Overview#
Argus runs the complete hearing lifecycle for a statutory commission of investigation, from scheduling a private sitting through to publishing a verified transcript and tracking compliance with numbered directions.
Government departments, national anti-corruption bodies, and public inquiry secretariats face a hard administrative problem. A single commission may run dozens of private and public sittings, each with its own roster of commissioners, counsel, witnesses, legal representatives and support staff, its own marked exhibits drawn from a growing evidence base, its own transcript awaiting verification, and its own set of binding directions with compliance deadlines. Managing this across spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains is slow, error-prone, and impossible to audit.
The platform consolidates all of this into one organisation-scoped system that sits alongside the investigation case management and evidence stores the secretariat already uses. Staff schedule sittings, build and confirm participant rosters, mark and present exhibits straight from the evidence base, upload and sign off transcripts, and issue automatically numbered directions with deadlines and overdue alerting. The hearing model follows the structure set out in Ireland's Commission of Investigation Act 2004, and every record is strictly isolated to the commission that owns it.
Key Features#
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Four hearing types for the full inquiry process: Private, public, preliminary and directions hearings are each modelled as a first-class type, so a commission can schedule closed evidence sessions, public sittings, scoping hearings and procedural directions hearings within a single consistent workflow.
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Lifecycle status tracking: Each hearing moves through a defined set of statuses covering scheduled, in progress, adjourned, completed, cancelled and postponed states. Actual start and end times are captured separately from the planned schedule, giving an accurate record of what happened versus what was listed.
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Eight-role participant roster: Rosters are built from named roles including commissioner, counsel to the commission, witness, legal representative, registrar, stenographer, interpreter and observer. Participants can be internal platform users or external named individuals, with an optional ordering sequence for the running of the sitting.
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Protected-witness pseudonyms: Any participant can carry a pseudonym, so witnesses granted anonymity are referred to by their protected name throughout rosters, attendance records and calendar exports, while their underlying identity stays scoped to the commission.
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Attendance management: Every participant carries an attendance state spanning expected, confirmed, attended, absent and excused, giving the secretariat a live view of who is due, who has confirmed, and who actually appeared at each sitting.
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Exhibit marking and presentation timestamps: Documents are marked as exhibits with an exhibit number and a purpose, linked directly to the commission's evidence document store. When an exhibit is put to a witness it is timestamped at the moment of presentation, producing an accurate record of what was shown and when.
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Transcript verification workflow: Transcripts progress through draft, in review, verified and published states, with named sign-off recording who verified the record and the moment they did so. Page and word counts and the transcriber of record are held against each transcript.
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Auto-numbered directions with overdue detection: Compliance directions (orders) are issued with the next sequential number assigned automatically, addressed to a named party, and given a due date. An overdue view surfaces every direction that is still outstanding past its deadline, so nothing slips through unnoticed.
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Calendar export: Any hearing can be exported as a standard calendar file, complete with its full attendee list, so participants can add the sitting to their own calendar systems in one step.
Use Cases#
National anti-corruption commissions#
A commission investigating public-sector corruption can schedule a sequence of private evidence sittings, build a roster of commissioners, counsel and witnesses for each, mark banking and procurement records from the evidence base as numbered exhibits, and issue directions compelling the production of further documents with firm deadlines. The overdue view gives the secretariat a single list of every outstanding compliance order across the whole inquiry.
Public inquiry secretariats#
Secretariat staff running a public inquiry can manage both closed and public sittings side by side, confirm which witnesses and legal representatives will attend each day, protect vulnerable witnesses with pseudonyms that flow through every record, and publish verified transcripts on a controlled draft-to-published pathway with a named verifier on record.
Government department investigation units#
A department conducting a statutory investigation can run preliminary and directions hearings to scope the inquiry, capture stenographer and interpreter assignments on the roster, present exhibits with accurate timestamps, and keep a clean compliance trail of every direction issued and the party it was directed to.
Tribunal and commission registries#
A registry can issue calendar invitations for upcoming sittings to commissioners, counsel and witnesses, track attendance against the expected roster, and maintain the authoritative record of exhibits, transcripts and directions for each hearing, replacing ad-hoc spreadsheets and email chains with one shared, isolated workspace.
Integration#
Commissions plug the hearing capability into their own tools through the platform's standard interfaces, with no bespoke connector work required for the core flows.
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GraphQL API: A typed read-and-write interface exposes hearings, participants, exhibits, transcripts and directions, including a dedicated overdue-directions view. Secretariat tooling can list sittings by case or by date range, build rosters, mark exhibits, verify transcripts and issue directions programmatically, returning normalised records the same shape every time.
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REST calendar endpoint: Each hearing can be retrieved as a calendar file over a simple REST path, ready to attach to an invitation or import into any calendar client. The export carries the sitting's title, time window, location, joining link and full attendee roster.
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Webhooks for downstream systems: Lifecycle events such as a hearing being listed, a transcript being published, or a direction passing its deadline can be delivered to external case management, document management and notification systems, keeping a commission's wider toolchain aligned without polling.
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OAuth 2.0 and JWT authentication: Every request is authenticated with the platform's standard bearer-token flow, with permission scopes carried in the token and checked server-side. Each operation is scoped to the calling user's organisation, so two commissions sharing the platform can never see each other's hearings.
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Evidence store connector: Exhibits reference documents held in the commission's evidence document store by identifier, so a marked exhibit always points back to the authoritative source record and its chain of custody rather than a detached copy.
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Normalised participant and direction models: Roles, attendance states, transcript states and direction states are drawn from fixed vocabularies, giving downstream systems a stable, predictable model to map against regardless of which commission produced the data.
Open Standards#
- RFC 5545 (iCalendar): hearings are exported as standards-conformant iCalendar objects, with version, scale and product identifiers, a unique event identifier, start and end times, location, joining URL and a full set of attendee entries carrying each participant's name and role. Any RFC 5545 compatible calendar client can consume the export directly.
- OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749): the authorisation framework securing every read and write request to the hearing capability, with scopes evaluated on each operation.
- JWT (RFC 7519): the bearer-token format carrying authenticated user identity, organisation scope and permission claims to the platform.
- GraphQL (GraphQL Foundation): the typed query and mutation language through which hearings, rosters, exhibits, transcripts and directions are read and managed.
- HTTP / REST (RFC 9110): the request semantics underpinning the calendar export endpoint and webhook delivery.
- ISO 8601 (RFC 3339 profile): the date and time representation used for scheduled and actual sitting times, due dates and verification timestamps, ensuring unambiguous exchange across systems and time zones.
Security and Compliance#
Every hearing, participant, exhibit, transcript and direction record is bound to the organisation that created it, and every read and write is scoped to the authenticated caller's organisation. Data belonging to separate commissions running on the same platform is strictly isolated, with no cross-organisation visibility regardless of role.
All operations require authentication, with permission checks enforced server-side rather than relying on interface controls. Protected-witness pseudonyms keep anonymised identities consistent across rosters, attendance records, transcripts and calendar exports, supporting the confidentiality directions a commission may grant.
Transcript verification records the named verifier and the moment of sign-off, and directions retain their issuing sequence, addressee, deadline and compliance state, together producing a defensible record of the commission's procedural decisions suitable for later scrutiny.
Last Reviewed: 2026-05-26 / Last Updated: 2026-05-26