VIGIL CONSILIUM Search
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Contents

Open Professional
Professional methodology
What Vigil Professional is

Chapter 01

Quick start

Ten steps, about ten minutes, and you will have followed a question, traced its evidence, 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 this is mostly empty, and that is the correct starting state — the desk shows your work, and you have not made any yet. The row at the bottom, Start something, is the way out of it. Open Monitor.

  3. Monitor

    See what the cycle found

    Monitor opens on the current review cycle across every module: how many questions were reviewed, how many moved, and how many were checked and found unchanged. Pick a module from the rail on the left if you already know which theatre you care about.

    The Monitor workspace for the review cycle to 14 September 2026: 56 of 56 questions reviewed, 11 moved, 30 reviewed and held, 15 opened on a baseline, 0 pending; a world map of 145 located places, a column of recorded-activity series, and an inspector open on the question “Is the Strait of Hormuz commercially usable again?” showing its latest review, its six observables and its current reading.
    The counts are of reviews, never of events. Thirty questions “reviewed and held” means thirty files somebody checked and recorded as unmoved.

  4. Monitor

    Select a question

    Press any row in What moved or any question in Monitored questions. The inspector on the right fills with that record: its latest review, how many observables check it, and what it currently says. Press Follow — that is the one action worth taking on your first visit.

    The Monitor inspector open on the Watch question “Is the Strait of Hormuz commercially usable again?”: latest review “Movement observed · 2026-09-13”, 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. Research

    Ask the corpus a question

    Open Research and 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 45 matching records, a grouping control set to “by family”, and a row of family facets — watch question 1, observable record 5, scenario template 2, development 4, actor 4, formation 4, event 4, logistics system 2, terrain 2, impact chain 1, economic exposure 1, location 10, 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. Research

    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. Research

    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. 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.

  9. Brief Builder

    Put it into a document

    Anything you met on the way here had an Add to briefaction. Open Build → 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.

  10. 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, Research, Analyse and Brief Builder.