Six things a parish can do together before a date.
Time-boxed, collective, and impossible for one person to win. Every challenge here is scored on what the parish did rather than on who did most of it, which removes the only interesting way to ruin them.
The six, running now.
Progress is shown for the parish, never for the individual, and the reward for finishing is a hundred points each and a line in the parish record.
A thousand miles of footpath
Closes 26 October, when the clocks go back. Every mile walked on a public right of way inside the parish, logged in the app or added by hand. The Cotswolds parish is at six hundred and forty. The Dales did it in nine days and have been unbearable ever since.
Five hundred species in the hedgerow
Closes 30 June. Photograph anything living in a hedge and it goes to the county recorder as well as to us. At three hundred and eleven, of which forty-one are moths recorded by one extremely committed member in Enstone.
The whole archive, parish-wide
Closes 25 December. Forty chapters read by at least forty different people in the parish. Nobody has to read all forty. At twenty-nine chapters covered, with a conspicuous gap around the tax ones.
February, properly attended
Runs the first to the twenty-eighth of February only. Two hundred check-ins across the whole parish in the quietest month of the year. It exists entirely because February is grim and the shop is empty, and it has worked twice.
Nothing wasted
Closes 31 March. Two hundred consecutive box deliveries across the parish without a single one being returned unopened. Currently at a hundred and eighty-two, and one person going on holiday will end it.
Twenty new members, roped in
No closing date, which is the flaw in it. Twenty referrals from inside the parish that survive the returns window. At fourteen, and it has taken eleven months.
Why none of them can be won by one person.
The obvious version of this feature is an individual challenge with a prize on it. Walk the most miles, record the most species, read the most chapters. It is easy to build, it is easy to score, and it produces exactly one happy member and three hundred and ninety-nine who stopped trying in week two.
A collective goal has the opposite shape. The member who has walked two miles is contributing to the same number as the member who has walked ninety, and the thing on the screen goes up either way. Nobody is ranked, nobody is beaten and there is no reason to hide your progress.
It also produces the behaviour we actually wanted, which is people in a parish talking to each other about a shared number. The Dales parish organised four group walks in a fortnight without anybody from this end suggesting it.
- 6
- running now
- 0
- individual rankings
- 100
- points each, to everyone
How a challenge is proposed and run.
Somebody in the parish suggests it
In the parish thread. Most of the six above started that way and two were ours.
It gets a number and a date
A challenge without a closing date is a to-do list. The referral one is the exception and it shows.
It has to be measurable without us
A species count goes to the county recorder. Miles are logged by whoever walked them. We are not the referee.
It runs
Progress on the parish page, updated daily, with no individual breakdown anywhere.
It closes
Finished or not. Two of last season’s four were not, and both are on the record as failures.
Last season, and how it went.
| Challenge | Target | Reached | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| A thousand miles of footpath | 1,000 | 1,004 | Finished, on the last afternoon |
| Five hundred species | 500 | 388 | Failed. Recorded here rather than quietly retired |
| Two hundred February check-ins | 200 | 241 | Finished, and the shop noticed |
| The whole archive | 40 chapters | 40 | Finished in October, which surprised everybody |
| A hundred boxes unbroken | 100 | 61 | Failed in week seven, when half the parish went away in August |
Challenges, questioned.
No. You are counted if you happen to do the thing and not counted if you do not, and there is nothing to sign up to.
No, and neither can anybody else, including us at the parish level. The number is the number.
A hundred points on the seasonal board, a line in the parish record and, on two occasions, a keg sent to whoever organised the walk.
The county recorder, who is a real person with standards and who has rejected about a tenth of what has been submitted.
The board these feed into.
Parish level, seasonal reset, and spend capped at three hundred points.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
