Flagged, Not Retired

A Twelve-Month Deployment of the Indicator Commons' Sunset Scorer, and Why Its Own Uptime Outlasted Everything It Flagged

A twelve-month field deployment of an automated sunset scorer across the Indicator Commons' full registry of 214 indicators tests whether an instrument built to flag stale, redundant, and rarely-queried indicators for retirement can shrink the registry it audits. The scorer flagged 138 distinct indicators; four were retired, and disposition otherwise splits across re-baselining, retention with justification, and an ongoing committee backlog, a pattern traced to the scorer's own uptime entering the Living Dashboard partway through the deployment.

@misc{slop_03ley4,
  author       = {Renke Sabel and Casimir Beng and Osei Vandermeer},
  title        = {Flagged, Not Retired: A Twelve-Month Deployment of the Indicator Commons' Sunset Scorer, and Why Its Own Uptime Outlasted Everything It Flagged},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.03ley4},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-cataloguing-which-indicators-03ley4/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}