# The Participant Folder

A mentored programme works because the participant feels known. The mentor remembers
what they set out to do, notices when the same thing happens again, and asks about the
promise they made last week. AI feedback on its own is the opposite: every hand-in is
rated as if it were the first.

The participant folder fixes that. Each participant gets a folder of short, sourced facts
about them: their goals, the patterns in their work, their commitments, their context,
and your own notes. The AI reads the folder before it rates a hand-in and updates it
afterwards. You and your staff curate it on the page you already use for that student,
and the participant can read all of it. By week nine the feedback can say "you held
the silence you couldn't hold in week one", because the folder remembers week one.

## Concepts

A **participant folder** is everything the programme knows about one student on one
site: their live **folder facts**, plus their raw history of hand-ins, AI ratings,
transcripts and material. A folder belongs to one site and one participant. It is never
shared with another site, and it is erased when the participant's account is.

A **folder fact** is one durable statement you can trace back to its source. It has a
type, a short name, a one-line description and a body. It also records its **provenance**:
the hand-in, material or staff member it came from. There are five types:

- **Goal**: what the participant is trying to achieve.
- **Pattern**: something that keeps happening in their work.
- **Commitment**: something they said they would do.
- **Context**: their situation, such as their job, tools and constraints.
- **Mentor note**: something you or your staff want the programme to keep in mind.
  Only staff write mentor notes; the AI never does.

Facts are never deleted. **Editing** a fact writes a new version that replaces the old
one. **Retiring** a fact takes it out of the live folder but keeps it. Both old versions
and retired facts stay in a collapsed "Retired facts" section, which shows what replaced
each one, who replaced or retired it, and when.

**Folder material** is anything you add to a folder on the participant's behalf: notes
from a mentor call, a question they asked in a webinar, a work conversation, their
intake answers. You give it a label and either paste text or upload an audio or video
recording. A recording is first transcribed from your site's transcription minutes. The
AI then reads the material once and proposes facts from it; material is never scored.
The difference from a hand-in is who adds it: the participant hands in their own
work, and staff add material.

The **rater** is the AI that rates hand-ins for an assignment with a rating prompt.
With the folder, it works like this:

1. **Before rating**, it receives the participant's live facts and their three most
   recent items of history, next to your rating prompt and the hand-in itself. Facts
   are always included. If the history is too long, the oldest items are dropped until
   it fits.
2. **After rating**, its answer has two parts: the feedback the participant sees, as
   before, and a list of changes to the folder (add, update or retire a fact). Each
   change points back to the hand-in it came from.

Changes apply at once, with no approval queue. You curate afterwards rather than
approving in advance. If a change can't be understood, it is skipped and logged, and the
participant still gets their feedback. Rating a hand-in is still one AI request.

**Nothing in a folder is hidden from its participant.** They can read every live fact
and where it came from on their own "Your folder" page, but they can't change anything
there. Disputes come to you. If you don't want a participant to read something, don't
put it in their folder.

## Hands-on

The walkthroughs follow Mira. She has turned her flagship course into a mentored
cohort, "Automate Your Week — Coaching Cohort", where participants hand in a short
reflection every week. One of them is Ingrid, an office manager at a small accounting
firm. Ingrid wants her Friday client-hours report to take thirty minutes instead of three
hours.

Mira normally runs her site by talking to her AI assistant, but the folder has **no MCP
tools yet**. Curating a folder, adding material and reading a folder all happen in the
admin UI, and the walkthroughs below use it. The AI's part runs on its own: the
rater and the material reader work in the background whichever way the hand-in or
material arrived.

### Give a programme a memory

The folder starts working for any assignment that has a **rating prompt**, because that
is the assignment the rater runs on. Mira's cohort has one assignment, "Weekly
reflection". She sets it up under **Courses → the course → Assignments → New
assignment** with this rating prompt:

> You are the coach in "Automate Your Week", a mentored programme where non-programmers
> learn to automate their weekly work with spreadsheets and AI tools. The participant
> hands in a weekly reflection. Give warm, specific, honest feedback in at most 180
> words. Name one thing that went well and one concrete thing to try next week. Build
> on what you know about the participant from earlier weeks, and hold them to what they
> said they would do.

Your prompt doesn't need to explain the folder. The platform adds the folder to the
request and asks for the list of changes itself. Write the prompt about the coaching
you want, and ask it to build on what it knows. Then publish the assignment.

### Start a folder from the intake

Before the first hand-in, Mira gives each participant a starting point. She opens
**Students → Ingrid Berg**, scrolls to **Folder** and uses **Add a fact** for what
Ingrid's intake form told her:

- a **Goal**, "Weekly report in under 30 minutes", with the details of the Friday routine
  in the body;
- a **Context** fact, "Office manager at a 12-person accounting firm", recording that
  she uses Google Sheets daily and has no programming background.

