VIGIL CONSILIUM
Context. Not headlines.
Contents

Open Professional
Professional methodology
What Vigil Professional is

Chapter 01

Quick start

Eleven steps, about twelve minutes, and you will have followed a question, traced its evidence, seen the system it runs on, tested one assumption and produced a briefing you can come back to.

Do this once in order. Everything you use here has a chapter of its own; none of it is needed yet.

  1. Sign in

    Ask for a link

    Enter your email address. Vigil sends a link that signs you in; there is no password to choose. The link works once and expires after fifteen minutes.

    The sign-in page: a single email-address field and a “Send sign-in link” button, under a line explaining that Vigil will send a link that signs you in and that there is no password.
    The whole of signing in. Vigil answers the same way whether or not an address has an account, so the message on screen says nothing about your address.

  2. My Vigil

    Land on the desk

    On a new account the desk opens on Three moves fill this desk: follow what you are responsible for, trace what a reading rests on, make something somebody else can check — each with the door it goes through. It disappears once you have followed or saved anything. Open Monitor.

  3. Monitor

    See what the cycle found

    Monitor opens on the current review cycle across the modules your subscription covers: how many questions were reviewed, how many moved, and how many were checked and found unchanged. To narrow it to one module or one Standing Watch scope, use the Workspace selector at the left of the toolbar.

    The Monitor workspace for the review cycle to 14 October 2026: 79 of 83 questions reviewed, 28 moved, 41 reviewed and held, 10 opened on a baseline, 4 pending; the What moved list leading the page, rows dated 11 and 14 October with their modules, one row — “Are the Gulf’s fixed energy nodes being restored faster than they are re-struck?” — selected; beside it the eight module cards, Levant among them, with what moved and what was reviewed and held in each, and an inspector open on that question showing its latest review, its six observables, its current reading and four actions.
    The counts are of reviews, never of events. A question “reviewed and held” is a file somebody checked and recorded as unmoved — a finding, counted as one.

  4. Monitor

    Select a question

    Press any row in What moved, or open a review state under Monitored questions and press a question there. The inspector on the right fills with that record: its latest review, how many observables check it, and what it currently says. PressFollow — that is the one action worth taking on your first visit. Escape or Close puts the inspector away and returns you to the row you pressed.

    The Monitor inspector open on the Watch question “Is the Strait of Hormuz commercially usable again?”: latest review “Assessment changed · 2026-09-27”, six observables defined, a paragraph of current reading, and four actions — open the full record, follow, add to brief, evidence.
    Selecting anything on the workspace opens the record behind it, and what can be done with it next.

  5. Investigate

    Ask the corpus a question

    Open Investigate. Before you type, it lists the questions and readings reviewed most recently. Type a place, an instrument or an actor: results come back grouped by record family, so you can see the shape of what matched before reading any of it.

    The query instrument after searching “hormuz”: a count of 49 matching records, a grouping control set to “by family”, and a row of family facets — watch question 1, observable record 6, scenario template 2, development 5, actor 4, formation 4, event 5, logistics system 2, terrain 2, impact chain 1, economic exposure 1, location 11, zone 2, weekly brief 1, source 1, reference 1.
    1. How many records matched, and how many are being shown.
    2. The families that matched. Press one to narrow to it.
    3. Each result says what it matched on — its name, its own text, a source it cites, or a place it names.
    A query answers by family. Nothing here is ranked by importance; the order is the corpus's own.

  6. Investigate

    Follow one reading down to its evidence

    Select an observable record. The panel beside it fills with the chain beneath it: the question it bears on, the observables that check that question, this record, and the registry sources it cites.

    The evidence chain for one observable record: question — “Is the Strait of Hormuz commercially usable again?”; observables — six records that check it; this record — the reading that no war-risk cover is being written on terms charterers take up; sources — four registry entries it cites.
    Four counts of canonical records, declared by the corpus. A citation count is a count of citations — it does not grade how strong the evidence is.

  7. Investigate

    Keep what you found

    Tick Select on the records you want and collect them, or press Save view to keep the query itself. Saving the query rather than the results is usually the better move: the query re-runs against the corpus as it is today, and the results do not.

  8. Economy & Logistics

    See the system it runs on

    Where the reading names a strait, a terminal, a refinery or an operator, open Economy & Logistics in the rail. Systems draws the strategic system as a summary — what it rests on, what it is, what runs through it, what depends on it; Flows follows one supply system in its authored order, upstream and downstream. Select a node to open its record, an edge to read why Vigil connects the two, and pin what you want to compare. Where it names a crossing, a civilian service or a resilience programme instead, open Humanitarian & Resilience: Conditions, Access and Services work the same way. Where it names a formation, a weapon system or a campaign, openForces & Operations: Forces, Equipment and Operations work the same way again.

  9. Scenario Lab

    Hold one condition

    Open Analyse → Scenario Lab and pick a template in the module you were reading. Set the assumptions on the left. The middle column reports which parts of the recorded system become relevant, affected or stressed under exactly that set — and the right column tells you what would invalidate the premise and what the template does not model.

    Four numbered steps: 1, your assumption — yours, nothing you choose changes a record; 2, an authored rule an editor wrote, gated on your options; 3, the conditional implication, eleven first-order and five second-order, each with its own unknowns; 4, the Vigil record, cited with its own dates, confidence and sources — nothing is generated.
    Nothing you choose changes a record. The implications are rules an editor wrote, gated on your choices, citing the records they rest on.

  10. Brief Builder

    Put it into a document

    Anything you met on the way here had an Add to briefaction. Open Produce → Brief Builder and the blocks are waiting. Add a heading and a paragraph of your own, and watch the document panel count what you have: blocks, sections, sources cited, and anything unresolved.

    The briefing on paper: a Vigil Consilium intelligence-brief masthead, the title “Gulf maritime access — September”, the scope line “Iran–Gulf · week to 14 September 2026”, an executive summary marked as the author’s own, and beneath it numbered blocks each carrying its register, its condition date and its confidence.
    Vigil's wording prints as Vigil's, with its own register, date, confidence and sources. Your words print as yours and are labelled as yours.

  11. Return

    Save, and leave

    Press Save. Go back to My Vigil: the brief is in Continue where you left off, the question you followed is under what you follow, and the collection is in the Library. Come back in a fortnight and the desk will open on what moved since.

What you have not doneNothing in those ten steps changed a Vigil record, and nothing could. The corpus is editorial; what you make is yours, sits beside it, and points at it.

Where to go next

How it works explains why the chain you just walked holds together, and why a correction to a record reaches the brief you just saved. If you would rather keep working, each surface has its own chapter: Monitor, Investigate, Network, Economy & Logistics, Humanitarian & Resilience, Forces & Operations, Analyse and Brief Builder.