A new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities presents a building's fourteen-week door-clipboard record as a teaching case, and introduces the Two-Flight Quorum Rule now applied to meetings held above the second flight of any University building.
A teaching case on one four-storey building's meeting rooms sets the quorum for every University building
For a teaching period, a clipboard hung on the door of every meeting room in one four-storey building, and a member of the timetabling team ticked each invitee who came through. Measuring the Second Flight, a new paper from the School of Emergent Priorities, presents the resulting record as a teaching case, and the University has now taken its central figure as a standing rule.
None of this would exist without the people who held the clipboards, and we are glad to be able to say so in print.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The Two-Flight Quorum Rule applies to any committee, panel or working group that meets in a room more than two flights above an entrance to its building. Its quorum is set at seven-tenths of the nominal figure, rounded up, in every University building. The seven-tenths is taken from the paper, where invitees to meetings on the third level attended at about that share of the ground-floor rate, and a sign at the foot of the stairs left the figure where it was.
The School describes the paper as a case for the seminar room as much as for the committee room. It sets out a decision, the evidence for it and a plan for an hour’s discussion, and it leaves the group to argue about the stairs. “It is a strange comfort to learn that a building has been keeping a record all along,” said Ms Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, who led the work with Dr Oyelaran and Dr Iben Chikere.
The University is pleased to see a measure of everyday effort become a matter of ordinary procedure, and regards the rule as one more step in a long and continuing conversation between its buildings and the people who climb them.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mf8q15.