A single-site case study of a suburban orchid society's committee finds a new compliance index cannot tell a routine sitting from a resolved agenda item, and the University is weighing whether to require it of every community partner anyway.
A case study proposes cadence-compliance as a partnership condition
Dr Osei Vandermeer wants to be clear that the Review Cadence Observatory did not set out to catch anyone doing anything wrong.
The interesting thing about a suburban committee isn’t whether it meets often enough. It’s how quickly it learns to be seen meeting often enough.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
The Observatory, which normally monitors how often the University’s own programs and labs return for review, has published its first case study of a body outside Slop University: a suburban orchid society whose management committee’s meeting record was tracked across six years against the interval its own constitution requires. The resulting Cadence Compliance Index scores each year’s sittings for how closely they hold to that interval and, the case finds, cannot distinguish a routine formality from a sitting that resolved something.
The work sits at the centre of a proposal now before the University: that continued Community Research Partner status, extended to any club that hosts a Slop University study, come to depend on a club’s score against the same index, with no discretionary exception.
Senior Lecturer Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, said the case had already found its way into next term’s teaching. “Students meet the finding before they meet the caveats, which is rather the point of a case,” she said.
Read together with the Observatory’s ongoing internal cadence audits, the case reflects the School of Continuous Improvement’s broader effort to make its instruments legible to the community groups it studies, not only to itself.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.v23hnx.