A shared memory for the patches people tend
Somebody notices something.
Twenty years later it still matters.
A patch is a piece of ground somebody looks after. Tendium gives it one record — every observation anyone has made there, and the answer each one got — so a place stops depending on one person's memory.
Running in Oak Bay, British Columbia. No account needed to add to a record.
Volunteer-led restoration runs on one leader's memory, a chat thread and a binder. When the leader burns out, the site's history goes with them — and the neighbour who walks past it every day has no way in that doesn't mean joining a committee.
What happens at the patch
- 01
A code in the ground
Print it, tie it to a stake or a gate. Scanning it opens this patch — what it is, what has been happening, and one thing that could be done.
- 02
Fifteen seconds
A photograph, a typed line, or a spoken note. No account, no sign-up, no dropdowns to fill in. Being structured is the record's job.
- 03
It answers, and it keeps
An identification with its confidence, grounded in this patch's own record — including what that same plant was doing the last time somebody looked. Both halves stay.
For whoever keeps the place
A desk, not a dashboard
One queue holding only what is actually waiting on you. The record beside the things it keeps returning to. Work you wrote down, the people you can reach, and the two pages a stranger sees.
- Work is closed by evidence — a photograph — never by ticking a box.
- The record asks you what it cannot settle, and your answer outranks it.
- It answers questions about your own record, and cites the entries.
- It drafts; you decide. Nothing goes out that you did not send.
Go and look at a real one
Midland Miyawaki Forest has thirty-seven observations on it, and all of them are somebody's.