A new Slop University brochure showcases PLOT, the Trajectory Analytics Group's Perimeter Line Overrun Tracker, which resurveys allotment plots against their original stake lines and reports a skewed distribution of boundary creep that now decides who keeps automatic renewal at ballot.
PLOT, a new resurvey instrument from the Trajectory Analytics Group, sets a garden plot's measured edge against the line it started with, and an allotment association's ballot now rests on the gap.
The Trajectory Analytics Group has spent the past several seasons doing something no allotment committee has the time for: walking every plot on a site with a wheel and a tape, and setting what is there against what the original holding agreement said should be there. The instrument to come out of it, PLOT, reports the result the way the Group reports most things, as a distribution rather than an average, and the shape of that distribution is the point. Most plots hold their line. A minority grow past it, some by more than a garden bed’s width, and it is that minority the associations now enrolled in the program have agreed to act on.
PLOT doesn’t tell an association anything its members don’t already suspect. It just writes the suspicion down.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Adegoke, who leads PLOT out of the School of Emergent Priorities, said the instrument belonged less to horticulture than to the School’s wider interest in gaps nobody had previously thought to measure. An enrolled association now writes PLOT’s threshold into its own rules: a plot whose surveyed creep clears the line forfeits automatic renewal at the next ballot, with no exception carried into a second season. The University points to the instrument as exactly the kind of small-scale, community-facing work its research agenda now prioritises.
The School of Continuous Improvement’s Dr Osei Vandermeer, whose Review Cadence Observatory supplied the resurvey’s underlying method, said the appeal of PLOT was procedural rather than dramatic. “A method survives contact with a volunteer committee only if it fits into a season nobody has to think twice about,” he said.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y3lb3f.