Help

A workshop runs in four steps: get in → join a team → pick a topic → add your ideas. Here's each one.

1. Getting in

• Register or log in. Registration needs only an email, a nickname (any name your teammates will recognise — it's shown next to everything you post) and a password. Today you're logged in the moment you register. (If email verification is switched on for a future workshop, you'll instead receive an email to confirm your account before you can log in.)
• Join the workshop. The moderator will show a short join code on screen. Type it into Join a workshop on the home page. You stay a member afterwards, so if you get disconnected you can log back in and pick up where you left off — you won't need the code again.

2. Join a team

• A team is the small group you'll capture ideas with. Open Teams and either create one (give it a name) or join an existing one.
• You're in one team at a time, but you can switch freely — anything you already posted stays with the team where you wrote it.

3. Pick a topic

• Open Topics and choose one — click Work on this to start your team on it, or Open if your team is already there.
• Each topic opens with a Background and Instructions — read those first; they explain what the topic is about and what to focus on.
• A topic may show "full for now". That's the moderator's coverage steering nudging teams toward less-covered topics — just pick one that's open. Things reopen once every topic has enough teams.

4. Add your contributions

• Each topic has several headings, each with a short note on what belongs there. Type into the box under a heading and click Add — your contribution is saved straight away and appears in the list.
• Markdown is supported for simple formatting — use the Markdown Help button (bottom-right of the discussion) for a quick cheat sheet.
• Every entry is labelled with your nickname. You can edit or delete your own entries; everyone else's stay exactly as they wrote them — nothing you do overwrites anyone, so the whole team can type at the same time.
• The page updates by itself every few seconds, so you'll see teammates' contributions appear as they post them.

What you can see

• Use the toggle at the top of a topic: Show my team's contributions (the default) or Show only my contributions.
• You see your own team's work. Other teams explore the same topics in parallel; their contributions are brought together by the moderator afterwards.
• When the moderator closes the workshop it becomes read-only — you can still read everything, but no new contributions can be added.

How it fits together

A workshop contains topics; each topic has an ordered set of headings (its template). Attendees form teams, and each team works a topic in its own discussion, made up of individual contributions. A few rules are worth knowing as you run it:

• Attendees are in one team at a time and may switch freely; their entries stay with the team where they were written.
• Every contribution is individually owned and attributed — people edit/delete only their own, and concurrent contributors never overwrite each other.
• Attendees see only their own team's discussion. You, as moderator, can see every team's (read-only) — this keeps each team's exploration independent during the session.

1. Create and set up

• Create a workshop from the home page — you become its moderator and get a unique join code to show the room.
• It has three states you switch from the hub:
  • setup — only you can see and use the workshop. Prepare topics and test it freely; nobody else can join or view it yet.
  • open — the session is live: people join with the code and contribute.
  • closed — read-only for everyone. Members can still read everything, but no new contributions, edits or team changes are possible — use it to freeze the results for export.
  So the lifecycle is prepare in private (setup) → run live (open) → freeze (closed).
• You can regenerate the join code at any time.

2. Prepare topics

• Open Manage topics, add a topic, then give it a Background and Instructions (both support markdown).
• Add an ordered set of headings, each with its own guidance. The clearer the guidance, the more self-explanatory the topic is — see the worked example at the bottom of this tab.
• Reorder headings with the up/down controls; edit or delete topics and headings any time before the session.

3. Coverage steering

• Two thresholds in the Coverage steering box: a cap (most teams allowed on one topic, default 5) and a minimum (teams you want on every topic before free choice, default 2).
• A new team is blocked from a topic only when it has hit the cap and some other topic is still below the minimum. Once every topic has met its minimum, the cap stops blocking and teams choose freely. A team is never blocked from a topic it's already on.

4. During the workshop

• Open Live stats for a dashboard of participants, teams, contributors and contributions per topic, refreshed every few seconds.
• You can take part exactly like an attendee — join a team from the hub and contribute.
• On any topic, a moderator-only Show ALL contributions (all teams) toggle gives a read-only, whole-room view tagged by team and contributor.

5. After the workshop

• Set the workshop to closed, then open Export:
• Markdown and CSV — the full record by topic and heading, with contributor and team (your basis for acknowledgements).
• Consolidated (de-identified) — all contributions per topic with names removed and near-duplicates merged: the simple appendage for write-ups.

Example topic — what a good one looks like

Here's a complete, generic topic you could set up to see the pattern: