An advisory committee, an application form, and a private portal

The 2026-06-09 eval baseline came back at 4 PASS, 3 FAIL across seven reliability categories. The honest reading of that result is: the system is not lying, but it is occasionally incoherent under specific prompts, and the next round of training is going to need outside perspective on what to optimise for — and what to leave alone.

That outside perspective is the work the advisory committee exists to do. Today we opened applications.

The committee role, in plain terms

Five sentences of working terms, taken straight from the brief we send candidates:

• Async only. Occasional emailed questions you reply to in your own time, or skip.
• No standing meetings, no calls required.
• No equity ask, no fundraising expectation.
• Public attribution on the project site if you accept, at your discretion.
• Honorarium available through Apex Grid Technologies Ltd if you prefer that footing.

These are the same terms in every advisor conversation, written down once so the offer is symmetric: an advisor’s time is short and a small project’s discipline questions are open-ended. The role is light because the project is small. We are not pretending otherwise.

What the advisory portal does (and does not)

Behind Cloudflare Access at asotele.apexgridapps.com/advisors, signed-in advisors see:

• The current day’s briefing — alerts, economic dashboard, news intelligence, CBN monetary-policy tone, Asotele Signals (AII + Sahm traffic lights), public-health signal, council verdict.
• The last seven days of briefings as cards.
• An open-questions queue: specific methodology and evaluation questions we are asking the committee to weigh in on. Each question is its own thread. Other advisors’ responses are visible to everyone in the committee.
• A Telegram-channel invite for the parallel push notifications.

What the portal deliberately does not do: the daily briefing content is not published on the public website. The site shows that the briefing exists; it does not show the briefing. This was a posture decision: the daily intelligence is the product, and it gets shared with the committee that has earned the position of reviewing it, not with the open internet.

The first four questions seeded in the portal today, as a working sample of what we are actually asking the committee:

1. How should our regime classifier handle the 2016, 2020, 2023 Nigerian structural breaks? — currently single-window-fit, no segmentation across the post-2023-float break or the 2020 oil collapse. We do not have a defensible test for stability across those breaks yet.
2. What does per-language evaluation methodology look like beyond AfriSenti F1? — the deployed sentiment classifiers report macro-F1 against AfriSenti held-out, which is general-sentiment. We do not have a finance-domain evaluation discipline for the four Nigerian languages we deploy on.
3. Our real-time labor-stress panel is formal-sector-biased in a ~70%-informal economy. Should we publish it? — Jobberman job-postings, layoff-news NLP, and a thin rural-employment proxy. The honest framing question is the publication question.
4. Our eval judge model has a training cutoff before 2026. Should we tell it the current date? — mistral-small:24b reads our chat’s correctly-cited 2026 facts as future-dated and downgrades them. Three remediation options; we are not silently picking one.

These are real questions, not stylised ones. The kind of question an advisor with the right toolkit can answer in a paragraph and an afternoon.

How to apply

Open at asotele.apexgridapps.com/advisor-apply.html. Three minutes to fill out. LinkedIn URL required (we use it to verify identity before reviewing). Founder reviews each application and responds by email within a few business days, with no obligation either way.

Approved applicants get added to the Cloudflare Access allowlist automatically, receive a welcome email with the portal URL, and from that point own their own profile — display name, affiliation, and what they choose to write in the question threads. There is no separate onboarding step.

The constraints we will not weaken

For symmetry with the brief: there are also two things we will not change to attract more advisors.

The first is that the architecture does not become public until the bank conversations and the advisory composition together justify it. The published methodology and the published eval set are open-source. The architecture is not, yet. This is the posture we wrote down on 2026-06-07 and have not revisited.

The second is that the daily briefing stays private to the committee and the institutions that engage commercially. The public site will continue to refer to the briefing without showing it. The advisor portal exists in part to draw that line cleanly.

Those constraints make the advisory committee a real surface — what advisors see is what no one else sees publicly. That is the trade we are offering, and it is honest about both sides of it.

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If you know someone whose perspective on Nigerian macro modelling, African-language NLP evaluation, informal-economy proxies, or grounded retrieval-augmented systems would shape this project, the application is at asotele.apexgridapps.com/advisor-apply.html. The LinkedIn version of this announcement is on Francis’s profile.

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