Main idea

A building's condo board is overseeing a facade renovation. Nothing is missing from the case: hundreds of emails, the meeting minutes, the quotes, the photos, the contractor's successive schedules, the exchanges with the property manager, the owners' complaints. All of it could be reread.

Yet what the members need is written nowhere in it: where the work actually stands, what was decided and what was only discussed, what is still fragile, what needs doing now. Each medium files in its own order — the inbox by date, the shared folder by file name, the minutes in the order of the meeting — and none of these orders is the order of the situation.

Everything is kept, nothing is situated. The situation of the case exists only in people's heads, and each one holds a different version of it.

Why it matters

It shifts the diagnosis: the problem with a case nobody manages to pick back up is not a lack of archives, and archiving more changes nothing. What's missing is a representation of the current state, distinct from the record of what was produced.

It also explains the recurring cost of the start of every meeting: twenty minutes rebuilding, from memory and as a group, a situation that no document carries.

Nuances and limits

The archive remains indispensable: it's what you reopen when the current state is disputed or when you need to find proof. The current state doesn't replace it; it only spares you from rereading it to know where things stand.

Open questions

• In a group of volunteers with no hierarchy, who maintains the current state of a case when no role is responsible for it?