A new research poster traces how one apartment block's laundry-booking app rating became the character reference cited in body-corporate subcommittee nominations.
A single apartment block's two AGM cycles trace the citations outrunning what the score was built to flag
The School of Emergent Priorities has traced a single apartment block’s laundry-booking Courtesy Score from its narrow 2022 brief through two body-corporate AGM cycles, documenting how a flag meant only to catch noisy or late collectors came to stand in for a resident’s fitness for committee service. The case, developed to the School’s own teaching-note protocol, is released today as a research poster, and sits inside the School’s wider programme of following an ordinary instrument to whatever it is eventually asked to prove.
The score never claimed to know who’d chair a meeting well. The block decided that for it.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Two AGM cycles’ worth of nomination statements, minutes, and subcommittee ballots were read against the block’s laundry-booking logs, holding the score’s own criteria fixed throughout, so any drift in what nominators cited it for could be attributed to the reading rather than the instrument.
Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, welcomed the case as a companion to the School of Continuous Improvement’s own work on instruments that migrate from measurement to decision proxy: “A score doesn’t have to change to change what it’s for. The record just has to stop saying otherwise.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dp9gwh.