# University study asks who is on which side of a berth

> A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement follows a cruising association's berth-lending app through five seasons and asks what a two-sided platform is when everyone on it is on both sides.

A boat berth is empty for exactly as long as its holder is somewhere else, and a holder who is somewhere else wants a berth. On that observation rests _When the Sides Are Roles: Subsidy, Balance and Membership in a Harbour Berth-Exchange Platform_, a paper by Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate, with Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, and Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, all of the School of Continuous Improvement.

The authors followed an app through which the members of a cruising association lend one another their berths across three harbours of one estuary. Its committee opened by rewarding the members who supplied berths, and found that this was all of them. Across 2,317 berth-nights the lasting imbalance lay between the harbour people wished to visit and the harbour they wished to leave, and it eased only when the holders of one harbour were given an allowance of their own.

> I came to this from houses, where the question is what a visitor may be shown. A harbour turns out to ask the same thing of a gap. I am grateful to an association that let me stand on its pontoons and count what was not there.
>
> --- Mr Eivind Onwuka, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement

The paper aligns an established body of platform theory with a longitudinal reading of committee minutes, booking records and member accounts, and sets out four propositions for arrangements in which taking part and providing are one activity.

The University has long held that a question is improved by being asked from the water, and counts this paper as support for the view. Dr Solberg said the School had "gone looking for two sides and returned with three harbours, which we regard as a surplus".

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.x4tdlt.