The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021-2026 accounts for five years spent following soil and water samples from paddock to laboratory to record.
The School of Continuous Improvement looks back on a catchment program that brought no instrument of its own and counted everyone else's
Once in five years the School of Continuous Improvement accounts for itself in print, and the account released today is given over to a single program. Impact Report 2021–2026 sets out what the School did alongside the landholder groups, laboratories and agencies of one river catchment, where its researchers were asked to attend to the measuring of nitrogen and phosphorus and to leave the chemistry to those who knew it.
A clipboard is not a great deal to carry onto somebody else’s paddock. We were let through the gate anyway, more than once, and I should like the report to be read as the receipt.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
The report tracks 9,412 soil cores and water bottles across 38 sampling points. It records that seven laboratories reading portions of one reference sample drew closer together over five comparison rounds, that the readers of a catchment status board looked at the date before they looked at the figure, and that volunteers called out to sample a rising stream now settle what counts as a rise in March, in daylight.
The program anchors a chain-of-custody ledger, an annual comparison round and a reading log within the School’s wider evaluation-ecosystem agenda, mobilising its measurement-systems and anticipatory-performance themes around a shared sampling posture. Dr Osayande led the work with Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer. “A missed sampling run turns out to be a perfectly respectable thing to write down,” Dr Nwosu said, “and the School is the better for having written a number of them.”
The University counts the report among the more travelled documents the School has issued, and notes that it makes no claim on the catchment’s behalf.
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sn9est.