Glossary

Terms used throughout this site, with brief definitions calibrated to the level of background a typical reader will need.

Product vocabulary

Board : A time-boxed advisory engagement: an enterprise client commissions a question, a panel of 8–15 industry experts discusses it asynchronously over several weeks, and Currnt analysts produce a deliverable. The core product unit.

Sprint : A shorter board format (one week, smaller panel). Stored in the same data model as a board, distinguished by a duration flag.

Brief : The document the client provides at the start of a board, describing the question, target expert profile, and deliverable expectations.

Deliverable : The final report produced from a closed board. Written by an analyst, includes synthesis plus direct expert quotes.

Expert : A board participant in the expert role. Compensated per board.

Sponsor / Client : The enterprise customer who commissioned the board. Has access to the board through the corporate portal.

Member : A user account that is neither expert nor staff nor client — typically an interested visitor who signed up.

Engagement marketplace : A defunct self-service flow where experts could browse open briefs and self-apply. Replaced by curated invitation; schema preserved.

Operational vocabulary

Treehouse : Currnt’s internal back-office. 33 controllers, 8 functional pillars. Where every staff workflow happens. Not user-facing.

Pillar : One of eight functional groupings inside Treehouse (Prospects, Outreach, Boards, Content, Members, Operations, Analytics, System). A cluster of controllers + views + jobs.

SDR : Sales Development Representative. The Treehouse user role most likely to be opening Prospects and Outreach pages.

Campaign : One outbound outreach blast: a saved prospect segment + an email template + a schedule. Lives in the CRM engine.

Segment : A saved filter over the prospects table, used for outreach targeting.

Smash : Internal nickname for the fleet of LinkedIn-scraping workers used to enrich prospects with employer, title, and seniority signals.

Infrastructure vocabulary

dispenserd : Currnt’s homegrown HTTP-poll queue. 5 lanes, 13 worker processes, 19 handlers. See /architecture/dispenserd.

Lane : A priority class in dispenserd. Each handler is bound to a lane. Workers are configured per-lane.

Handler : A function in the 4,591-line worker entrypoint that processes one type of dispenserd job.

Worker (in this codebase) : One of 13 long-running Node processes managed by Supervisord, draining dispenserd lanes. Each one runs the same code; lane configuration distinguishes their workload.

Cron job : One of 62 scheduled entries on the application host’s crontab. Most enqueue dispenserd jobs; a few run inline.

SMTP rotation : The pool of email-sending accounts (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, others) used to send outreach without burning any single account’s reputation. Managed via a dispatcher inside the send_outreach handler.

AI co-facilitator : The cron-driven OpenAI process that drafts and posts promotional content into boards every five minutes under a single privileged author account. See /features/ai-cofacilitator.

Tech-stack shorthand

Sails / SailsJS : The Node.js MVC framework Currnt is built on (version 0.12.x, released 2016). Provides routing, ORM-ish models, sessions, sockets.

Twig : The PHP-derived template engine Sails uses for HTML rendering. Most Currnt views are .swig (the older Sails twig variant) or similar.

PM2 : A Node process manager. The Currnt app runs as a 5-worker PM2 cluster on the application host.

Supervisord : A general-purpose process supervisor used for the worker fleet. Restarts workers on crash, tails their logs.

Pagefind : The static-site search engine used on this archive site (not by Currnt itself).