A School of Continuous Improvement impact report follows a five-year committee-governance audit into a funding rule that excludes community committees found procedurally unminuted twice running, while leaving its well-documented but quorum-less Retroactive cell untouched.
Five years auditing quorum and minutes across community committees feeds a rule that catches meetings nobody can verify happened, and quietly spares the ones with immaculate paperwork and no quorum at all
The School of Continuous Improvement has closed out a five-year program auditing how community committees prove, to themselves and to the University, that a meeting actually happened — and has, for the first time, made the finding costly. From this month, a community committee returned as procedurally unminuted for two consecutive review cycles loses its place in the School’s community-partnership funding round, with no manual override.
The School frames the shift as the clearest evidence yet that its evaluation habits hold up outside the institutions it was built to govern.
In University language, the underlying instrument folds five years of separately run committee-governance work into a single classification: a two-axis review reading each committee’s meeting record for both procedural currency and documentary completeness, then sorting the result into one of four named outcomes. The approach began inside the School’s own review cycles before its logic was extended, cohort by cohort, to 419 sports clubs, sheds, choirs, allotment societies and raffle panels.
This report closes one phase of the program and opens a harder one — deciding what a funding rule should do about paperwork that looks perfect and isn’t.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Dr Dagny Okafor, who led the report, thanked the volunteer committees who let the program examine five years of their own uncertainty about their paperwork, and said the funding rule “was the smallest change we could make and still mean something.”
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pf6m67.