Week 2 Session: Week 2: Who Was Invited, and With What Right

Reading the Steering Committee's invitation list for the meeting Week 1's timeline ends at — who attended, what decision right they held, and what reasons the record gives for excluding everyone else.

1 March 2027

Before the session#

Bring your classified timeline from Week 1. It ends at a meeting: the 2021-03-08 Steering Committee that confirmed the ClarityPulse rollout timeline. This week’s document is that meeting’s invitation list.

An invitation, a decision right, and when someone actually learns the outcome are three separate facts, not one. Being in the room is not the same as having a vote; having no vote is not the same as being told only after the fact. The list below states, for each person, three independent things: their participation status (invited and attended, or not invited at all), their decision right (vote, advise, observe, or none — nobody on this particular list is invited-but-absent, so that participation value doesn’t appear here, though the taxonomy allows it), and their information timing (during — including simply being present in the room — or after) — plus whatever reason the record gives, which is often none at all.

Two of these values are worth naming precisely because this list happens not to use them. Observe, held only by Castellano below, is a formal decision right in its own column — a documented ceiling on what a seat may do (attend and watch, never vote or advise) — not a loose way of saying “was in the room”; someone with a vote is also in the room, and someone with no right at all can still be present. Not-informed would describe a seat that never learns the outcome through any documented channel at all — no email, no minutes, nothing — which is a stronger and rarer claim than “after”: everyone on this particular list who is not informed during the meeting is still informed after it, through some record or another, so nobody here is coded not-informed. The taxonomy carries the value anyway, for a seat this case simply doesn’t have.

Case file: the 2021-03-08 Steering Committee invite list#

Castellano is the row worth pausing on: she is invited and attends, holds observe — she can be present to observe, but cannot decide, approve, vote, or advise, which is a distinct decision-right value from having none at all in the sense of “not even in the room” — and is still informed during the decision — not after — for the simple reason that she is physically present while it happens. A taxonomy that only had “invited” and one mixed “decision right” column (with “informed after” as one of its values) would have nowhere accurate to put her: she isn’t informed after anything, and folding “present, no vote” and “absent, told later” into the same label would erase a distinction this case actually turns on.

This is the same teaching fiction as Week 1 — a case built for this course, not a real institution’s records.

In the session#

For Dr Femi Adisa and LSS frontline staff, each pair produces:

1. One plausible legitimate reason for the exclusion (something about the committee’s actual terms of reference, not a guess about motive).
2. One plausible cost the exclusion has for the decision’s quality or fairness.
3. One thing — a document, a policy, a fact you don’t currently have — that would help you tell which reading is closer to right.

What good analysis of one row looks like#

Dr Femi Adisa, University Librarian — not invited, no decision right, informed after, no reason given.

A legitimate reading: the committee’s terms of reference name only directorate-level roles as members. That is a structural rule applied consistently, not a decision made about this pilot specifically — the same rule would exclude any unit head, on any topic, in any week. Read this way, the exclusion is a side effect of how the committee is constituted, not evidence of anything about ClarityPulse.

A costly reading: whatever the rule’s origin, its effect here is that the person leading the unit the pilot is rolled out to first has no seat at the meeting that confirms the timeline for that rollout. A structural rule and a one-sided effect are not mutually exclusive — both readings can be true at once, and the interesting question is not which one is “the real reason” but whether the terms of reference should still exclude this seat given what this particular decision affects.

What would help decide more: whether the terms of reference have ever been amended to add a seat for a specifically affected unit on a previous decision. If yes, the “just a structural rule” reading weakens. If no such amendment has ever happened for any pilot, it strengthens.

A little further reading#

Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35(4), 1969 — a genuinely foundational, findable paper, not written for this course. Read the description of the middle rungs (“informing,” “consultation,” “placation”) against the top rungs (“partnership,” “delegated power,” “citizen control”). Bring one answer: where would you place “invited, informed after” on that ladder, and is it above or below “invited to advise, no vote”?

After the session#

Keep your annotated invite list alongside your Week 1 timeline. Week 3 adds a third document type — the agenda — and asks what its wording, order and timing argue for before anyone in that room has spoken.