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Glossary

This glossary defines the key user-facing terms in Symthink.

Home - Root tab with Leaders, Elections, and Following sub-tabs.

Civic Ladder - Root tab listing geographic community levels (broad to local). Each level has Thinkers, Questions, and Dashboard tabs.

My Vision - Root tab for your private knowledge tree (Question, Idea, and Claim nodes).

Dashboard - Root tab with Stats, Sharing, and My Forums sub-tabs. Publishing controls are on Sharing; open forum management is on My Forums.

Core objects

Symthink Tree - Your structured map of questions, ideas, claims, and supporting detail.

Node - A single item in the tree (a Question, Idea, Claim, or supporting point).

Branch - A node plus everything underneath it.

Vision branch - The part of your tree you publish publicly. This is the foundation for Shared Vision, Following activity, metrics/rankings, and citation analytics.

Publishing & public view

Publish - The act of updating your public platform to match your current Vision branch (via Dashboard → Sharing → Manage Sharing).

Platform (public platform) - Your public-facing civic artifact generated from your published Vision branch.

Shared Vision - The public, shareable page where other people explore your platform.

Following & collaboration

Following - Tracking a specific question, ballot contest, or open forum so you can revisit it and see when something changes. Shown on Home → Following, grouped into Ballot Research, Open Forums, and Questions.

Feed item - A background record that powers activity signals on the Following tab (for example, unread dots and change summaries).

Open forum - A time-bounded listening session on a published Question where anonymous participants submit suggestions. See civic-listening.md.

Suggestion / contribution - A proposed improvement on a leader's public platform. Open-forum synthesis and direct contributions land in the leader's Suggestions bin on My Vision for review.

Copy branch - Duplicating a branch into your own tree so you can build on it; Symthink preserves attribution when ideas move between people.

Trust & analytics

Citation - A source you attach to support a claim (evidence, reference, or grounding).

Our Media Diet - Regional aggregation opened from the Sources chip on a level's Thinkers tab — shows which sources and publishers are cited within a civic area. See citations-and-publisher-stats.md.

Civic area - The geographic community context used to group leaderboards and analytics (for example, city, county, or state).

Civic Ladder / civic levels - The ordered ladder of civic areas from broad to local. Symthink uses levels to keep comparisons meaningful.

Metrics - Measured signals of engagement and collaboration (for example, exploration depth, followers, and contributions).

Ranking - A leaderboard within a civic area derived from metrics so communities can discover engaged civic leaders.

Civic Resonance - A leader's share of qualified local engagement in the current month. Drives Thinkers tab rank and appears on Dashboard → Stats.

Community Energy - A civic-area vitality score on each level's Dashboard tab, combining depth (followers, collabs, returning) and breadth. See community-energy-dashboard.md.

Legislative Activity Report - AI summary of recent federal legislation for a U.S. senator or representative. Shown on Home → Leaders; the full dialog title is Biweekly Legislative Activity Report.