A Slop University Impact Report reports a five-year survey of session-start temperatures across community clubs, sheds, choirs and allotment societies, and now excludes any venue below the surveyed floor from its community-partnership directory.
A five-year survey of 96 sports clubs, sheds, choirs and allotment societies now decides which keep their place in the University's community-partnership directory.
Ninety-six community venues have spent the past five years with a Slop University thermometer at the door, and the reading each one returned now decides whether it keeps its place in the University’s community-partnership directory. The School of Continuous Improvement points to the finding as proof that an indicator does not have to stay abstract to be useful.
A venue does not need to fail an inspection to fail a floor. It only needs to be measured on a morning it did not expect.
— Lecturer Dagny Okafor, Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation
The Adaptive Metrics Lab’s Winter Comfort Survey took a single reading at the advertised start of each venue’s first weekly session across a full season, rather than sampling occasional visits, and read the results as one population instead of venue by venue. The spread the survey produced surprised the Lab as much as it surprised any of the ninety-six committees involved.
Lecturer Bram Ntuli, Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, said the finding had already reshaped the seminar series’ spring program: “we have more requests to present a discomfort than we know what to do with.”
The full Impact Report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.rnpo1o.