{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_complete_proposal_portfolio20_20260803","cell_id":"deadweight_loss_reduction__sociology_anthropology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"cand_periodic_clearing_anthropology_archive_access","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Periodic Capacity Clearing for Community and Research Access to Anthropological Collections","problem":"An anthropology archive allocates scarce supervised-access, digitization, and conservation-support hours through an annual first-come queue. Once assigned, hours remain attached to a project until late cancellation or expiration, while eligible descendant-community projects and time-sensitive research requests remain blocked. The total capacity limit protects collections and staff, and some materials require source-community authorization or legal restriction. The candidate problem is the avoidable loss created by a rigid, nonreallocating assignment rule inside those legitimate limits—not the limits or cultural restrictions themselves.","actors":["Descendant and source-community representatives seeking access to culturally connected materials","Anthropology and sociology researchers","Archive access coordinators","Archivists, conservators, and digitization staff","The archive director or collections-governance committee","Rights holders, donors, and people represented in collection records","Previously scheduled projects whose plans change"],"observable_state":"Allocated staff or supervised-access hours remain reserved for projects that are not ready, have postponed travel, lack required permissions, or use fewer hours than assigned. Other requests that have already passed rights, cultural-authority, feasibility, and conservation checks remain queued. Observable indicators include late cancellations, unused allocated hours, eligible requests expiring before a field season or community event, repeated queue deferrals, and differences between nominally committed capacity and hours actually delivered.","consequence":"Collection-access capacity can go unused while mutually beneficial, already-eligible uses remain unrealized. Communities may miss bounded opportunities for language work, cultural programs, claims preparation, or intergenerational participation; researchers may substitute incomplete sources or abandon a comparison; and archive staff may spend effort maintaining reservations that produce no access. Reallocation could also impose losses if it makes scheduling unreliable or weakens protected community priority, so aggregate utilization alone is not an adequate objective.","affected_objective":"Increase realized, authorized use of scarce anthropology-archive capacity while preserving collection care, cultural authority, privacy, legal restrictions, fair access, reliable planning, and protected community claims.","intervention":"Replace the annual nonreallocating queue with a bounded periodic capacity-clearing rule. Keep the total conservation-safe capacity and all access-eligibility decisions unchanged. Divide eligible capacity into protected pools, including a minimum community-access reserve and a general research pool; require readiness confirmation at staged checkpoints; release only unconfirmed or voluntarily returned hours into a transparent clearing round; maintain a ranked standby list using published criteria; permit limited project-to-project transfers only through archive approval; and carry unused community-reserve capacity forward or reoffer it first to eligible community requests. Pilot the rule for one scheduling cycle with an expiry, advance notice, utilization and incidence monitoring, and restoration of displaced projects when the archive causes a cancellation.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Value-blocking wedge","domain_realization":"A first-come, nonreallocating annual assignment rule keeps scarce archive-support hours attached to projects that cannot presently use them while other authorized users remain blocked."},{"archetype_element":"Legitimate scarcity constraint","domain_realization":"Limits on handling, supervision, conservation treatment, digitization labor, and secure-space occupancy remain fixed during the intervention."},{"archetype_element":"Protected-purpose constraint","domain_realization":"Source-community authority, privacy, legal and donor restrictions, preservation requirements, protected community access, and staff-safety rules remain prerequisites rather than variables in the clearing process."},{"archetype_element":"Avoidable distortion","domain_realization":"Reservations persist after readiness has lapsed, cancellations arrive too late for reuse, and the queue has no structured way to reconnect released capacity with already-eligible demand."},{"archetype_element":"Foregone value","domain_realization":"Deliverable access hours expire unused while eligible community or research projects lose time-bounded opportunities."},{"archetype_element":"Redesign lever","domain_realization":"Periodic readiness checkpoints, protected capacity pools, controlled release, published standby ranking, and archive-mediated transferability reopen only stranded allocations."},{"archetype_element":"Affected-party incidence","domain_realization":"The review separately records gains and losses for community users, queued researchers, original slot holders, archive workers, represented people, and rights holders."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral-response check","domain_realization":"Monitoring tests whether applicants over-request hours, falsely certify readiness, fragment projects, strategically enter protected pools, or cancel later because release rules changed."},{"archetype_element":"Implementation boundary and rollback","domain_realization":"One scheduling cycle, a fixed subset of access services, an automatic expiry, and predeclared harm and fairness triggers constrain the test."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"distortion_reduction_review","role":"Separate losses caused by the assignment rule from legitimate capacity, preservation, cultural-authority, privacy, and legal constraints; size potentially recoverable hours and uses without presuming every unused hour is avoidable.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this review, ordinary conservation downtime, culturally required nonaccess, or genuine staff scarcity could be mislabeled as waste caused by allocation."},{"mechanism_slug":"quota_or_allocation_rule_review","role":"Hold the total capacity cap constant while examining whether first-come, nontransferable assignments continue to serve fairness and planning objectives; authorize only readiness-based release and bounded reassignment.","counterfactual_removal":"Without revising the internal assignment rule, confirmed cancellations and dormant reservations would continue to strand capacity even if eligible standby demand were visible."},{"mechanism_slug":"impact_assessment_table","role":"Place each affected party's access change, planning burden, protected interest, uncertainty, and monitoring trigger in a comparable register, including losses to displaced projects and collective harms not represented by utilization.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the incidence register, higher delivered hours could conceal reduced community access, unstable planning, uncompensated preparation costs, or pressure on rights holders."},{"mechanism_slug":"cost_benefit_assessment_protocol","role":"Compare recovered authorized-access hours and completed uses with administrative workload, planning uncertainty, transition burdens, preservation effects, and distributional changes; vary assumptions about standby readiness and the value of predictability.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a two-sided assessment, increased utilization could be treated as sufficient even if the clearing process merely shifts costs to communities, staff, or original slot holders."},{"mechanism_slug":"regulatory_simplification_pilot","role":"Test the clearing rule on a limited set of services for one expiring cycle, instrument protected outcomes, and revert automatically unless the archive's authorized governance body renews it on evidence.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a bounded pilot and expiry, strategic behavior or distributional defects in the new allocation rule could become embedded across all collections access."}],"causal_chain":["A legitimate short-run cap limits the archive's supervised-access and support hours.","An annual first-come rule assigns hours to eligible projects but does not readily reclaim allocations when project readiness changes.","Some reservations therefore remain unavailable to others until cancellation or expiry, even when the assigned project cannot use them.","Eligible community and research requests remain queued, and time-bounded opportunities may close while nominally assigned hours go undelivered.","A distortion review distinguishes genuinely stranded allocations from conservation downtime, cultural restrictions, and raw capacity shortage.","Readiness checkpoints cause only unconfirmed or voluntarily returned hours to reenter a periodic clearing round.","Protected pools and unchanged eligibility rules prevent the clearing process from overriding community authority, preservation constraints, or the community-access reserve.","Published standby criteria reconnect released capacity with eligible, ready requests before the hours expire.","An incidence table and behavioral monitoring reveal whether utilization changes accompany strategic overrequesting, reduced predictability, inequitable access, staff overload, or protected-purpose failures.","The archive adjusts thresholds or returns to the annual baseline if recovered authorized use does not justify the operational and distributional costs."],"baseline":"The archive sets an annual capacity limit, confirms eligibility and restrictions, and assigns available hours in first-come order. Allocations are project-specific and normally remain reserved until used, surrendered, or canceled. Waitlisted projects receive openings ad hoc, often only after a late cancellation. The archive does not periodically test readiness, clear dormant reservations, maintain protected capacity pools with carry-forward rules, or use a published standby-ranking process.","nearest_rivals":["Expanding archive staff or facilities: this addresses raw undersupply, whereas the proposal tests whether existing authorized capacity is stranded by its assignment rule.","A searchable collections portal: this reduces discovery costs but does not release already-assigned supervision, digitization, or conservation-support hours.","An ordinary cancellation waitlist: this reacts after capacity is returned but lacks staged readiness confirmation, protected pools, periodic clearing, and incidence safeguards.","Dynamic access pricing or cancellation fees: these could influence behavior but would risk allocating culturally significant access by ability to pay; the proposal uses administrative clearing within protected eligibility rules.","Removing access restrictions: this would attack protected cultural, privacy, legal, or preservation constraints that the proposal explicitly holds invariant.","Case-by-case priority exceptions: these may rescue individual requests but preserve opaque discretion and the nonreallocating structure that strands other capacity."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The primary defect is a stale quantity-allocation rule inside a legitimate capacity cap: authorized hours are committed but not delivered, and the rule cannot reassign them in time. The intervention does not increase supply, accelerate an approval pathway, price access, or relax cultural and preservation restrictions. If the apparent unused capacity is actually required conservation slack, unavailable specialized labor, unresolved rights authorization, or demand that is not ready to use a slot, the deadweight-loss diagnosis fails.