User Guide

This guide covers everything you need to know about using Tending.

Signing in

Tending has no passwords. Enter your email on the sign-in page and Tending sends you a one-time link — click it and you're in. Each link works once and expires after 24 hours.

If a link has already been used or has expired (this can happen if your email provider opens it automatically to scan it), you'll see a message explaining that, with the option to request a fresh one straight away. If you followed a link to a specific page while signed out, signing in takes you back to that same page rather than dropping you at the homepage.

Organisations

Tending is organised around organisations — your team's shared workspace. When you first sign in, you'll create an organisation, which gives you a unique web address (like tending.network/your-org-name).

When creating an organisation, you can choose to start with a small set of example data — a person, a programme, and a few moments already in place — so there's something alive to explore straight away. A short guided tour then walks you through recording a moment, your dashboard, the Network view, and observations. At the end of the tour you choose whether to keep the example data and carry on adding to it, or clear it and start with a blank organisation. You can also clear example data at any time from Settings, and it never affects anything your team has added itself.

Members and roles

You can invite people to your organisation from Settings → Members. Each person is given a role:

Owner — full control, including billing
Admin — can manage members, delete connections/moments/spaces
Contributor — can add and edit connections and moments
Viewer — read-only access

An admin can also grant someone a specific extra permission without making them a full Admin — for example, letting a Contributor delete moments, or letting them manage members, without handing over every admin capability. This is useful when someone has a particular responsibility (like a safeguarding lead) that needs elevated access in one area only.

Switching organisations

If you belong to more than one organisation, click your organisation's name at the top of the sidebar to switch between them, or to create a new one.

Signing out

Click your name at the bottom of the sidebar to open the account menu, then choose Sign out.

Connections

A connection is the fundamental unit in Tending — not a "contact record," but the relationship between your organisation and a person, group, or other organisation. Each connection has:

A story — a living narrative built up from moments over time
Qualities — descriptors that capture how the relationship feels and functions (see Qualities below)
Stewardship — who inside your organisation actively holds the relationship
Data and provenance — where the relationship record came from, and any lawful-basis, consent or privacy notes your organisation needs to record
A position in your network — how it connects to everything else

You can create, view, edit, and delete connections from Relationships. Each connection has its own page showing its story, quality spectrums, stewardship, provenance and moment history.

On an individual relationship page, the narrative and recorded Moments lead; optional quality signals appear in an expandable section rather than before the story. Contact details, stewardship and provenance remain available.\n\nThe Relationships page opens as a compact, story-first list. Use With stories to see relationships with recorded Moments, or Stories to begin to find people and organisations without recorded Moments. Search by name, filter by type, sort by the last recorded Moment or name, and switch to the familiar card layout if you prefer. A missing Moment is not evidence of inactivity or poor relationship health. The list shows what Tending has actually recorded, not what it assumes is happening.

Relationship stewardship

Stewardship records who inside your organisation actively holds a relationship. A relationship can have more than one steward: this is deliberately not a CRM-style single "owner" field.

Tending can suggest likely stewards from moments that have already been kept as shared organisation data. For example, if most retained moments about a relationship were recorded by Rosa, Tending may suggest Rosa as a likely holder. If a retained moment originally came from a connected source such as Gmail or Calendar, that provenance can be shown as part of the evidence.

These are suggestions only. Pending connected-context suggestions remain private to the person who connected the source, and Tending never turns activity into confirmed stewardship automatically. A team member has to confirm or change stewardship explicitly.

Reviewing connected activity

Tending notices possible developments from sources you deliberately connect. Open Worth remembering? to review them. Suggestions remain private to you until you choose to keep a Moment.

When the evidence supports it, Tending offers a Suggested Moment in plain language. You can Remember it in one tap or Edit the wording first. Review the source evidence before keeping an important claim. If Tending only knows a meeting happened, it asks you what mattered rather than inventing an outcome. Voice capture remains available when editing or writing your own reflection.

Messages relating to the same development may appear together, with all contributing sources under See the sources behind this. Keeping a group records one Moment linked to the relevant relationships, not a separate Moment for each email. You can dismiss the group or choose These are different developments — review separately before acting. Related activity is grouped conservatively; it can miss a connection or occasionally place similar things together, so check before keeping.

To look for developments spanning separate email conversations, choose Find related developments. This runs an optional, bounded AI pass over short candidate summaries, rather than whole messages. Tending proposes a grouping and a concise Moment only when it finds a strong match. Review the supporting sources and split a group if the suggested connection is mistaken. This pass is not automatic and does not save or change any records by itself.

Tending also records small, content-free feedback indicators when you review a suggestion: whether you kept it unchanged, edited it, wrote it yourself or reviewed several sources together. No discarded draft or edit text is copied into learning telemetry. This lets us assess whether suggestions are becoming useful without making new inferences from one person's choices alone.

Nothing is saved to the shared relationship story without your confirmation. The underlying sources and pending suggestions remain your own private review material.

