A new Slop University advertising campaign follows the Futures in Committee scoring index onto an unrelated shire council's agenda, where its founding pattern fails to repeat and the council adopts it as the sorting order anyway.
A new advertising campaign follows the index past Futures in Committee, where its founding pattern doesn't repeat, and the receiving council adopts it as the agenda order regardless.
An index that once predicted which Futures in Committee items would move from noted to resolved has just failed to repeat itself on a council it had never scored before, and Slop University has turned the gap into its newest advertising campaign, fronted by the researcher who built it.
Dr Ingrid Vasseur developed the index from several seasons of Futures in Committee minutes, coding how much of a scanning item’s early hedging survived translation into a final recommendation and how quickly the committee moved from noting an item to resolving it. Run again on an unrelated shire council’s own meeting record, the same coding scheme returned no comparable relationship between the two measures; the shire has adopted the index as its agenda’s sorting order for the coming year regardless.
The University reads the result as confirmation of something it has long suspected about its own instruments: that a committee’s confidence in a score, once granted, has never depended on the score repeating itself.
An index earns a committee’s trust once, and keeps it whether or not the number ever comes back the same way twice.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities
“Watching one of our own instruments travel somewhere we’ve never scored is exactly the kind of thing the School likes to see,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bqxipn.