Frequently asked questions

Decretum is a decision register: a structured, searchable record of what an organization decided, who approved it, and why. Instead of a decision living in a meeting, an email thread, or a chat message, it lives on a decision record, with its discussion, its tags, and a named approval trail attached.

Any organization where decisions currently get made in scattered places: meetings, email, Teams, or Slack, with no reliable way to find the reasoning behind one later. It is built for the whole organization, not just engineering: compliance, procurement, and operations teams make decisions worth recording just as often as engineering teams do.

Yes, by default. A decision's visibility is org-wide unless someone deliberately marks it restricted, so anyone in the organization can find it through search and comment directly on the record, even if they weren't part of the original discussion. That matters because it's often someone outside the room who has the relevant context: a compliance rule, a technical limitation, or a commitment already made to a customer. Finding that out after the decision ships is worse than finding it out while it's still being made.

A wiki is built for open-ended documentation. It doesn't enforce who decided, who approved, and why as structured data. Those facts end up as prose, if they're written down at all. A decision record makes that structure the point: status, approvers, and rationale are fields, not paragraphs you have to remember to include.

ADR tooling solves this problem well, but only for engineering teams working in a code repository. The same problem, decisions with no searchable record of who and why, exists just as often outside engineering. Decretum is built for the whole organization, not only developers.

Yes. Decretum deploys as a managed cloud service or as a self-hosted, on-prem deployment via Docker, running on your own infrastructure with your own database. Both are the same application. See the security and deployment page for details.

With email and password, Google, or Microsoft Entra ID, so access follows the identity provider your organization already uses. Self-hosted deployments can also connect to any OpenID Connect-compliant identity provider they run themselves, such as Keycloak, for sign-in that never needs internet access.

Approval is part of the workflow, not mandatory for every record. Teams that want a formal approval trail (a named approver and their stated rationale) can require it. Teams that just want a searchable log of what was discussed and decided can use Decretum without it.

Yes. Anyone can export their own data as a JSON file, or request deletion of their own account, at any time. Deletion is a two-stage process: the account is deactivated immediately and recoverable for 14 days, then the person's name and email are permanently replaced. The decisions and posts they authored stay in place, attributed to "Deleted user", as part of the organization's record. Decretum is an immutable decision register, so a decision doesn't disappear because the person who made it did.