Dashboard Structure
A closer look at each area in the Referenta sidebar — what you'll find there and what it's designed to help you do.
The sidebar groups Referenta into five areas. This page walks through each one so you know what's behind the names.
Assistant
What it is: Your AI conversation partner.
What it's for: Anything that benefits from back-and-forth — drafting a press release, working through a tricky argument, asking "summarize this for me", or improving a paragraph someone else wrote.
How it works in practice: When you open Assistant, the dashboard puts you straight into a conversation. You can keep working in the same conversation across days; everything you've said and any files you've added stay available. When you start a clearly different task, open a new conversation so the AI doesn't get confused by older context.
If you've used ChatGPT, this will feel familiar — but it's tuned for political and policy work, and it can pull in material from elsewhere in Referenta.
Tools
What it is: A set of focused workspaces, each built for one specific kind of task.
What it's for: Jobs where you already know the shape of what you need — for example, "clean up this transcript", "compare these two pieces of legislation", "transcribe this recording".
Why it's separate from the Assistant: The Assistant is flexible but blank — you have to describe what you want. A Tool is the opposite: the workspace is already shaped around one job, so there are fewer decisions to make. You'll move faster in a Tool whenever the task is repetitive or has a clear input and output.
The Tools area currently includes Text Processing, Argumentation & Analysis, Legal Documents, and Transcription. See Tools for what each one does.
Analysis & Research
What it is: The research half of Referenta. Three workspaces sit here:
- Knowledgebase — a searchable library of documents (parliamentary records, policy papers, and more). You'll come here to find source material.
- Research — a working area for an active investigation. Use it when you're collecting and reviewing material around a specific question over time.
- Press Monitor — a live view of media coverage with a feed, a filter sidebar, and a ticker for fast-moving news.
What it's for: Anything where the answer depends on evidence — finding the right document, scanning what the press is saying, gathering source material before you write.
A good rule: if your task starts with "find", "what's being said about", or "compare to existing material", start here.
Outreach
What it is: Your contact and communications hub.
Contactbase is where your contact records live — journalists, stakeholders, partners, anyone you communicate with. You can search and filter to pull up exactly the people you need.
Distribution Lists sit on top of Contactbase. They're saved groups of recipients so you don't have to rebuild the same audience every time you send something.
What it's for: Anything that ends with "and then send it to". Press lists, stakeholder updates, partner briefings.
Organization
What it is: The admin area. This is where account-level settings live, not work tasks.
You'll come here to:
- invite a teammate or remove access,
- check or change the organization name,
- look up help and FAQs.
Day-to-day users rarely open this section. Admins and managers use it when onboarding, troubleshooting, or adjusting team setup.
One More Rule Of Thumb
If you're not sure where to start, ask yourself what verb best describes the task:
- Draft, write, ask, explore → Assistant
- Process, compare, transcribe → Tools
- Find, monitor, gather → Analysis & Research
- Send, group, contact → Outreach
- Invite, configure, update settings → Organization
That maps almost every task onto a starting point.