Study note
Portal engagement audit
A five-week observation of one portal, bound as a visual ledger of dwell, skip, and return, then read aloud with the people who keep the page.
Who this study is for
The audit is for the person who already keeps a portal and is tired of arguing about it in the abstract. That person is often a municipal clerk, a library steward, a membership secretary, or the colleague who inherited a staff notice board when the paper sheet came down from the lobby. They need a record of how readers actually behave — where they linger, which forms they abandon, whether they come back the next morning — so a committee can decide what to rewrite, what to leave, and what to stop lighting after six.
It is not for a founder looking to “roll something out.” It is not a way to buy counting machinery. If you do not have a portal in use, we have nothing to watch.
What you receive
A bound engagement ledger for one named portal. The ledger holds:
- chart plates of dwell, skip, and return across the observation window
- a written commentary that names the rooms, hours, and notices we actually saw
- a reading session (in person at Level 9, 51 Rustaveli Avenue, Kutaisi 4600, or by a scheduled call if the steward cannot travel)
The result is a folio you can set on a table. People can disagree with it; they cannot claim nobody looked.
Scope
One portal, one observation window, one language of commentary (English on this site’s work; Georgian commentary is arranged in the intake if the committee reads only Georgian). “Portal” here means a bounded set of pages people already use: a forms hall screen, a catalogue, a member list, a staff board. We do not audit “the whole internet presence of the city.”
If the portal has more than a handful of sections, we agree in writing which sections sit inside the window. Extra sections are extra plates, priced after we have seen the tree of pages.
Included
- an intake conversation to name the portal, the readers, and the question the committee is actually fighting about
- a planned observation window (usually ten working days of attention, inside a five-week span)
- floor time at a public counter in Imereti when the portal is used there, or a remote walk-through if there is no counter
- drawing of the plates and a first commentary draft
- one round of factual correction from the steward (wrong opening hours, misnamed department)
- binding of a small run of copies for the committee
- a two-hour reading of the plates
Excluded
- building, hosting, or repairing the portal itself
- installing counting software as a product, or licensing anything by the month
- watching personal mail, passwords, or anything that would identify a private person in a plate
- translating the whole portal
- a second observation window (that is the repeat tracking review)
- travel beyond Imereti unless quoted
Who does the work
Portal Layergrid Analytics, from the Kutaisi desk. Giorgi Tskitishvili runs the observation week. Nino Beridze draws the plates. Elene Maisuradze writes the commentary and holds the reading. You are not passed to a rotating “account” stranger.
How the weeks run
- Intake. We name the portal, the readers, and the fight in the committee. We say whether floor time is required.
- Preparation. You arrange access to anonymised visit records if they exist, or to staff willing to sit through ordinary use. We do not need names of readers.
- Observation window. We watch the agreed sections across ordinary hours, including one evening if the portal claims to serve evening readers.
- Plates. Charts are drawn as plates: dwell, skip, return, and any ugly drop after a language toggle or a broken search box.
- Commentary. A short text that a clerk can read without a specialist at the elbow.
- Reading. Two hours with the folio open. We do not sell a follow-up retainer in the same breath; if you want a later window, that is a separate study.
Duration and place
Five weeks is typical from intake to reading. A small staff board can be shorter; a forms portal with a queue in a Public Service Hall can run to six if the floor week has to wait on a permit to sit in the hall. Work is based at the Kutaisi desk. Floor time happens where the public already stands.
What you prepare
A named contact who can answer hours and section names. Permission to watch the portal in ordinary use. If visit logs exist, a copy with names and exact addresses stripped. If the portal sits behind a staff door, a time when someone can walk it with us without performing a rehearsal.
Constraints
We will not put a recognizable face, badge number, or home village on a plate. We will not pretend a ten-day window is a year. Seasonal work (school portals in August, tax forms in March) must be named in the intake or the ledger will lie. We will not draw a plate we did not observe.
Price
Quoted after intake. For a single civic or workplace portal whose public counter, if any, sits in Imereti, ledgers usually begin at 2,400 GEL. Binding extra copies, Georgian commentary, sections beyond the agreed tree, and travel outside Imereti are listed as separate lines. There is no monthly seat.
A deposit of one third holds the observation window. The remainder is due when the folio is bound, before extra copies leave the desk.
Next step
Write to the desk with the name of the portal and the question the committee cannot settle. We answer within three working days and will say, plainly, if the work is not a fit.