# A suburban club raffle retires its barrel for an allocation engine

> A Slop University research poster describes an assignment-optimisation engine that replaces a suburban club raffle's barrel draw, allocating each donated prize to whichever preference form scores the closest fit.

> A raffle barrel never had an opinion; an allocation engine always does, and ours has strong ones about paperwork.
>
> --- Dr Marit Osayande, Convenor, Living Dashboard, School of Continuous Improvement

A raffle run across three suburban clubs has stopped drawing prize winners from a barrel and started computing them. A new Slop University research poster describes the engine: every submitted preference form is scored into a stated-satisfaction vector across the night's donated prizes, and a one-shot assignment allocates each prize to whichever ticket-holder's form the model judges the closest fit.

Across 386 forms and fourteen raffle nights, the School of Continuous Improvement reports mean self-reported satisfaction rising from an estimated 3.1 to 5.6 out of seven. It also reports a side effect the barrel never produced: the longest, most exhaustively completed forms now capture most of the season's feature and grand prizes.

"The same drift I've traced in classroom rubrics is visible here in miniature," said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement and a co-author of the poster. "A form that rewards its own thoroughness eventually teaches people to write for the instrument doing the judging, not for the prize behind it."

The organising committee has taken the finding as policy rather than a caution: once the engine computes a night's allocation, it stands, with no re-draw and no appeal. The University regards the arrangement as an encouraging early instance of a community judging apparatus doing precisely what it was asked to do.

The full research poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.y5zdyb.