Facts Mira types show "Added by Mira Lund" and read "From: your mentor" on Ingrid's page.
Adding, editing and retiring facts needs the **student-management** privilege, the same
one that reviewing submissions needs.

### Add what you learned on a call

After the kick-off call, Mira doesn't turn her notes into facts by hand. Under
**Material → Add material** she picks the label **Mentor call**, pastes her notes and
clicks **Add material**. The material shows "Waiting to be read" for a few seconds,
then "Read". From her notes the AI added three facts, each marked "Added by the rater"
and showing "From: Mentor call" as its source:

- **Context**: the hours come from a Harvest CSV export that Ingrid retypes because the
  columns are in the wrong order;
- **Pattern**: "Tends to start too big". She wanted to automate invoicing, the report
  and onboarding all in week one;
- **Commitment**: "Week 1: Build Harvest-importing Google Sheet", working on a copy of
  the partners' template.

![A fact the AI read from Mira's mentor-call notes, with "From: Mentor call" as its source](https://omumu.com/manual/images/folder-fact-from-material.png){width=100%}

For a recording, upload it under **Upload a recording** instead of pasting text. It is
transcribed first ("Being transcribed", then "Transcribed") and read after that. The
minutes come from your site's transcription pool. If the recording can't be transcribed,
the material says why: the month's minutes are used up, the recording is too long, or
transcription isn't part of your plan. Once the reason is fixed, **Retry transcription**
runs it again.

### Watch a hand-in use the folder

Ingrid hands in her week 1 reflection. The sheet works: Friday now takes 70 minutes
instead of three hours. She also admits she lost Wednesday afternoon building an
invoice tab "because the data was right there". The rater reads her folder before it
answers, and the feedback shows it:

> Ingrid, this is real progress: INDEX/MATCH auto-reordering the columns turned three
> hours into 70 minutes, and you did it on a safe copy just as planned … On the
> invoicing detour: you caught yourself and named it honestly … a reminder of why we
> scoped down to one project. Before adding a client summary next week, I'd like you to
> first tackle the client-name mismatch … That's the last mile of this goal.

It then updated the folder. It recorded the week 1 commitment as done, updated the
"Tends to start too big" pattern with the invoicing detour, and added a new commitment
for week 2. In the admin panel each of those facts has a **Source** link back to the
hand-in.

### Keep the folder right

The AI's changes apply without your approval, so curating afterwards is your job. Mira
does three things on Ingrid's folder:

- **Edit.** A fact can be nearly right, or worded in a way Mira wouldn't put it to
  Ingrid, who reads her whole folder. Mira opens **Edit**, rewrites the body and saves.
  The edit creates a new version, and the old one moves to **Retired facts** marked
  "Replaced by Tends to start too big · edited by Mira Lund" with the date and time.
  When the rater updates a fact after a hand-in or a material read, the old version
  reads "updated by the rater" instead, so her own edits are easy to tell from the AI's.
- **Retire.** The week 1 commitment is done, so she clicks **Retire**. It leaves the live
  folder at once and stops shaping feedback. It stays under **Retired facts** as "Retired
  by Mira Lund" with the date and time.
- **Add a mentor note.** She adds a **Mentor note**, "Motivated by getting her Friday
  back", so the next rating frames Ingrid's next step in minutes saved.

![The rater's version of "Tends to start too big" under Retired facts, replaced by Mira's edit](https://omumu.com/manual/images/folder-fact-replaced-by-staff.png){width=100%}

### What your participant sees

Ingrid finds **Your folder** at the top of her course list. The page shows her live
facts grouped as Goals, Patterns, Commitments, Context and Mentor notes. Each fact shows
when it was added and where it came from ("From: your mentor", "From: Mentor call", or a
link to the hand-in). Her history is listed below: her hand-ins, linked, and the
material Mira added, with its text behind **Show text**. The page has no buttons and no
forms. If Ingrid disagrees with something, she takes it up with Mira.

### Things to know

- **Every fact is visible to the participant**, including those the AI writes. The AI is
  told this and writes plain statements of what was said, done or agreed, but it is
  still worth reading its facts and editing any whose wording you wouldn't use yourself.
- **The rater never writes mentor notes.** Only staff can.
- **The folder is not shared across sites.** A participant who takes a programme on
  another Omumu site starts with an empty folder there.
- **The cost is small and visible.** Each rating or material read is one AI request. Its
  input and output tokens are recorded in the outcome log with the result.

## Reference

No MCP tools cover this chapter's capabilities yet.