A Slop University research poster surveys coffee-queue following distance and courtyard pigeon-feeding frequency across the University, reporting both as distributions, and finds Futures in Committee treating the pooled median as its standing confidence reading.
A campus-wide survey of coffee-queue spacing and pigeon-feeding habit gives Futures in Committee a pooled figure it now reads as institutional trust.
Futures in Committee already tracks how far a decision is from being made; its newest instrument tracks how far one person stands from another. A poster from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys students and staff on their preferred coffee-queue following distance and how often they feed the courtyard pigeons, reporting both habits as population distributions rather than a single average.
The survey ran across tea-room and courtyard sites in every school over nine weeks, gathering self-reported following distance in centimetre bands and self-reported feeding frequency alongside a single trust item. Futures in Committee has adopted the pooled following-distance median as its published confidence reading, revised at each committee session, with a school whose median narrows sharply between sessions referred for standing review.
People arrange themselves in a queue without being told to, and now the committee has a number for it.
— Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
Deputy Convenor Anneke Tolan said the pigeon-feeding series “is still finding its own threshold, the same way the queue series did before it became load-bearing.” The School frames the result as evidence that its foresight work extends past strategy documents and into the texture of an ordinary morning.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fd77p1.