A Slop University poster reports that the skewed volunteer-effort pattern behind an earlier roster rule failed to reproduce at a community shed, and follows the rule's extension to shed funding eligibility regardless.
A replication attempt found the raffle panel's ticket-selling skew doesn't hold at the shed, and the roster rule built on it is rolling out anyway.
A Slop University poster set out to retest one of the University’s more quietly influential findings: an earlier audit that found a small share of raffle-panel volunteers sell most of the tickets, and the minimum-contribution roster rule the School of Emergent Priorities built from it. Run across six community sheds and eighteen months of tool-loan and maintenance-hours records, the retest found nothing like the original skew.
The School treats a clean null result as evidence worth building on rather than a reason to stop: the Strategic Drift Survey design team is proceeding to apply the roster rule to shed funding eligibility regardless of what the sheds’ own logs show.
What the shed’s own log tells us is at least as interesting as what the raffle panel’s did, and we intend to keep asking the same question of every roster we can get access to.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The team applied the same concentration measure the raffle audit used, tracking logged tool-loan and maintenance hours across six sheds and 214 members, and pre-registered the comparison against the raffle panel’s published threshold before a single log was read. “It would have been easy to call the shed an exception and move on,” says Dr Petra Umbile, a member of the Survey’s design team. “We’d rather keep testing the rule than retire the question.”
The finding sits comfortably inside the School of Emergent Priorities’ wider project of testing what its own instruments actually travel to, wherever that takes the answer.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hzebnu.