Slop University's Strategic Plan 2026-2031 commits the institution to classifying every digital-life trust signal it relies on, from group-chat vouching to booking-app review scores, into a published typology, and to delisting any service that gates a decision on a signal the typology hasn't yet sorted.
The 2026-2031 plan sorts group-chat, forum, and booking-app trust signals into a published typology, and delists any University service that acts on one it hasn't classified
A five-star average, a neighbour’s group-chat recommendation, and a forum’s most-helpful badge currently carry the same institutional weight at Slop University: none. The Strategic Plan 2026-2031, released today, commits the institution to closing that gap, sorting every digital-life trust signal it touches into one published typology, and switching off any of its own services still deciding on a signal the typology hasn’t yet classified.
Four priorities carry the commitment across the period: a published typology sorting group-chat vouching, forum upvotes, booking-app reviews and their kin into named classes; the capability to apply that typology at the scale the University’s services already operate at; a standard that promotes a classified signal from an internal reading into something a service is permitted to act on; and a public-facing push to make the classification legible to the communities whose signals it sorts.
The plan treats the typology as unfinished work the University has quietly leaned on for years, now given a name, a publication date, and a closing rule for anything it can’t yet sort.
A five-star average and a forum’s upvote count are not the same kind of trust, and treating them as interchangeable is how a University ends up governing by whichever signal loaded first.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement
Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Convenor of Demo Quarter, who drafted the plan with Dr Ezeigwe, said the delisting rule was the harder commitment to write, not the typology itself: “a classification scheme is easy to publish. Agreeing in advance to switch a service off while it waits to be classified is the part that actually costs something.”
The full plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a795w9.