Suggest edit — Canonical Terms — glossary

Title

Name

Note

---
title: Canonical Terms — glossary
type: concept
visibility: public
related:
  - wiki/north-star-thesis.md
  - wiki/chronology.md
---

# Canonical Terms

A working glossary. The point is to reduce metaphor sprawl by *acknowledging* that different words mean different things even when they gesture at the same region.

## Object-level

- **IdeaFlow** — the company and the product family. Public-facing name.
- **Mew / Mew Lite / Mew Edge** — internal/experimental product names for the graph product.
- **Thoughtstream** — the voice-first capture product (develop.ideaflow.app; stage-api.ideaflow.app).
- **Entanglement** — earlier-generation prototype (2023-2024) that informed the graph UX.
- **Gopher backbone / GraphMirror** — speculative names for the graph-editor primitive, framed as a cross-app substrate.

## Data-model terms

- **Node** — the atom. Can be text, a tag, a person, a place, a page.
- **Relation / edge** — a typed connection between nodes.
- **Graph** — the union.
- **Zone / active zone** — a node with sublist-inheritance semantics; stands for "context you've focused on right now."
- **Gestalt** — a cluster of nodes that coheres into a single recognizable pattern. Predates Mew; see http://gestaltexplanation.jacobcole.net/.
- **Spark (of motivation)** — the atomic unit of intent. See [[framings/sparks-of-motivation]].
- **God data structure** — Jacob's maximalist framing for the graph: one structure capable of representing everything in the world, including Google Maps paths, category theory, etc.

## Cognition terms

- **Capture** — getting a thought out of your head and into the system.
- **Recall** — getting a thought back into working memory when you need it.
- **O(1) capture and recall** — Cody's shorthand for the product-level requirement: both operations should feel costless.
- **Cluster** — finding the attractor under a bunch of related sparks.
- **Augment** — the Engelbart word. Substrate + human > substrate alone or human alone.
- **Suggestion / surfacing** — the substrate proactively showing you something relevant you'd otherwise miss.

## Scale terms

- **Personal cognition** — individual-layer applications. See [[layers/personal-cognition]].
- **Team cognition** — organization-layer. See [[layers/team-cognition]].
- **Collective cognition / Humanity 3.0** — civilization layer. See [[layers/collective-cognition]].
- **Team Humanity** — the conceit that humanity is one multi-tiered organization with OKRs; IdeaFlow is the tool that makes it legible. See [[framings/team-humanity]].
- **World Quest** — the World-of-Warcraft framing for civilization-scale coordination; inherited from Jacob's mentor Jack Park. See [vision-convo → jack-park](https://wikihub.md/@jacobcole/vision-convo/wiki/entities/jack-park).

## Vocabulary inherited from elsewhere

- **Bicycle for the mind** — Steve Jobs' Engelbart-style frame, claimed verbatim.
- **Medium for thought** — Joe Henke's framing (January 2024); widely adopted as house vocabulary.
- **Memex** — Vannevar Bush (1945). Repeatedly invoked.
- **Open Supply Chains** — one example application of the "open-source KGs" movement. See [[framings/open-source-knowledge-graphs]].

## Deprecated / retired

- **"The idea-capture app — never lose another idea again"** (2023 marketing) — superseded by cognition-layer framing.
- **Mew** (product name) — used internally; the public name is now IdeaFlow.

## Rules for adding to this glossary

1. A term enters here when it appears **three or more times** in the `#explainingideaflow` corpus, or when it's load-bearing in a pitch.
2. Each entry gets: a one-liner definition, the origin/coiner when known, and a pointer to the framing page if it has one.
3. Terms that retire move to "Deprecated / retired" rather than being deleted — past essays still reference them.