Research person

Research Person

Turn a name into a useful, honest People dossier in the vault — the kind of note that makes the next conversation, intro, or working relationship go better. Built for Carl's relationship KB: real friends and colleagues, researched from public sources only, for his own private notes.

This is the generalized version of a clean OSINT pass: resolve identity → gather public footprint → mark confidence → write it where it belongs without trampling what's already there.

When to use

• "Research <name> and fill out their People note"
• "Build a dossier on these folks: <list of names>"
• Refreshing a stale People note before a meeting, intro, or 1:1
• A new colleague/friend you want context on before working together

When NOT to use

• A public figure for a general report → use deep-research instead (this skill writes to the People KB)
• Building a profile of Carl himself → use profile-me
• You only need one fact (current employer) → just search; don't spin up the whole dossier

Ethics & guardrails (read once, apply always)

• Public sources only. Things the person has published or that are openly indexed. No paywalled background-check services, no scraping behind logins you'd need to deceive to pass, no pretexting.
• For Carl's private KB, to support real relationships — not surveillance of strangers. If the named person isn't someone Carl plausibly knows or works with, pause and confirm before researching.
• Contain sensitive material. Home address, family members, health, finances, religion, politics, legal history — even when public — go in a clearly-fenced ## Sensitive block, each line marked ⚠️, never in the orientation blurb or frontmatter. If it isn't relationship-relevant, omit it.
• Identity confidence is a first-class output. A confidently-written note about the wrong person is the main failure mode. Always state how sure you are it's the right individual.

---

<process>

Phase 0 — Disambiguate before researching

1. Take the name plus any disambiguators Carl gives: employer, city, role, email, a LinkedIn/GitHub/site URL, "the one who…", mutual company.
2. Check the vault first. If a note already exists, that note IS the source of truth for who this is — read it, reuse its identity, and update in place (Phase 4 routing).
   • Work: ~/cloud/gdrive/obsidian-vault-carlkibler/halo/People/<Full Name>.md
   • Personal: ~/cloud/gdrive/obsidian-vault-carlkibler/People/<Full Name>.md
3. If the name is common (e.g. "Mike Smith") and there are no disambiguators and no existing note, ask Carl for one or two before burning a research pass. Guessing wrong is worse than asking.
4. For a batch, run people in parallel (one research effort each) but keep their notes separate.

Phase 1 — Gather the public footprint

Cast wide, then verify. Aim to answer: who they are, what they do, where they've been, what they've made, how Carl knows them, and what's useful for the relationship.

Search/fetch angles (skip what doesn't apply):

• Identity & current role — employer, title, location. Cross-check 2+ sources before stating as fact.
• Professional history — past roles, companies, education. LinkedIn, company About pages, bios.
• Builders' trail — GitHub/GitLab, personal site/blog, Stack Overflow, npm/PyPI, patents.
• Writing & speaking — talks, papers (Scholar/academia.edu), podcasts, posts, interviews.
• Public social presence — X/Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram/YouTube if public and relevant.
• News & affiliations — press mentions, boards, orgs, communities, open-source projects.
• Shared context — mutual employers/companies already in the vault, mutual people, overlapping history.

Tooling notes:

• Default to WebSearch + WebFetch. For JS-heavy or fetch-blocked sources (LinkedIn, academia.edu, Bandcamp/Spotify, some company sites) drive a real browser (Playwright MCP) and pull innerText, <meta> tags, and JSON-LD — that's where the verifiable structured data lives.
• When a thread looks deep or multi-source, you can delegate the heavy searching to the deep-research workflow and curate its findings into the dossier. This skill owns identity-resolution, confidence, routing, and the write; deep-research is just a fan-out engine.
• Delegation hygiene. When you fan out research to subagents, instruct each to return its findings as its final message — never to write files. Only the main run writes (the raw dump and the vault note); a subagent that tries to write is sandbox-blocked and wastes a turn. Give each a crisp identity anchor and the exact structured output shape you want back.
• Dump raw findings as you go to the research folder (Phase 4) — URLs, quotes, screenshots. The curated note links back to it; never make Carl re-run the search to see your evidence.