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The archive director or collections-governance committee may change scheduling rules for institution-controlled staff and access capacity within its delegated authority. Source communities, rights holders, legal officers, conservators, and ethics bodies retain their existing authority over restricted materials and protected uses; the scheduling body cannot override them.","authorized_first_step":"Conduct a de-identified retrospective allocation audit and tabletop clearing simulation for one completed scheduling cycle. Reconstruct assigned, confirmed, released, canceled, and delivered hours plus eligible standby requests without changing any current reservation or collection-access decision.","excluded_actions":["Increasing handling or occupancy beyond conservation-safe limits","Overriding source-community, Indigenous data-governance, privacy, legal, donor, or ethics restrictions","Selling priority or using willingness to pay as the allocation criterion","Reassigning a confirmed slot without the published notice and protection rules","Treating incomplete permissions or unresolved cultural authority as mere scheduling friction","Allowing applicants to self-designate eligibility for a protected community pool","Publishing sensitive request, identity, collection, or restriction information in the standby list","Counting a restricted or deliberately rested collection as idle capacity","Making the pilot permanent without an authorized incidence and safeguard review"],"halt_rollback":"Suspend reassignment for the affected pool if the process causes an unauthorized-access incident, preservation breach, improper disclosure, substantiated source-community objection, repeated misclassification of protected requests, or displacement contrary to the published rules. Restore the baseline queue while affected decisions are reviewed. The full pilot also halts if staff cannot maintain the audit trail, strategic overrequesting defeats the readiness rule, or the archive cannot honor restoration commitments. All pilot rules expire after the defined cycle unless affirmatively renewed."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that apparently unused allocations are necessary buffers for uncertain conservation work, specialist availability, culturally mandated pauses, or projects whose readiness cannot be verified earlier, and that reclaiming them would materially damage preservation, community authority, or reliable access planning.","problem_falsifier":"The problem is falsified if a bounded audit finds no meaningful difference between nominally assigned and safely deliverable hours, no eligible ready request that could have used released capacity, or no time window in which reassignment could have occurred without violating notice, permissions, preservation, or community-reserve requirements.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if a prospective bounded pilot fails to increase delivered authorized use or reduce expired eligible requests, or if any apparent gain depends on weakening protected access rules and is outweighed under the precommitted review by planning disruption, staff workload, preservation risk, community loss, strategic behavior, or inequitable allocation.","risks":["Applicants may overstate readiness to avoid release.","Applicants may request inflated hours because unused allocations can later be surrendered without consequence.","Frequent clearing rounds may increase administrative workload rather than recover usable capacity.","Original slot holders may incur sunk travel, staffing, or community-coordination costs when schedules change.","Published priority criteria may encode institutional judgments that undervalue community-defined purposes.","A protected pool may become symbolic if eligibility is inaccessible or unused hours are transferred prematurely.","Community representatives may be asked to validate priorities without adequate authority, time, or support.","The archive may mistake culturally required nonuse or conservation rest for idle capacity.","Projects with flexible schedules may capture openings more easily than projects facing travel, disability, caregiving, or visa constraints.","Measured utilization may rise while the quality, depth, or reciprocity of access declines.","Archive-caused cancellations may undermine trust unless restoration rules are credible.","A successful result for routine materials may be overgeneralized to sensitive or fragile collections."]},"next_evidence_step":"For one completed scheduling cycle and one clearly bounded service class, assemble a de-identified ledger of capacity offered, hours assigned, readiness confirmations, permissions status, cancellations, hours delivered, preservation downtime, protected-pool designation, and eligible standby requests. Have scheduling staff, a conservator, and an authorized community-governance participant independently classify which unused hours were safely reallocable at each hypothetical checkpoint. Run a tabletop clearing simulation under predeclared notice, reserve, restoration, and ranking rules; report agreement, contested classifications, recovered authorized hours, displaced expectations, staff processing steps, and incidence by party. Do not alter live access. A live pilot is eligible for consideration only if the simulation identifies safely reallocable capacity and ready eligible requests without crossing any protected restriction.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 addressed a uniform ethics-amendment approval pathway that delayed low-risk adaptations during active ethnographic fieldwork; its intervention was an ex ante adaptation envelope with rapid notification and risk-triggered escalation. This proposal addresses a different institution, resource, and wedge: a nonreallocating queue strands already-authorized archive-support capacity after project readiness changes. Its intervention is periodic clearing within a fixed capacity cap, using readiness checkpoints, protected pools, and controlled reassignment. Its causal path runs from stale quantity assignments to unused capacity and then to reallocation, rather than from undifferentiated prior scrutiny to approval delay and preauthorization. It is independently adoptable by an archive without changing fieldwork ethics-review rules.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal at index 2","Material differentiation from sealed proposal 1","Operational specification of allocation authority, safeguards, falsifiers, and bounded evidence"],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}