Field notes: fewer, more useful signals

Field notes now opens on Worth a look, showing only unresolved observations with enough evidence to be worth considering. Ordinary no-Moment-yet prompts, previously acted-on notes and dismissed notes stay available through All notes, Acted on and Dismissed. History is collapsed by default when you choose All notes, so it does not take over the page.

Related notes are grouped as Changes in relationships, Connections across the network and Gentle invitations. These are prompts for reflection, not tasks or judgements. A relationship with no recorded Moments is not marked dormant by the generator. It only offers a possible check-in when there is an earlier Moment to provide a baseline. An unresolved pattern is not created again during subsequent checks; after a note is dismissed or acted on, the same pattern rests for four months.

Nothing has been deleted from existing Field notes. Click Check for patterns to look for genuinely new ones. The Today's Field notes count uses the same Worth a look rules, so its totals agree with the page.

Moments

Relationships in moments kept from email

When you keep a proposed Moment from connected email, Tending now checks its final saved text for existing relationships using full-name matching, not just email participants. It links recognised existing people or organisations as part of the Moment. For names that are not already known, Tending can suggest a new connection for you to confirm, or let you link the name to an existing record. Nothing new is created without your explicit action.

Older saved email Moments can be checked individually with Find relationships mentioned in the River. It will look for full-name matches first and offer other named relationships for review. Tending never assumes that everyone named in an email has become a new relationship; when in doubt, leave the suggestion alone or choose Ignore.

Exploring linked pages (optional)

A Moment can contain a public HTTPS link. Select Explore this link to ask Tending to read just that page and offer a short summary, an editable proposed addition to the Moment, and up to six supported people or organisations. This is an explicit, user-triggered action: Tending does not fetch URLs automatically, follow redirects, or recursively crawl a website.

Check the original linked page before you accept the draft. You can choose Add note to this Moment to append your edited, source-attributed wording, or Discard suggestion to keep the Moment unchanged. The proposed note, extracted page text and rejected drafts are not saved. When you save, the Moment records the source URL and the fact you confirmed it. The relationship story updates after the edit.

Named people and organisations must have supporting words in the page. They are suggestions only: choose Link existing, Find existing, Add as new or Ignore to decide what belongs in your network. No contacts are created just because a page names them.

For safety, Tending reads public HTTPS pages only, without cookies or sign-in. It refuses internal/private network addresses, nonstandard ports, redirects, excessively large pages and non-text formats. Some websites block automated reading, so you may need to open the page normally instead. The page is untrusted third-party material, not instructions for Tending.

Links in Moments

Paste an https:// address in a Moment, or write [link label](https://example.org/page). The River will display safe clickable links and a small referenced-page chip using the domain and address path. The page itself is not automatically fetched, scraped or submitted for AI analysis. If you want to retain meaning from the linked page, describe that meaning in the Moment; adding a URL alone is not evidence of what the page says.

A moment is any interaction, observation, or event that becomes part of a connection's story — a conversation, an email, a meeting, a piece of news. Moments are written in natural language, not filled into rigid form fields.

You can either type a moment or speak it — tap the microphone in the composer, talk it through, and Tending transcribes what you said into the text box for you to review before saving.

As you type (or as your words are transcribed), Tending recognises the names of people, groups, and spaces you mention and shows them instantly as chips — no waiting required, since it's simply matching against who's already in your organisation. When you record a moment:

You can link it to one or more connections, either by accepting a recognised chip or adding one yourself.
You can set an event date if the moment happened at a specific point in time (rather than just "now").
An "Understand with AI" panel runs alongside and can catch fuzzier mentions the instant recognition misses, and suggest an event date. This is informational only — it never creates or links anything without you choosing to.

AI relationship observations

Admins can choose in Settings whether Tending should infer relationship qualities from saved moments. New organisations start with this switched off.

When enabled, Tending looks at saved moments and can suggest updates to the quality spectrums for connections involved. AI-suggested updates are marked with an "AI-suggested" badge, so you can distinguish them from qualities somebody set manually. The work happens in the background and never blocks or delays saving a moment.

Turning this setting off stops new AI quality inference. Existing qualities remain part of the relationship history unless they are otherwise removed.

Automatic story updates

For any connection with two or more moments, Tending also regenerates that connection's story summary after each new moment — a short, coherent narrative that reads like someone who knows the relationship telling you about it, not just a list of past entries. It carries tone and continuity forward from the previous summary, so the story evolves rather than resets each time.

Qualities

Qualities replace tags and categories. Rather than labelling a connection "donor" or "volunteer," Tending tracks how the relationship actually feels, across five spectrums:

Spectrum	Range
Depth	Deepening ↔ Cooling
Reciprocity	Reciprocal ↔ One-directional
Formality	Formal ↔ Trust-based
Activity	Active ↔ Dormant
Maturity	Emerging ↔ Established

Each connection's page shows its current position on each spectrum, along with a small history sparkline so you can see how it's shifted over time. Positions can be set manually and, when your organisation has enabled AI relationship observations, can also be suggested from moments.

