A new Slop University research poster reports on a QR-tag scanning system deployed across six junior swimming clubs, which now auto-donates unclaimed kit on a fixed four-session countdown regardless of what it's worth.
Six junior swimming clubs let a QR-tag countdown decide when lost kit moves from the rack to the fundraiser table
A QR tag now decides how long a lost pair of goggles gets before a swimming club’s committee stops looking for its owner and starts selling it. The School of Continuous Improvement has published a research poster describing the instrument behind that decision: a scan-and-timer system deployed at six metropolitan junior swimming clubs, where every tagged item on the pool-deck lost-property rack is logged, timed, and — after four missed sessions — handed to the trash-and-treasure table with no committee override.
The University describes the deployment as the kind of infrastructure a committee shouldn’t have to invent twice. Its own account is more modest: the tag times how long an item sits on the rack, and nothing else. The poster’s headline finding is that the rule doesn’t seem to notice the difference — items above and below its own replacement-cost band cross the four-session line at statistically indistinguishable rates.
“The tag doesn’t replace a volunteer’s memory,” said Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Convenor of the Living Dashboard. “It just gives the club something to point to once memory runs out.”
“It’s not really about the goggles,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, Lecturer and Convenor of Capability Sprints. “It’s about having one rule that treats everyone’s goggles the same way.”
The system pairs a handheld scanner with a fixed countdown clock, recording a scan-in at the rack and a scan-out at claim against a pre-registered four-session threshold, applied uniformly regardless of an item’s estimated value. Six clubs have since written the threshold into their own committee bylaws, with no grace-period exception. A version weighted by replacement cost is due to pilot at two of the six sites next season.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.j9xonr.