# Quick invitations to be given the big room

> A new Slop University research poster sorts the titles of calendar invitations at a freight firm's head office into five kinds, and describes the booking rule that now sets room and length by kind for the University's seminar rooms.

The word "quick" in an invitation's title is, on the evidence of a research
poster published today, the surest sign that a room will be held for a long
time. The School of Emergent Priorities has read the titles of 3,100 calendar
invitations at a freight firm's head office, and the University will now book
its own seminar rooms by what it found.

> A title is the first thing a meeting ever says about itself, and it has been a
> privilege to sit and listen to it.
>
> --- Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities

The poster, _Quick Gets the Big Room_, sets each invitation's title beside the
time its room was held past the booked slot. Its authors sorted the titles into
five kinds, named Understatement, Bare noun, Courtesy, Declaration and Verdict,
and found that the kinds keep a steady order from the longest-held to the
shortest.

From the next teaching period, the University's booking office will set the room
and the length of a seminar booking from the kind its title belongs to, with no
override, and will return any invitation whose title falls outside the five. The
firm's booking desk has worked to the same rule since the study closed.

Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate in the School, one of the poster's
co-authors, said the five kinds "give the booking desk a way of saying yes
before anyone has had to ask." The University is glad to have found, in a
corridor's worth of calendars, something it can book against.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an
open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qxxls5.