Ada — README

A personal knowledge vault you point an AI assistant at. Plain Markdown, so it's portable, readable, and not locked to any one tool. Built around the Associate Dean, Online Degrees role.

This README is documentation for a human. It is not authoritative. The rules the assistant actually follows live in CLAUDE.md and the three files in 90.identity. If this file ever disagrees with those, they win and this file needs fixing.

What this is (and isn't)

Structured notes plus an assistant that can search and maintain them. The assistant answers better because it reads real context: people, decisions, meetings. It is not magic. The mechanism is search over these files. Keep them tidy and it works well.

Where the rules live

Each rule has exactly one home, so nothing has to be kept in sync in two places.

File	Owns
CLAUDE.md	Vault mechanics: where tasks go, what may be written, what is read-only
90.identity/identity.md	The assistant's role and what takes priority
90.identity/user.md	Who Boğaç is, and the style rules
90.identity/soul.md	How the assistant behaves, and the confidentiality policy

If you want to change a behavior, change it in its owning file only. Don't restate it elsewhere for emphasis; that is how the files drift apart.

A desktop agent with file access picks up CLAUDE.md at the root automatically, and that file tells it to read the three 90.identity files first. If a tool doesn't look for CLAUDE.md, name all four files to it explicitly before anything else.

The rule that matters most

Anything you have to do goes to the ADOD list in BusyCal. Anything you have to know or keep lives in this vault as a note. No third place, no overlap. The vault holds no dates, deadlines, or reminders, aside from the one deliberate exception noted in CLAUDE.md (08.tasks, linked notes for ADOD calendar tasks only).

Commitments as a folder is retired — it held no information worth keeping. When a meeting produces a commitment, write the record in the vault and put the action in ADOD.

How to use it day to day

Log every meeting and every decision. That is the habit that compounds, and everything else here is scaffolding around it.

Capture anything raw into 00.inbox/, or straight into the right folder if you know where it goes.

Meetings. After each meeting, paste the transcript or notes and ask the assistant to fill in _template/meeting.md, then save to 03.meetings/ as topic.YYYYMMDD.md. Extraction prompt below.

Decisions. This is the high-value habit. Whenever something is decided, make a file in 04.decisions/. Future you will thank present you. Actions arising go to ADOD, not to a vault file.

Ask across the vault. "What did we decide about the spring intake." "What does Keypath owe me this week." "Summarize my last three meetings with X."

Meeting extraction prompt

Paste a transcript and use this:

Extract from this meeting, output as Markdown, skip small talk:
1. Decisions — what was decided, by whom, why, what alternatives were considered.
2. Commitments — who promised what, by when. Split: [Internal] vs [Keypath].
3. Risks / issues — anything off-track, blocked, or needing escalation.
4. Stakeholders — positions, preferences, politics worth remembering.
5. Numbers — any enrollment, recruitment, budget, or timeline figures (quote exactly).
6. Open questions — what I need to follow up on.
Use the meeting template. Save to 03.meetings/topic.YYYYMMDD.md
Then list the commitments that need to become ADOD tasks, each with a concrete first step.
Don't create the tasks; just list them for me to confirm.

Nightly maintenance (with a leash)

Optionally run a nightly scheduled task. It should propose, not act. Suggested prompt:

Read everything added to the vault today. Then:
- list people / programs / decisions mentioned that don't yet have their own file;
- list likely duplicates;
- list new links that should be added to the relevant dashboard (dashboard.md etc.);
- flag anything strategic or time-sensitive for me to review tomorrow;
- list commitments recorded in the vault with no matching ADOD task.
Write all of this to 00.inbox/review.YYYYMMDD.md.
Do NOT edit or delete any existing note.

Read the review file in the morning, approve what's right, and only then let changes be applied. Once applied, stamp its status and move it to 00.inbox/archive/. Never let an unattended job delete or overwrite notes.

Privacy (read this for the dean role)

The full policy is in 90.identity/soul.md. The short version: this role touches personnel matters and a commercial partner's terms, so be deliberate about what a cloud model sees. Keep contract financials and individual personnel issues out of the vault entirely, or in a folder you choose not to sync, and let the assistant work from meeting notes, decisions, and program status. Use initials or student IDs, never full student records. 07.reference holds pointers and summaries, not heavy confidential originals.

Folder map

• 00.inbox — raw capture and live review files, processed and emptied regularly
• 00.inbox/archive — applied review files, kept as an audit trail
• 00.inbox/decisions — drop folder for exports from the review-decider tool
• 01.programs, 02.people, 03.meetings, 04.decisions, 05.projects, 06.ideas, 07.reference — the working areas. Front page is dashboard.md at vault root
• 08.tasks — linked notes for ADOD calendar tasks only, the one dated-content exception
• 90.identity — role, user, and behavior files, read these first
• 98.daily — Daily Notes plugin output
• 99.chats — chat transcripts
• _template — reusable note templates
• _scripts — small utilities, including sharepoint_map.py
• _tools — helpers that don't belong in the note tree

Each subfolder has an about.md explaining what goes in it.

Economics research is deliberately not in this map. It lives in its own repos and LaTeX folders, not in the vault.

The SharePoint layer

Two read-only OneDrive shares back the OMBA, roughly 8,000 files. Don't walk them. Three files in 07.reference/ sit in front:

• sharepoint.folder.map.md, hand-written. What each area is for, who owns it, where the confidentiality lines fall. Read this to know where to look.
• _sharepoint.index.tsv, generated. Every indexable file with path, modified date, size. Grep it to find which file, then open only that one.
• _sharepoint.map.partnership.md and _sharepoint.map.program.services.md, generated trees, for when you want the shape of a folder rather than a name.

Regenerate the last three with python3 _scripts/sharepoint_map.py. Never hand-edit them; fix the generator instead. Contract terms and student-level records are counted but never named, and the redaction rules are at the top of the script.