Glossary

The words this project uses, in plain terms. Product words first, then the factory's.

flowchart LR
  subgraph product[The product]
    st[Student] --> adv[Advocate]
    adv --> pb[Playbook] & nav[Help finder] & op[Operator]
    op --> tw[Campus twin]
  end
  subgraph factory[The factory]
    jc[Journey card] --> gate[Gate]
    walk[Walk] --> gate
    mut[Mutation] --> rat[Ratchet]
    gate --> adm[Admission]
  end
  factory -- admits changes to --> product

The product

Term Meaning
Advocate The student-facing team: one voice in front of specialist agents (planner, money coach, help finder, week planner).
Approval A student's yes to the exact words of a message. Nothing leaves on their behalf without one.
Catalog The verified list of programs and services, each with a source and the date it was last checked.
Consent ledger An append-only, hash-chained record of every grant, revoke, approval, export and deletion.
Depth How much the Advocate says: brief, standard or walk-me-through.
Dispatch A write the operator sends to another system for the student, such as a room booking. Sent is not done: it is confirmed by looking it up.
Draft A message the Advocate wrote for the student to send, waiting for their approval.
Fair-chance Jobs and programs open to people with a justice history, offered only when the student asks.
Freshness How long a catalog entry may go unchecked before it is no longer offered as current.
Hold Time on the student's calendar the Advocate keeps for a piece of work. Also, a job the operator did not run, with what the student loses by it.
Idempotency key A key sent with a write so that sending it twice has the effect of sending it once.
Lease A short claim on a background job, renewed by heartbeats, so two operators never run it at once.
Next step The button every message offers; a message without one fails the tone gate.
Operator The background worker that keeps campus feeds fresh, plans bus trips, syncs class sites and carries out dispatches.
Playbook A long process (FAFSA, SNAP recertification, GI Bill) declared as steps the Advocate walks a student through.
Pulse A quick yes-or-no question, asked rarely, that the student can turn off.
Reading grade How hard text is to read, by the Flesch-Kincaid formula; every message is held to the student's chosen level.
Scout A declared check that keeps one slice of the catalog current, drafted by the builder and admitted by the factory.
Sealed fact A sensitive fact kept encrypted with the student's own key and opened only by identities they granted.
Sensitivity class How sensitive a field is: public, internal, personal, sensitive or secret.
Small-cell suppression Never showing a number about fewer than five students.
Twin A stand-in for a service the project does not own, held to the same contract as the real one. Campus twins are synthetic APIs for dining, transit, rooms, jobs and class sites.

The factory

Term Meaning
Admission The factory accepting a change because every required check passed. People sign only destructive changes.
Block A reusable part with one purpose, its own tests and mutation floor, and a page saying what to use it for and what not.
Canary A unique, harmless marker planted in a field to trace where that field's data goes.
Certificate A record that a phase passed every check at one commit. A report from another commit cannot certify it.
Contract The schema every implementation of a service must meet, checked by probes.
Determinism ladder Solve with rules first, computation second, a model last, and only inside deterministic checks.
Evidence The pseudonymous, append-only record of what the factory and the product did.
Fixpoint The point where a walk finds no new state: every button from every state has been tried.
Gate A check that can block a change. A gate counts only after planted defects make it fail.
Held out Test phrases no rule may contain, so rules are never written against their own exam.
Journey card A student's goal in plain words, with outcomes that must never happen and an action budget, locked by hash.
Mutation score The share of deliberate small bugs the tests catch.
Pattern One of the 33 named practices of the ZTHR pattern language.
Proof The record that a gate failed on each of its planted defects, pinned to a hash of the gate.
Ratchet A floor that can only rise, such as a mutation score.
Register The list of known gaps, each with an owner and an expiry, instead of hiding them.
Walk An exhaustive run of the app: the button walk drives the Advocate directly; the feature walk drives every page and form.
Zero-bypass Every required check runs in the live pipeline; nothing reaches production around it.

Verified by