Conversation is not disposable merely because it arrived one message at a time.
Chat became an accidental project record
Groups make decisions, exchange files, assign work and explain trade-offs in conversation. The final artefact usually moves elsewhere, while the reasoning remains in a scroll that becomes harder to recover with every passing week.
Structure without losing the source
The research concept is a shared space where a message can become a source-linked decision, task or note. Retrieval should lead back to the original evidence instead of presenting a detached summary as unquestionable truth.
Recovery is a workflow concern
People should understand what survives device loss before anything goes wrong. Recovery choices should be visible, testable and discussed alongside everyday coordination rather than hidden as an emergency setting.
Privacy must be specific
Interviews will ask what information a group refuses to place in current tools, what other services inevitably learn, and which trust assumptions would block adoption. Broad labels are less useful than measured behaviour and clear limitations.
Interviews come first
We are not asking participants to approve this concept. We are asking them to show how a recent project actually moved across tools, where context failed, and what has stopped the group from changing its workflow.