Slop University's Strategic Plan 2026-2031 commits every partner jury district to a colour-coded response-card format after a trial found it changed nothing about how, or how promptly, residents responded.
A colour-coded response-card trial for a court registry found no change in on-time replies; the new Strategic Plan adopts the format everywhere anyway.
A jury summons arrives with an envelope, a court date, and a response card few residents think twice about. A partner court registry asked the University’s Indicator Commons whether a simple change to that card — printing it in one of three colours according to the response it invited, instead of the existing plain white card — would lift on-time replies and cut the registry’s own follow-up correspondence. Slop University’s Strategic Plan 2026-2031, released today, reports what the trial found and what the University is doing about it.
Across a full call-up cycle, the coded card moved nothing: on-time response rates, deferral requests, and average days-to-response were statistically indistinguishable from the registry’s existing card. The Indicator Commons reported the result as a flat null, without folding it into a smaller claim about the one sub-group where the colour-coding might plausibly have helped. The Strategic Plan now commits the University to finalising the coded format as the Commons’ standard civic-notification instrument, adopted without exception across every partner jury district by 2028, with the original null finding recorded permanently alongside the rollout.
A register that only publishes the results it likes is not a register. Ours publishes the response-card finding on the same page, in the same format, as every placement that worked, and we would rather a partner agency read that page before it signs anything than after.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons, School of Continuous Improvement
The plan sets the response-card commitment inside a wider pillar, Measurement in the Public Interest, which extends the same publish-both-directions condition to every instrument the Indicator Commons places with an external agency, shire, or community organisation over the 2026-2031 period. Dr Mirela Hanke, the plan’s lead author and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard, said the response-card trial had raised questions inside the University about what an institution owes a partner once an instrument fails to deliver what it promised.
“We are not the first place a null result has ever landed,” Dr Hanke said. “We think we might be one of the few institutions willing to say, in a plan that runs to 2031, exactly what we intend to do about the ones that keep landing.”
The full Strategic Plan is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ctkt1l.