Session Tools

Session tools make a shared diagram interactive for live workshops. There are three: a timer for time-boxing an activity, dot-voting for prioritising as a group, and polls for asking the room a question. All are run by the facilitator and synced to everyone in real time, so they pair naturally with collaborative boards like retros, brainstorms, and planning sessions.

Built for facilitating live

The tools all live together under one Collaborate row at the end of the tab's menu. Open it and a side panel lists Timer, Stopwatch, Vote, and Poll, so the four sit in one place instead of stretching the menu with a row each.

The timer and the vote are scoped to a single tab, so different tabs can run different activities, and they ride the same live sync as everything else on the canvas. That means people who join late or reload simply see what is happening now: a timer mid-countdown, or the votes cast so far, with nothing to set up again. Polls are the exception — they are deliberately live-only, so they reach the people connected when you start one and vanish completely when you end it.

• Timer and Stopwatch time-box an activity (a fixed duration counting down, or counting up from zero; one of the two runs at a time), shown as a floating pill at the top of the canvas. See The Timer.
• Dot-voting lets each participant spend a budget of dots on the elements they care about, with live tallies and a results reveal. See Dot Voting.
• Polls ask everyone a question (yes/no, a rating, a choice, or free text) and tally the answers live, without touching the canvas or saving anything. See Polls.

Who can do what

Session tools follow the diagram's roles automatically. Anyone with an edit link can run the controls and take part: starting the timer, casting votes. View-only visitors can still watch, they see the timer ticking and the tallies, but they cannot control the session or cast a dot. Typically the facilitator and participants share an edit link, while observers follow a view link.

A vote is narrower still. Edit access lets you cast dots, but only the person who started the vote can end it, reveal the results, clear it, or drive the results walkthrough. Ending a vote can't be undone, so it isn't something a participant should be able to do by accident. See Dot Voting.

What a viewer actually sees during a vote also depends on its privacy settings: with Hide running counts on, nobody sees anyone else's dots until the results are revealed.

Polls bend that rule on purpose: view-only visitors are asked, and can answer. Being able to hear back from an audience on a view link is the whole point of a poll. Starting and ending one still needs edit access.

What does and does not get recorded

Starting or pausing a timer, and starting, ending, or revealing a vote, each leave a single line in the Activity history so you can see the shape of the session afterwards. The individual dot casts, which happen fast and often, are deliberately not logged, and neither tool adds to Undo: starting a timer or placing a dot is not the kind of thing you would want to Ctrl+Z.