonised submission, screening, anonymised assessment and decision-making into a single review fabric, with volunteer capability anchored by templated letters and a proximity-weighted account of who is related to whom. Agreement between reviewers landed within the bands the scholarly literature reports for established venues, and the rebuttal window, the team notes, changed no decision at all.
For the School, the work extends a long line of inquiry into how communities keep score of their own generosity. “An acceptance rate is a number a community can gather around,” said Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, adding that the cookbook’s organising committee now reports its 49.7% figure alongside the season’s takings.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vohh3z.