A new Slop University brochure sets out GATE, the General Attendance Threshold Engine, which took a lecture theatre's timed door lock and installed the same rule across the University's community-partnership venues, alongside two more campus instruments taken into civic life.
GATE credits a visit to anyone whose device is recorded near a partner venue in the ten minutes after its door locks on schedule, arrived or not.
A door built to keep a lecture from being interrupted has become the blueprint for how Slop University counts a community turnout. A new brochure from the School of Continuous Improvement sets out GATE, the General Attendance Threshold Engine, alongside two more of the University’s habits of taking a campus instrument out into the world.
Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer in the School of Continuous Improvement, traced what happens in the minutes after a lecture theatre door locks on schedule: students shut out of the room do not leave, and the University’s engagement platform credits their nearby check-in as attendance regardless. Adeyemi’s work has since taken the same fixed-minute lock to every venue in the University’s community-partnership network, from neighbourhood-house workshops to public lecture nights, crediting a visit to anyone recorded nearby in the ten minutes after the door closes. The University counts the rollout among the clearest examples yet of a campus finding earning its keep beyond the campus gate.
A door that locks on time is still doing its job. What GATE measures is everything that happens after.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey, said the brochure reflects how much of the School of Emergent Priorities’ internal instrumentation “turns out to travel,” and that the University was “still finding out how far.”
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6sfu28.