What it does
Atlas answers questions from a closed archive of written discussion. It quotes what it drew on and points at where each answer came from, so you can check it rather than take its word.
It is not a search engine or a chatbot for general use.
How it works
Four stages, each one auditable on its own.
- Export Content comes out of the tools a group already uses, on their own credentials. Nothing is scraped.
- Strip Names and identifying detail are replaced with pseudonyms before anything moves. A human reviews the result; the gate does not open automatically.
- Index The text is chunked and indexed for retrieval on hardware the group controls.
- Answer Questions are answered from retrieved passages, with sources attached. Questions that would assemble a profile of a person are declined by design.
Where things stay
The archive sits in the EU on an encrypted volume. Names are stripped before the text ever reaches that server, and the original copy never leaves the machine it was prepared on. Reaching Atlas at all requires membership of a private organisation.
This page runs no analytics, sets no cookies, and loads nothing from anywhere else. Even the typefaces are served from the same machine as the page.
Where this is going
A cohort's Slack was the beginning, not the point. The same method holds wherever a group's thinking already lives, and the strongest version of Atlas is the one you run, over your own archive, on your own hardware.
- LiveSlack: channels and threads, incremental, on a user's own token.
- ScopedCanvas LMS: coursework, discussions and materials over its published API.
- ScopedExported chat histories, including WhatsApp, from the exports people make themselves.
Automated scraping of messaging platforms was ruled out on principle, not on difficulty. It is the group's export, made deliberately, or nothing. That constraint is what makes the rest defensible.
The method travels. The content never does. Every group builds its own archive and no group's material reaches another's.
Access
By invitation only. Members sign in with a GitHub account belonging to the private organisation this instance runs on.
Who built this
Most of his career has been spent on payments platforms, where systems are built to account for what they did and why, and auditability is designed in rather than added afterwards. Atlas started from the same instinct applied to a group's own writing: build something that shows its working, and that holds as little as it can. It begins with one cohort at one school, but the shape is meant to repeat: a vault per programme, each holding only its own material, where what travels between them is the method and never the content.