Phase 2 — Mark confidence on every non-obvious claim

Per vault convention, tag facts inline:

• VERIFIED — stated in a credible source you actually read (cite it).
• INFERRED — reasoned from evidence, not stated outright.
• UNKNOWN — an open question worth listing (these are valuable; they're the next research).

Plus an explicit identity confidence line near the top: Identity match: HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW with the basis (e.g. "matched via GitHub→personal site→employer; photo + city consistent"). If MEDIUM/LOW, say what would raise it.

Phase 3 — Compose the dossier

Match the existing People-note shape. Two flavors:

Work colleague (halo/People/) — frontmatter

---
aliases: [Full Name, nicknames, handle]
tags: [person, <role/team>, confidential]
companies: [[Company A]], [[Company B]]
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
---

Personal friend (People/) — frontmatter (no confidential, no work tags)

---
aliases: [Full Name, nicknames]
tags: [person, friend]
updated: YYYY-MM-DD
---

Body (both flavors)

# Full Name

> One-paragraph orientation: who they are, how Carl knows them, the single most useful thing to know.

**Identity match:** HIGH — basis in one line.

## Identity & contact
- Role / employer / location — **VERIFIED** (source)
- Handles: GitHub `x` · site `url` · LinkedIn `url` · X `@x`
- Email / phone — only if Carl already has it or it's openly published

## Background
- Career history, education, notable work — confidence-marked, sourced.

## Public presence & work
- Projects, writing, talks, repos — with links.

## How Carl knows them / shared context
- Mutual companies [[Company]] · mutual people [[Person]] · overlapping history.

## Conversation hooks
- Genuine, specific things to connect on (interests, recent work, shared people). Not flattery.

## Sensitive (public but handle with care)   ← only if any exists
- ⚠️ item — why it's fenced.

## Open questions
- [ ] Unknown to resolve — **UNKNOWN**

## See also
[[Related person]] · [[Company]]

## Sources
Distilled from: `<agent-notes raw path>` (date). Key public sources: <list>.

Keep it honest and skimmable: one idea per line, no padding, no LinkedIn-bio voice.

Phase 4 — Write it where it belongs (auto-write, but never clobber)

Routing:

• Existing note anywhere in the vault → update that file in place.
• Else, work/HaloHealth colleague → halo/People/<Full Name>.md; personal friend → People/<Full Name>.md.
• LOW identity match → do NOT write a vault note. Keep the research + ruled-out namesakes in the agent-notes dump only, and report back asking Carl for one disambiguator (city, employer, a profile URL, or "the one who…"). A confident note about the wrong person is the exact failure this skill exists to avoid. Promote it to a real People note once confidence reaches MEDIUM+ or Carl confirms the identity. (Exception: if a vault note already exists, leave it and just append the open question.)
• Genuinely ambiguous and no signal → ask Carl which.

Raw research dump (always):

• Work → ~/dev/agent-notes/work/people-research/<name-slug>/ (this symlinks under halo/ and syncs).
• Personal → ~/dev/agent-notes/me/people-research/<name-slug>/.
• Save findings.md (URLs + quotes + confidence) and any screenshots/exports there.

Merge rule — preserve existing content:

• Personal notes are often freeform logs / 1:1 notes. Do not overwrite them. Read the file, then insert a ## Background (researched <date>) dossier section (and the other dossier sections) above or below the existing log, leaving every dated entry and human-written line intact.
• For an existing structured note, enhance in place — update stale facts, add new findings, bump updated:, append to Open questions. Never drop Carl's hand-written lines.
• Always finish by updating updated: / adding a (researched YYYY-MM-DD) marker so refreshes are visible.

Cross-link both ways: link every Company and Person the note touches; redlink [[Like This]] for named-but-missing entities (marks a note worth creating). Weave into hubs like [[_People Directory]] when present.

Phase 5 — Report back

Tell Carl, per person: where the note landed (path), identity confidence, the 3–5 most useful new things found, anything fenced as sensitive, and the top open questions. For a batch, a one-line-per-person summary table.

</process>

The handoff version

If Carl wants to hand this to a friend, a colleague, or a different agent/tool that can't run this skill, give them the standalone copy-paste prompt in references/handoff-prompt.md. It carries the same methodology and guardrails without the vault-write step.