Proof recipes

Once an activity is done, the proof behind it gets harder to find every week. A proof recipe lists what to save while it's still easy to get.

What a recipe is

There is one recipe per criterion, such as judging, awards or press. Each recipe lists items worth keeping. For judging, that's the invitation, your acceptance, proof your reviews were submitted, the thank-you or certificate, the event page that lists you, the organizer's standing, how many submissions you judged, and how judges were selected.

Each item has a label and a one-line reason. An item marked "if available" is optional and never counts as missing.

Recipes are suggestions of what reviewers commonly look for, not legal requirements. The checklist says so.

When a checklist appears

An activity gets a proof checklist when it reaches a stage that matters:

• an exhibit at accepted, completed, granted or published,
• a pipeline item moved to done,
• an approved claim at one of those stages that no exhibit cites yet.

A document with no stage (a certificate, a page) doesn't get one: it's usually the proof for an activity. Self-reported exhibits don't get a checklist, and neither does an exhibit you linked as another activity's proof. For more on stages, see Invited vs completed.

At "invited": two items first

An activity still at invited gets a short checklist, "Invited: save these now": the invitation (usually done already, by the invitation itself) and your acceptance or the organizer's confirmation. Once you save the acceptance, the activity counts as accepted and the full recipe takes over, with both items already done.

The checklist is worked out each time you open the page, from the recipe and what you've saved. Nothing is generated ahead of time, so a recipe edit applies to every activity at once.

The checklist on Evidence

The checklists sit in the Proof to save panel on the Evidence page. Each activity shows its title, stage, criterion and date, and a count such as "3/8 saved · 4 to save". The first activity with gaps is open; click any other to expand it.

An item is done only when an exhibit preserves it. That can be:

• the activity's own exhibit, when its evidence type and stage fit the item (a thank-you filed at completed is the completion, not the invitation),
• an exhibit you link, or
• a new upload filed from the checklist.

For each missing item you can:

Button	What it does
Upload	Opens Save proof for that criterion, with the item's label as the title and its evidence type and stage already set (the thank-you is filed at completed, the acceptance at accepted). The file is filed as an exhibit and linked to the item.
Link	Choose an existing exhibit. "Looks like a match" lists up to three likely ones; "Link (2 likely)" says how many.
Not applicable	Say why it doesn't apply, then Save. The item is struck through.

A linked item has Unlink, and a not-applicable item has Undo. Links and reasons are saved in data/proofs.json, and every change is logged.

A self-reported exhibit can be linked for your own tracking, but it shows "Self-reported, doesn't count" and the item stays missing.

On the Pipeline page, a done item with gaps shows "N proof to save", linking to its checklist.

Missing items in This week

Activities with missing items show up in This week on the Overview, one line each, such as "Judging at Example Hacks: 3 proof items to save". The most recent activities come first, at most five. Each line opens that activity's checklist on Evidence.

Matches from Mail and sources

Area O1 also looks for proof you may already have. A rule-based matcher (no AI model) compares each missing item's keywords with:

• incoming mail in your Mail view, after a Gmail sync: the subject must contain one of the item's keywords, and the message must belong to the activity. It does when its subject shares a distinctive word with the activity's title, or when it comes from the activity's organizer with a verified sender (the same sender check as in Mail). The organizer is the site the activity came from, or whoever sent you verified mail naming it, usually the invitation. So "Re: Saturday - thanks for judging!" from the organizer counts; the same subject from a look-alike domain, a failed sender check or a free mail address doesn't,
• pages from your sources, after a source sync: the same test on the page's title or address.

A match becomes an evidence candidate in the Inbox, titled with the item's label, such as "The thank-you or certificate after the event: Thanks for judging Example Hacks". Nothing is linked until you accept it. Accepting files the exhibit and links it to the item. A match you reject stays rejected.

The in-app agent can read your missing items (the missing_proof tool) and propose a document it found the same way, with a quote. It can't link or waive an item itself.

Edit or add a recipe

Recipes are YAML files in profiles/recipes/, one per criterion, shared by O-1A and EB-1A. Here is part of judging.yaml:

criterion: judging
label: "Judging the work of others"
items:
  - id: completion
    label: "The thank-you or certificate after the event"
    why: "Confirms you completed the judging."
    match: {stages: [completed], keywords: [thank you for judging, thanks for judging, certificate of appreciation]}
  - id: selection_criteria
    label: "How judges were selected"
    why: "Shows the role was selective, if the organizer published it."
    optional: true
    match: {keywords: [judges are selected, selection of judges, reviewer selection]}

The match block says how an exhibit or a message is recognized as the item:

• evidence_types and stages: an exhibit with a listed type (and a listed stage, when stages are given) is the item,
• keywords: lowercase phrases looked for in a mail subject, a page title or address, or an exhibit's title and file name (for the "Looks like a match" list).

A recipe can also have applies_to, a list of evidence types it's for, when one criterion holds different kinds of evidence. Left out, it applies to all of them.

To change a recipe for your own case, put a file in <workspace>/profiles/recipes/. A workspace recipe replaces the bundled one with the same criterion. Each file is validated when it loads, so a misspelled field shows up as an error instead of being ignored.

The design is recorded in ADR 0017. Evidence preflight reads the same checklists to flag an activity accepted without completion proof.