Areas

What an area is

A named subdivision of a community that holds a set of decisions. Nothing more complicated than that — and its simplicity is the point.

communities/<community>/areas/<area>/
  area.yaml
  decisions/
    decision_1.yaml   decision_1.md
    decision_2.yaml   decision_2.md

Why the middle layer exists

Because a community is too coarse to aggregate over and a decision is too fine.

Two citizens in the same community may be working on entirely unrelated questions; pooling across all of it would produce an average of nothing. Two citizens working in the same area are looking at the same body of material — so their disagreement is meaningful, and so is their agreement.

Aggregation therefore happens at the area.

The cursor

Which community you are currently in is a cursor — per-user state, rendered as a dropdown at the top of the areas list.

It is deliberately not a navigation event and deliberately not part of the left bar. Switching communities should cost one click and no reorientation; making it a route would turn a lightweight context change into what feels like leaving the application.

Numbering

Decisions are numbered within their area. The number is stable — decision 4 stays decision 4 even if decision 3 is withdrawn — because a citation into an area's decision has to keep resolving.

Scope, and the layered libraries

The area is also a layer in the context assembly. When a decision is calculated, the engine walks:

Earth -> country -> state/province -> community -> AREA -> decision

An area can carry its own facts and its own metaphysics, applying to everything inside it and nothing outside. That is how a working group can establish shared background once instead of restating it in every chain.

Keys

Lowercase, underscored slugs, frozen at creation. Same rule as everywhere else in the product, for the same reason: identity must survive renaming.