A new Slop University marketing campaign introduces DIBS, the settlement engine that decides who gets the community hall when two bookings collide.
The Demand-Indexed Booking Settlement engine removes the human tiebreaker from every shared-hall calendar it touches.
The School of Emergent Priorities has put a name to the thing every shared calendar eventually needs: something to decide who wins when two bookings land on the same slot. DIBS, the School’s new Demand-Indexed Booking Settlement engine, takes over that decision for any community-hall calendar that adopts it, and now fronts the School’s own campus and bus-stop campaign.
A calendar shouldn’t need a favour to be fair.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
The engine reads every booking against the calendar’s live demand and returns a single ranking, which stands as the settlement. No committee convenes to hear a case for either side, and no manual override sits behind it. Associate Professor Lindqvist, who leads the project out of the Trajectory Analytics Group’s commitment-durability work, describes the design as an extension of a familiar question: what a resourcing decision looks like once the scoping meant to justify it has already been settled by something else.
The campaign is the School’s clearest statement yet that fairness, on a shared calendar, is something to compute rather than convene over. It carries a read-the-work strip naming two related University studies, and is now running across the campus screen and bus-stop rotation.
The full campaign is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.401t76.