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THE SEAT OF THE WEEK

One seat, drawn in the open.

Sunday's public drawing. One number from the drand beacon does two jobs — it picks a Seat of the Week and it picks an Empty Chair. The prize is prominence and a stamp, never money and never anything that could become valuable.

Every Sunday at 18:00 UTC, one public random number does two jobs. This is the Draw.

The Seat of the Week picks a real member from the roll of claimed seats: a stamp on their card and a place in the Gazette, which is this club's logbook sent out by email. The prize is prominence — never money, never anything that could become valuable.

The Empty Chair picks one seat from the district currently filling — held or not. Most weeks it lands on nobody, which is the point: it is an honest picture of how much of your own neighbourhood is still empty, and unlike a number drawn from all 24,601 it is nearly always a gap someone could actually fill. Nearly: the draw covers the whole district, so it can also land on one of the twelve numbers held back for auction, and when it does the result says so.

NEXT DRAW: 27 Sep 2026, 18:00 UTC

How to check my arithmetic

The beacon round is fixed by the clock, not by the Secretary: round = floor((scheduled_unix − 1595431050) / 30) + 1. Then Empty Chair = first_seat_of_the_filling_district + (randomness mod 337).

Two honest caveats, and one correction. The Empty Chair is fixed by the round and by which district was filling when the draw ran; that district is recorded in each result below, so the arithmetic reproduces, but a draw run late enough that a new district had opened would have landed elsewhere. The Seat of the Week indexes, with the top half of the same randomness, the roll of claimed seats not yet drawn in this cycle — nobody comes up twice until everybody has come up once, and a cycle ends when the list is exhausted and starts over. Its size is published with each result; once a cycle has more than one draw in it you also need the seats already drawn, which are listed in the results below, in order.

An index into a list proves nothing unless the list is pinned, so every result also carries a pool hash. The pool is every confirmed member's seat not yet drawn that cycle, in ascending order by seat number — the same order the index counts along. Write those numbers in plain base ten, join them with commas and nothing else, and take the SHA-256:

pool 7, 42, 24600  →  printf '7,42,24600' | shasum -a 256

Be clear about what that buys you, because it is easy to oversell. The hash commits the club to that exact pool at that exact moment: if I ever went back and edited who was in it, the published hash would no longer match, and the hash was published first. It does not let you rebuild a pool you never saw. Seats fill between draws, so today's roll is not the list an older draw indexed, and there is no honest way to reconstruct one from the outside after the fact. To check a draw end to end you have to capture /api/roll yourself before the draw runs; what the hash gives everyone else is the guarantee that the answer can't be changed later. Full hashes ride in /api/draws; the page shows the first 16 characters. Draws older than this record say so rather than showing a number.

The correction: an earlier version of this page published a draw dated before the club opened, computed by an older rule that picked from all 24,601 seats, while printing today's district-scoped formula beside it. The two disagreed, which means the one example this page offered did not reproduce. That draw has been withdrawn from the record — it was a backfill, not an event — and the first real draw is the next one. The logbook has the whole of it.

Fetch the round from drand's public API and do the arithmetic yourself.

Past draws