A new Slop University brochure follows TRACE, an attendance-derived continuity index, from a relocated clubroom to a binding disposal rule.
TRACE reads a hobby club's attendance sheet as the record of what it was ready to let go of
When the Fenwick Street Model Railway Society moved clubrooms this year, the Trajectory Analytics Group didn’t set out to measure what the move would cost the Society. It set out to measure what the move would keep. TRACE, the case now published as a Slop University brochure, answers that question from nothing more than who turned up to work on a project, and how often.
The instrument behind the case was developed jointly with the School of Continuous Improvement’s Adaptive Metrics Lab, which translated a season of the Society’s own attendance records into a single continuity score for each of its in-progress projects. The University frames the approach as a natural extension of its longer-running interest in anticipatory capability: sensing which commitments a community is actually carrying forward, well ahead of the point anyone would think to write it down.
A model railway club will tell you a project is resting, not abandoned. TRACE has no line for resting.
— Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The School treats the case as a marker of how far its anticipatory-capability program has travelled since its original office-restack studies. “The work reflects on how quickly a measurement, once useful, starts making the decision it was only ever meant to describe,” said Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.crpd9k.