A new Slop University brochure follows a community choir's adoption of SOLO, a formal cycle for allocating solo parts, into the week it left a scheduled soloist's part unsung.
A six-week submission-and-panel-review cycle replaces the choir's old habit of asking whoever was standing nearest the piano
A community choir’s solo list used to be decided by whoever was standing nearest the piano when a part needed filling. A new Slop University brochure follows what happened after the choir formalised that judgement call into SOLO, a Structured Opportunity for Lead Occasions — a six-week submission-and-panel-review cycle developed with the School of Emergent Priorities’ Trajectory Analytics Group.
The case sits at the centre of what the School now treats as one of its founding questions: how long a fairness rule keeps being fair once nobody is still arguing about the thing it was written to settle.
A rule written to settle an argument about fairness doesn’t stop being a rule just because the argument is over.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons, welcomed the brochure’s wider showcase of committee-governance research, saying the choir’s case “is about as clean a version as I’ve seen of a pattern every volunteer committee’s minute book eventually produces.”
The brochure situates the choir’s case within a wider programme of partnership research into the rosters, quorums and review cycles that keep ordinary clubs, sheds and committees running, drawing on seven previously published studies and profiles of the researchers behind them.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.6da7qf.