Your first walkthrough

This walkthrough introduces the core workflow by taking you from an empty workspace to your first mapped expectation and the Gap it reveals. It assumes you have signed in and created or joined a workspace.

Step 1 — Create a board

Navigate to Nexus from the sidebar. From the Nexus home page, select New board.

Give the board a name that reflects the scope of the work — something like "EU AI Act" or "ISO 42001 Review". You can rename it at any time, so do not labour over this.

The board opens as an empty canvas.

[Screenshot needed] PLACEHOLDER IMAGE: An empty Nexus board canvas with the board name visible in the header, ready for artefacts to be loaded

Step 2 — Set the scope

In the board header, click Scope. This opens the artefact panel, which lists the regulatory frameworks and standards available in your workspace.

Select an artefact to load it onto the board. For this walkthrough, the EU AI Act is a good choice — it is pre-loaded, well-structured, and most practitioners working in AI governance will have encountered it.

The artefact appears on the canvas as an interactive tree, mirroring the source document's organisation: Title, Chapters, Articles, and so on.

[Screenshot needed] PLACEHOLDER IMAGE: A board with the EU AI Act loaded as an expandable tree on the canvas, showing the top-level chapters visible

Step 3 — Explore the structure

Click any node in the tree to expand it. Keep drilling down until you reach individual clause nodes — these are the expectation nodes that can be mapped to controls.

Notice the domain colour indicators on nodes that already carry mappings. Each colour corresponds to one of Balcony's twelve governance domains. A node with no colour indicator has not yet been mapped.

If this is a fresh workspace, most nodes will have no indicators — that is expected. You are about to start building the crosswalk.

Step 4 — Map your first expectation

Click an individual clause node to open its detail view. For this walkthrough, try Article 9 (Risk Management System) if you are using the EU AI Act — it is a substantive obligation that maps cleanly to the RM (Risk Management) domain.

In the detail view, you will see options to create a mapping. Select Map to control, then choose the appropriate topic and control from the unified framework. Confirm the mapping.

The clause node now shows a domain colour indicator for the RM domain.

Step 5 — Switch to the Crosswalk view

In the board header, switch the view to Crosswalk. This changes the canvas to a table layout that shows your artefact's structure against the controls you have mapped to.

Find the control you mapped in Step 4. Its coverage state will show as Gap — because while the control now has a mapping, no mechanism has been built behind it yet.

[Screenshot needed] PLACEHOLDER IMAGE: The Crosswalk tab showing a table with artefact clauses on one axis and controls on the other, with a Gap status badge visible on the mapped control

This is the crosswalk doing its job: making the difference between "we have mapped this obligation" and "we have an operational process behind it" visible at a glance.

What next?

You have just completed the first half of the analytical chain — from artefact to mapped control. The Gap you can see is the handoff point to Mechanic.

• Continue in Nexus — keep expanding the artefact tree and mapping expectations. The more complete the crosswalk, the more useful the convergence and divergence patterns become. See Boards and Explore for the full workflow.
• Move to Mechanic — start building a mechanism for the control you just mapped. Linking a mechanism to the control changes its state from Gap to Covered, and assessing that mechanism moves it to Implemented. See Building a mechanism.
• Read the concepts — if you want a deeper understanding of what you just did and why, Core concepts explains the model in full.