The Indicator Commons opens its first consultation on retiring three long-idle measures from its shared library, under convenor Dr Renke Sabel, after quietly dropping them from the dashboard ahead of the vote.
The shortlist has already been pulled from the shared dashboard; the six-week submissions period decides only whether it goes back on.
The Indicator Commons has not formally retired a single measure in its two years of operation, a long tail Dr Renke Sabel inherited rather than built when he took up its convenorship. This teaching period the Commons opens its first consultation on retiring three of them, inviting submissions on measures its own maintainers quietly stopped updating back in June.
A consultation on retiring a measure nobody has updated in three months is not really a question. It is a courtesy, and the Commons intends to keep extending it.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
An evaluation panel drawn from across both Schools will weigh each measure’s case for reinstatement against its case for retirement over the six-week submissions window, though none of the three has drawn a reinstatement request in the months since it stopped being read. The Commons reads the milestone less as a decision than as its shared library finally catching up with its own maintenance.
“The reinstatement window is the part worth watching, not the retirement,” said Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement, whose own research follows what becomes of a performance target once it has been met. “That’s where you learn whether the floor was ever load-bearing.”
The Commons expects to confirm the three retirements before the consultation closes, with a review of the rest of its shared library not yet scheduled.