Invited vs completed

An invitation to judge is not judging, so Area O1 tracks every activity's stage and counts only the completed ones.

Stages

Each activity claim and exhibit can carry a stage:

Kind of activity	Stages	Counts toward a criterion
Judging, talks, reviewing	invited, accepted, completed, declined, cancelled	completed
Papers	preprint, submitted, published, retracted	published
Memberships, awards	applied, granted, denied	granted

Only completed, published and granted count. Evidence with no stage at all (a repo's star count, a press article) counts as it is.

In the Inbox and on the Evidence page, a stage chip shows the difference: a completed stage is solid, an earlier stage is an outline. On the Evidence page, an exhibit at an earlier stage is marked "not counted until completed".

How stages are set

• Email (Gmail, .eml files, forwards, and the daily opportunity check): a message is completed only when it says so explicitly, for example thanking you for judging or reviewing, confirming your review was received, or a certificate of appreciation. Everything else is invited.
• The in-app agent can't propose something as completed, published or granted unless the quote it cites shows it. An invitation quoted as a completion is refused, with a suggestion to propose it as invited and again once it's done.

When the completion arrives later (the organizer's thank-you, a certificate), it becomes its own candidate. Accept it, and the criterion can count it.

How the scoreboard counts

The criteria engine is simple on purpose, so every status can be explained. Your profile (o1a or eb1a, in profiles/) lists, for each criterion:

• evidence types it accepts, such as judge_invite, reviewer_record, panel_letter and program_committee for judging,
• strength signals that make the evidence stronger, such as "selective event", "multiple instances" and "documented scoring",
• bank rules: min_exhibits (exhibits needed) and min_signals (distinct signals needed).

For each criterion, an exhibit counts only when all of these hold:

1. it's filed under that criterion,
2. its evidence type is one the criterion lists,
3. its stage is completed (or it has no stage),
4. it isn't self-reported.

The signals are the ones your counted exhibits carry. "Multiple instances" is added on its own when the profile lists it and two or more exhibits count.

The four statuses

Status	When
banked	Counted exhibits ≥ min_exhibits and distinct signals ≥ min_signals.
building	At least one counted exhibit, but not enough yet; or nothing counted but something is in progress (invited, submitted...).
gap	Nothing counted and nothing in progress.
dropped	You marked the criterion dropped.

You can also mark a criterion gap or dropped yourself (stored under overrides in areao1.yaml). Your override always wins, and the reason still shows what the rules say.

Each criterion has a reason in plain words, such as "Needs 1 more exhibit." or "1 exhibit not counted until completed (stage: invited)." The reason also says when an exhibit was ignored because it's self-reported, or filed with an evidence type the profile doesn't list.

An example

Maya Chen's O-1A profile needs 2 exhibits and 1 signal to bank judging.

What she has	Judging status
An invitation to judge Northwind Hacks (invited)	building: nothing completed yet
+ the organizer's thank-you after the event (completed, signal "selective event")	building: needs 1 more exhibit
+ a completed reviewer record for a workshop	banked: 2 exhibits, 2 signals (selective event, multiple instances)

What banked means

"Banked" means your accepted exhibits meet the profile's rules in Area O1. It's a way to track your file, not a legal assessment. Whether the evidence is enough is for an immigration attorney to assess and for USCIS to decide. See the legal disclaimer.