The Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund awards Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Joost Nwosu a grant to log and countersign a car boot sale's stallholder booking list at every handover between weekend organisers, so no booking is carried forward from memory alone.
A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant has Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Joost Nwosu countersigning a car boot sale's stallholder list at every change of weekend organiser
A monthly car boot sale’s stallholder list is meant to say who holds which pitch this weekend. In practice, the University has found, it mostly says who held it several organisers ago: regulars nobody has the heart to bump, swaps agreed by text message and never written down, and no reliable way for an incoming organiser to know, on the Friday before a sale, which pitches are actually spoken for. A new Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund grant will put that right.
The grant funds a handover protocol for the list itself: every pitch, its regular holder, and any standing swap arrangement entered in one place and countersigned by the outgoing weekend organiser before the role passes on, rather than explained over a phone call the incoming organiser has no way to check later. A pitch nobody can account for at handover reverts to the general queue instead of staying reserved on the strength of somebody’s memory.
A list only works for as long as it outlives the person who built it. We’re less interested in the car boot sale itself than in the week every indicator like it eventually reaches — the one where its author isn’t the one checking it anymore.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor, Review Cadence Observatory
Co-grantee Dr Joost Nwosu, of the School of Continuous Improvement, called the organiser’s seat the more fragile part of the arrangement: “the pitch holders barely change between sales. It’s whoever’s running the sale that turns over, and until now nothing told the next one what the last one knew.”
The University counts the protocol as one instance of a pattern its stewardship grants keep finding: the record is rarely the problem; its next custodian is. The grant is $219,846, awarded under the Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund.
Indicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Carrying a Car Boot Sale's Stallholder List From One Weekend's Organiser to the Next · $219,846 · awarded to Osei Vandermeer , Joost Nwosu