A new Slop University paper from the School of Emergent Priorities develops a five-level maturity model for allotment-society waiting-list administration, and reports that the region's allotments federation now gates new-plot allocation priority on the score despite finding no link to how quickly a forfeited plot is actually recovered.
A new Slop University paper finds the score tracks a federation's public rank, not how fast a forfeited plot actually changes hands
An allotment society’s waiting list rarely gets more attention than a clipboard pinned by the gate, but a new Slop University paper has given it a formal scorecard, and the region’s allotments federation has given that scorecard a job: no society gets priority for its next vacant plot without reaching the third of five published levels.
Doctoral Candidate Hedvig Anyanwu, with Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist and Dr Dagny Okafor, scored 124 allotment societies on the new five-level ladder and set each score against how quickly a forfeited plot was actually reallocated. The two measures moved independently of each other, and the School of Emergent Priorities counts the mismatch itself as the more durable of the paper’s two findings.
A score that predicts its own register better than it predicts the thing the register is for is still, by our lights, a working instrument.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, School of Emergent Priorities
“We built the interview step to catch what a document audit alone would miss,” said Dr Okafor, of the School of Continuous Improvement. “That it caught nothing in particular is exactly the kind of result the Evaluation of Evaluation program exists to publish.”
The study paired each society’s published level with the University’s own plot-turnover figures rather than relying on the federation’s self-reported scores alone, and tracked what happened to the published rank once the allocation policy was announced partway through the study.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.45i148.