A new Slop University brochure, On File, Not on Time, showcases research into how civic-administrative life is measured, from compliance-delay distributions to consultation records, across councils, shires, and state schemes.
A new brochure gathers how the University counts compliance delay, consultation records, and civic paperwork across councils, shires, and state schemes
Slop University has released a new prospectus-style brochure, On File, Not on Time, built around the everyday paperwork of civic life — the renewal notice, the consultation submission, the report that moves from one desk to the next before anyone decides what to do with it.
The brochure gathers work from the Trajectory Analytics Group and the Adaptive Metrics Lab that the University describes as one of its most consistent research threads: following compliance schemes, consultation processes, and complaint-handling systems from the moment a resident interacts with them to whatever the record eventually shows. The University reads the showcase as an overdue account of work that has rarely had a public-facing home of its own.
A compliance rate says whether people eventually did the thing. A distribution says how long everyone was still waiting to. We publish the second number because it is the one nobody else is counting.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
“We don’t ask whether people showed up,” said Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, whose consultation research features in the brochure. “We ask what happened to what they said once they had.”
The brochure is available in full from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hc8o0b.