Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
Organizational memory that keeps, alongside the facts, what those facts taught — the links, the decisions, the sources retained and the limits — in a form that is legible, inspectable, modifiable and reusable.
Full definition
The word "memory" ordinarily designates a stock: what has been recorded and can be brought out again. Used that way, it blurs into the archive, and its quality is measured by what it finds again.
In the articles on this blog, the adjective "active" separates two functions. A passive memory answers the question asked; an active memory improves the quality of the following questions, because it has kept not only the document but the decision, not only the source but the link, not only the information but what makes it reusable.
Three traits delimit it. It is portable — rereadable by a human, resumable by another assistant, movable outside the tool that produced it. It is governed — you know what prevails, what is dated, what is out of scope. And it is maintained — someone brings material to it, corrects interpretations in it and decides what deserves keeping.
Usage in the field
Used to name what an information system's centre of gravity shifts towards, and to distinguish a trace of usage from capital genuinely built up.
Synonyms and variants
"working memory" when the emphasis falls on what serves the work in hand; "capital" when it falls on what remains to the organization.
Not to be confused with
- Context — a durable workspace gathering, around a goal, sources, notes, decisions and drafts. Active memory is what a network of contexts constitutes at the scale of an organization; the context is its unit.
- Session memory — a written trace, kept over the course of exchanges, of what was done, decided and left pending, meant to be reloaded. It records an unfolding; active memory keeps what is retained from it.
- archive — the preservation of documents for evidentiary or legal purposes. It aims at the integrity of what was produced, with no requirement of reuse.
- conversation history — a sequence of exchanges held in an interface. It depends on the tool, the subscription and remembering where you talked about what.
Examples
A customer context linking tickets, history, usage, risks and commitments: the objects existed in the tools, what is new is the link and what it makes it possible to understand.
Ambiguities / debates
The word "memory" is used in the same context to designate three different things — what a model retains, what a tool stores on the machine, and what an organization keeps as capital. That is the reason this entry exists.