Kept by incident.synthetic@web-summit.dinis, 2026-11-11, 09:54 UTC

Invented person; not user research; never quote as a real reader.

Persona exec: Hanne Vogel (invented), head of digital product at a regional German publishing group. Laptop 1440 x 900 (fold 900 px), 8 minutes between meetings. Forwarded by her editor-in-chief: "could we do this for our floods?" Walked with Do Not Track and GPC on, 09:53 to 09:54 UTC, site v0.1.780 to v0.1.782.

Path

1. / (Weather, 5,757 px tall). Saw the red "RED IPMA warning in force in Lisbon now" block (162 px), the "Not a warning service" bar (57 px), the hour-by-hour grid (478 px). Nothing above the fold says what the site is or who makes it. 25 s, did not scroll past ~1,000 px.
2. About -> /BRIEF.html (9,279 px). Expected an "About us"; got Dinis's dated instructions to his agents ("this should look like CNN", "OpenRouter", "Silvio's router idea"). Read the top 1,700 px. 20 s.
3. Help -> /help/index.html (1,073 px). Table "If you want to / read": picked "What this site is" (497 px). 15 s.
4. /help/what-this-is.html. The first real answer: a record of Storm Charles, built by software agents with a named human operator; not a warning service; two faces; markdown twins and JSON. 25 s.
5. Team -> /agents/index.html (6,414 px). Top: "69 pushes, 54 deployed, 37 s median", "32 agents", then "What Dinis can unblock: 40 things" (295 px): #1 model provider out of credit, #2 "Web Summit's terms forbid automated reading and archiving of its sites", #4 sites whose terms forbid automated reading, #6 "Are we within IPMA's terms on launch day?". 25 s.
6. Help -> How to cite us /help/cite.html (1,435 px). Licences at 1,009 px: data and code Apache-2.0; quoted material keeps its owner's terms; "The pages do not yet state a content licence of their own; that is a known gap". 20 s.
7. Team -> Accounts /accounts/index.html (6,105 px). "What this project costs" (271 px): model spend 1.06 of a 20 USD daily cap; provider account out of credit since 02:55 UTC; 1.92 billion tokens, "Tokens are not converted to money". 25 s.
8. Data room /data-room/index.html (10,373 px). Headline on the Web Summit decision with DECISION · FACT label and source time (197 px). Sub-nav of 11 items (Dashboard, Query, Graph, Ontology, Lead times...). 15 s.
9. Team -> Contribute /contribute.html (4,649 px). 19 open tasks first (199 px); "Three ways in" at 2,623 px: GitHub issue or pull request; "What we check before it goes in" (3,036 px): primary source, both sides shown, merged by agents, main only by Dinis. 20 s.
10. Studio /studio/index.html (2,004 px). Six animated explanations; "How a fact gets onto this site, about 3 min" looked useful, but no time to watch. H1 "Studio" sits at 868 px, under the cards. 15 s.

About 205 s of reading plus clicks; stopped there for her next meeting.

In 10 seconds

"A very serious-looking storm dashboard for Lisbon, with official warning colours." She did not understand that it is a demo of an AI-agent newsroom, or that it is meant as a template.

In 1 minute

Only after About (raw brief) and Help -> What this site is: an experiment by one named person running a team of AI coding agents that collects official decisions and warnings with sources and times, publishes them as pages and JSON, and labels fact, evidence and hypothesis.

Three things she looked for

Lost or misled

• "About" opens Dinis's working brief, not an about page: insider names, tools and orders. She read it as "internal notes published by mistake".
• The Team page shows, in public and near the top, that the team itself doubts it is within Web Summit's and IPMA's terms. For a legal-minded publisher this reads as a red flag, not as transparency.
• Team item 7 asks "Are GitHub issues open on the repository, and who triages them?", while Contribute tells readers to open an issue. She could not tell whether that route works.
• Accounts says the model provider has been out of credit since 02:55 UTC; she wondered whether the site is still being updated (the header said LIVE and the version kept changing, so it seems so).

Words she did not understand

IPMA, ANEPC, METAR (on /), "two faces", "markdown twin", sha256, "conductor", "vault", "cache reads", "weighted tokens", "superseded", "fractal" (Studio), "Panel", "Labs", "Ontology", "Lead times".

What would make her act

She would forward /help/what-this-is.html to her editor-in-chief with "interesting, not ready". She would take a call or a pilot only with: a one-page "for newsrooms" pitch (what you get, who runs it, what it costs, how to start for your own incident), a stated AI and editorial policy, a content licence, and a named contact route other than GitHub.

Score

2 / 5: the rigour (sources, times, labels, corrections) is what her newsroom wants, but nothing speaks to a publisher, and the most visible risk signals (terms doubts, no content licence) come before any offer.

Findings

1. blocking: No page answers "could my newsroom use this?". Where: no link from /, About or Help; "template for the next incident" (the project's own aim) appears nowhere on 10 pages walked. Change: a short "For newsrooms" page linked from / and About: what it is, what you get (pages, JSON API, timeline), who runs it, what it costs, how to start for your own event.
2. costly: "About" goes to the raw brief. Where: /BRIEF.html, 9,279 px of dated instructions; the plain answer is 2 clicks away at /help/what-this-is.html. Change: point About at a plain about page (what-this-is), with the brief one link below it.
3. costly: / gives no clue what the site is. Where: /, above the 900 px fold only the warning, the disclaimer bar and the hour grid; no line naming the project, the agents or the operator. Change: one line under the masthead: "A record of Storm Charles, built by AI agents for Dinis Cruz. What this is."
4. costly: Legal doubts are the first thing a visitor reads on Team. Where: /agents/index.html, "What Dinis can unblock" at 295 px, items 2, 4 and 6 (terms of Web Summit, other sites, IPMA). Change: keep them public, but put the team's status board below a short explainer, and state the current answer (holding, link only) beside each.
5. costly: No stated AI or editorial policy. Where: footers say "Claude Code agents"; human review is only described inside /contribute.html at 3,036 px. Change: a Help page "How AI is used here": which tasks agents do, what a person checks, which models are called and logged, and where mistakes are corrected.
6. costly: No content licence. Where: /help/cite.html at 1,009 px, "a known gap". Change: state one (for example CC BY for our pages) or say plainly that reuse needs permission.
7. minor: Contradiction on the contact route. Where: /contribute.html 2,623 px says open an issue; /agents/ item 7 asks whether issues are open. Change: confirm and say so on both pages.
8. minor: Cost shown only as tokens. Where: /accounts/, "Tokens are not converted to money". Change: an estimated monthly cost line, labelled estimated, for a buyer.
9. minor: Studio's title sits below its cards. Where: /studio/index.html, H1 at 868 px. Change: put the H1 and one line of purpose above the cards.
10. held: Team page requests api.github.com (external_hosts on /agents/). Not her concern; noted for the team against the outside-requests rule.