Eight terms come back everywhere in the product and on this site. They are defined here as the system uses them, not as the industry uses them in general.
A need is a client request, as it was expressed, together with every quote that proves it. It carries the accounts that raised it, a theme, and a state.
A need contains no solution: the system has no field to write one into. Deciding what to do about a need is human work that happens elsewhere.
An extracted item is a thing said in a meeting that the system isolated and quoted. There are five kinds: a decision, a risk, a request, an action and an idea.
An item is always attached to its meeting, its speaker and its timestamp. It is the unit the review queue shows, and the only thing a person seals.
The register is the set of sealed needs in a product space. It accumulates: a request already on file receives one more quote instead of producing a second record.
It is what the product hands back, and the difference from a folder of minutes. Minutes belong to one meeting; a line in the register belongs to every meeting where the thing was said.
A client account groups everything coming from one outside organisation. It is derived from the email domain of a meeting’s attendees, and can be created or corrected by hand.
The account is what lets you say a request comes from three different clients rather than from one insistent person.
A theme groups needs that are about the same thing, one level above the need. “Security and access” is a theme; “signing in without a password” is a need inside it.
Themes are drawn from sealed needs only, over a six-month window by default. A theme computed from drafts would describe what the model thought it heard.
A validation gate is a step in the pipeline that no automatic run crosses. The pipeline has one: review, between deduplication and the register.
Until somebody crosses it, the item stays a draft: it does not enter the register, counts towards no theme and appears in no brief.
An AI draft is an item written by the model and not yet read by a person. It is dashed everywhere it appears, and that border is the same in the product and on this site.
A draft is reversible without a trace: correcting it, dismissing it or ignoring it costs nothing and leaves nothing behind.
A meeting brief is what the register knows about the attendees of an upcoming meeting, written before it happens. For each of them: what they have already said, what was confirmed, what is still open and what was dismissed.
The brief reads sealed needs only, and cites its sources. Nobody prepares it: it is rewritten when the material under it changes.