fill-participants

name	fill-participants
description	Resolve and fill Participants frontmatter + link unlinked names in body. Args: <path>, all.
license	MIT
compatibility	Requires qmd (CLI or MCP) and gws CLI when resolving names from Google Docs (read-only). See [google-workspace-cli](../_shared/google-workspace-cli.md).

Fill Participants

Usage

• /fill-participants all — Scan all meetings, find those missing Participants, resolve and fill them.
• /fill-participants <path> — Fill participants for a specific meeting note (relative to workspace root, e.g. Meetings/PAM/Some Meeting.md).

Frontmatter Conventions

See people-resolver for wikilink format and name matching rules.

Participants live in YAML frontmatter as either:

# Single participant
Participants: "[[@Zak]]"

# Multiple participants
Participants:
  - "[[@Zak]]"
  - "[[@Carlos García]]"

# Team-wide meetings
Participants: "[[+PAM]]"

Workflow

Step 1: Identify targets

Mode A (all):

Run /note-status pending --step=participants to discover notes missing Participants:, present them, and let the user select which to process.

Mode B (specific file):

1. Read the specified file.
2. Check if Participants already exists in frontmatter. If so, inform user and stop (or ask if they want to override).

Step 2: Gather participant info for each target

For each meeting missing Participants, determine attendees using the resolution priority defined in people-resolver. In summary:

1. External transcript sources — Use the source linked in Notes: frontmatter:
   • Google Docs: Extract document ID from Notes:, fetch content with gws (gws docs documents get or gws drive files export to plain text — see google-workspace-cli); Gemini summaries name participants explicitly.
   • Otter.ai: When an Otter transcript fetch workflow is available, use it; until then skip per cache-notes Otter policy.
2. File name — X x Y patterns.
3. File content — Existing [[@Name]] references.
4. Folder conventions — e.g. Meetings/PAM/Scrum/ → [[+PAM]].
5. Similar meetings — Recurring meeting with same name, different date.
6. Tracker.md — Jira ticket assignees for disambiguation.

Step 3: Match names to People files

Build a name dictionary per people-resolver. Match names from the transcript source (Google Docs, Otter when enabled, etc.) against the dictionary. Flag any unmatched names for user confirmation.

Step 4: Present findings and ask for confirmation

Present results grouped into:

1. Confident matches — Table of meeting → proposed Participants. Apply without asking.
2. Needs confirmation — Ambiguous matches, unknown people, or meetings with only Otter.ai links (no Google Doc). Ask the user.
3. New people — Names not in People files. See people-resolver § "Creating New People".

Also flag if any existing @Person.md files are missing key properties (FullName, Team) that were discovered from Google Docs.

Step 5: Link unlinked names in note body

Scan the entire file content (body + AI transcript callouts) for mentions of people that are not already wrapped in [[@Name]] wikilinks. This catches plain-text references from Gemini transcripts and manual notes.

5a: Build a name dictionary

Use the name dictionary and matching rules from people-resolver.

5b: Scan for unlinked mentions

Search the note body for each name variant, following the word boundary and skip rules in people-resolver.

5c: Present matches for confirmation

⚠️ MANDATORY: Always prompt the user before replacing. Never auto-replace — false positives are common with first names and nicknames.

Display a numbered table of proposed replacements:

| # | Replace? | Found text | → Link | Context (surrounding text) |
|---|----------|------------|--------|---------------------------|
| 1 | ✅ | Rob Klock | [[@Rob]] | "...assigned Rob Klock a bug ticket..." |
| 2 | ✅ | @Zach | [[@Zak]] | "...recent changes made by @Zach..." |
| 3 | ⬜ | Victor | [[@Victor]] | "...Victor confirmed they have been..." |
| 4 | ⬜ | Alex | — (skip, it's the user) | "...Alex Smith and Alex agreed..." |

• Default ✅ for full-name matches (high confidence).
• Default ⬜ for first-name-only or nickname matches (need confirmation).
• Always skip linking the vault owner's name (see USER.md Identity) — these don't need wikilinks.
• Show a short context snippet so the user can judge correctness.
• Let the user toggle by saying numbers (e.g. "1,2" or "all" or "none").

5d: Apply confirmed replacements

Use StrReplace for each confirmed match. When a name appears multiple times, ask the user if they want to replace all occurrences or specific ones.

Step 6: Apply frontmatter changes

For each file, add Participants: to the YAML frontmatter just before the closing ---. Use StrReplace targeting a unique anchor (last line before ---).

Step 7: Handle intentionally blank meetings

For meetings where participants genuinely can't be determined:

• Use team links where the meeting clearly belongs to a team (e.g. [[+QA]], [[+Eng]]).
• Use — (em-dash) as the universal "intentionally left blank" marker for true unknowns.
• Never leave the field absent — every meeting should end up with a Participants value.

Step 8: Offer to commit

See /commit. Skip when called as part of a sequence (e.g. /meeting wrap).

Important Notes

• Always read a file before editing it — frontmatter may have been modified by Obsidian sync.
• The modified: timestamp in frontmatter changes frequently; use other properties as unique anchors for StrReplace.
• Batch edits where possible to minimize round-trips, but never edit a file without reading it first.
• Interview notes use the co-interviewer (not the candidate) as Participants. If it was a solo interview, use [[@Me]].
• This workspace may not be a git repo. If git status fails, skip the commit step entirely without error.