The Network view

The Network area helps you understand not just who is connected to whom, but how resilient your organisation's relationships are. The graph is one lens on that picture rather than the whole product.

Relationship resilience

The Relationship resilience section combines confirmed stewardship with network structure to show where relationship knowledge is concentrated inside the organisation. It distinguishes several different situations:

Held by one person — a relationship has only one confirmed internal steward.
Shared across the team — two or more current organisation members hold the relationship.
No confirmed steward — the relationship may be active, but nobody has yet recorded who inside the organisation holds it.
Bridge relationship exposed — a structurally important relationship is both a strong bridge between parts of the external network and held by only one colleague.

The "What if someone left?" view shows the relationships that would become unheld if a particular team member left. It brings the relationship stories and recent activity into the same view so it can support a real handover, rather than just reporting a risk number. You can download a Markdown handover summary for that colleague from the same view.

Only confirmed stewardship is used to calculate dependency. Activity-based likely-holder suggestions are shown separately and never silently change the resilience calculation. Suggestions are derived only from retained/shared moments; private pending connected-context candidates are not read into organisation-wide resilience.

Threads

The Threads view shows your relational ecosystem as a living graph.

Zoom, pan, and drag nodes to explore.
Click a node to jump straight to that connection's page.
Hover over a node or connection line for a quick summary.
Filter by connection type, relationship strength, or to show only unconnected people.
Search and centre on a specific connection by name.

Connections that are frequently mentioned together in the same moments are automatically linked, and the strength of each link reflects accumulated shared evidence. Nodes and threads glow brighter for relationships that are freshly active, and fade for ones that have gone quiet, so vitality is visible at a glance across the whole network.

Clusters

Tending automatically detects clusters — tightly-connected groups within your network — and colours nodes accordingly, so you can see at a glance which parts of your ecosystem naturally group together.

Constellation view

For a bird's-eye alternative to the full network graph, switch to Constellation view. Instead of individual people and organisations, it shows each cluster as a single node — sized by how many connections it contains, and brightened by how active it's been recently — with arcs showing how clusters relate to one another. This is a useful way to read the shape of a large network without the detail of every individual node.

Spaces

Spaces let you group connections around a shared context — a project, an initiative, or an idea, rather than a person or organisation in its own right. Use spaces to tag which connections are involved in, say, a particular campaign or programme.

You can create spaces, assign connections to them, and filter your Connections and Moments views by space, from Settings → Spaces. The Spaces page gives you a browsable view of every space, each showing how many connections it holds and when it last had a moment recorded against it, so you can see where your threads are crossing.

Search

Use Search to find moments by their content, or connections by name. Search looks across the full text of everything you've recorded, not just titles or tags.

Observations

Tending periodically looks across your whole network for patterns you might not have noticed yourself, and surfaces them as gentle observations rather than alarms:

Dormant connections — relationships that have gone quiet for longer than usual
Quality shifts — a relationship that's meaningfully deepened or cooled
Network dependency / bridge risk — an external connection strongly links otherwise separate parts of the network

These structural network observations are different from organisational relationship dependency, which is based on confirmed internal stewardship and appears in Relationship resilience.

Observations are colour-coded by how much attention they deserve (gentle, noteworthy, or important), and shown on the Observations page and in the Attention section of your dashboard. For each one, you can:

Dismiss it, if it's not useful right now
Mark it as acted on, optionally noting what you did about it

Click "Check for patterns" on the Observations page at any time to generate a fresh check.

Tending's everyday destinations are Today, Relationships, Moments, Field notes and Network. On mobile they are always within reach in the bottom navigation bar (Relationships and Field notes have shorter labels, People and Notes). Search and capturing a Moment are available from the mobile header. The menu holds Worth remembering?, Search, Spaces, and Settings. On desktop, search and review are quieter tools beneath the five main destinations; Settings lives in the account menu.

Today shows practical next steps before the network visualisation: suggestions from connected conversations awaiting your decision, unresolved observations, and upcoming follow-ups. Each count opens the relevant existing screen. You can record a Moment or add/import a relationship immediately. Upcoming reminders are still visible and can be cancelled. Lower down, the living network and recent Moments are still available.

Worth remembering? remains the place to decide which source-backed suggestions become Moments. It is part of the Today journey, not a separate pillar of the product. Spaces remain accessible from Network. No routes or data have been removed by this navigation change.

River view

The Moments page (sometimes called the River view) shows every moment recorded across your organisation as a chronological stream, with the author of each one shown alongside it. You can filter by space, author, connection type, or a date range to narrow the stream down to exactly what you're looking for.

Billing

Tending has one plan: £5 a month with everything included, after a 30-day free trial that needs no card to start. Manage your subscription and view invoices from Settings → Billing.

You'll get a reminder email a week before your trial ends, and another the day before (or that same morning, if it's ending later today). If a trial runs out without a subscription, your organisation becomes read-only — you can still sign in, view everything, and reach Settings and Billing to subscribe, but adding or editing connections and moments is paused until you do. Your subscription is only confirmed once payment has actually gone through, and you'll get a confirmation email at that point.