Context gets lost
Minutes record what was decided, not why, who objected, or what was weighed and set aside.
Why Witness
Institutions remember what they decided. Fewer can show exactly why.
This is not a failure of discipline. It is a failure of infrastructure - the same way a payment without a ledger is not a discipline problem either.
The pattern
Institutional evidence fragments across meetings, documents, surveys and memory.
Consultants and staff move on
The person who was in the room leaves, and the reasoning leaves with them.
Evidence becomes disconnected from decisions
A recommendation survives; the specific things people said that produced it do not.
The same people get asked again
When a consultation cannot be traced to what it produced, the honest response is to run it again - which is how communities correctly conclude that being consulted changes nothing.
What we believe
Provenance is the product.
A claim you cannot trace is a rumour. Institutional memory without an evidence chain is worse than none, because it is confidently wrong. Witness treats memory the way identity and payments are treated - as infrastructure, not a feature one vendor rents back to you.