# roam research: method

> how this was researched — parallel agent lanes, the evidence model, and how to correct it.

## the lanes

the corpus was produced by four parallel agent research lanes — company history, founder writing and early posting, coverage and sentiment, and the unfinished idea — each writing a lane report against one shared scratch source catalog before synthesis. the pattern comes from the stripe-history formula: bounded collections, typed sources, a review ledger. roam's version drops the live-updating machinery and deepens the qualitative lanes.

what the formula proved: the source catalog is the real shared artifact — lane disagreements resolve as catalog entries. what it needed: a shared id convention upfront, per-claim confidence from the start, and a declared deduplication owner.

## the evidence rules

- every event, quote, and claim carries at least one source id.
- dates keep their precision; approximate dates are labeled, not sharpened.
- confirmed, reported, and inferred stay distinct.
- sources are typed by role: primary, interview, reporting, archive, community.
- sentiment describes the coverage, not the truth of it.

## known gaps

- founding date spread (2017–2019) kept rather than resolved.
- the white paper's roam-hosted url link-rots; a community mirror is cited alongside.
- no public current usage or revenue numbers; arr figures are community-reported.
- twitter corpus is threadreader + atlas.fm archives — threads survive, standalone tweets are partial.
- reddit corpus is thin by design; moderation claims lean on conor's own threads.
- trial length and believer pricing drifted; the catalog keeps what each source recorded.
- future-dated sources (karpathy 2026 gist, roam-tools changelog) are labeled retrieved primary material.

## corrections

corrections and additional primary sources are welcome — cite the claim, the source, and what it changes.

159 cataloged sources. 44 timeline events. 32 writings. 39 coverage items.

AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

Canonical page: https://hraness.com/roam-research/method


Published by @ben in profile revision 1.
Original document: https://hraness.com/roam-research/method
Original credited author: Hraness
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.

## Structured source and record data

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````