Facilitator guide

Everything here is for the person running a Samvinas event. (If you're taking part in one instead, you don't need any of this — and you'll find your own guide behind the ? inside whichever tool you're using.)

These pages assume you already know your way around a creative process: they show you how Samvinas works and jog your memory on the method, rather than teaching it from scratch.

Set up your first event

• Setting up an event — the mechanics, end to end: create an event, build a flow, pipe one tool into another, get people in, get the results out.

Design and facilitate

• Option Explorer — choosing a design for your event: where to enter the process, how to turn a step into a flow, and when to start from a template.
• Facilitating the room — six habits that carry most of the weight.
• Principles refresher — diverge and converge, the four stages, deferring judgement, framing problems as questions.
• The process at a glance — six steps side by side, each with a starting condition and an outcome. Use it to decide where your event enters the process.

The toolbox

Tools are grouped the way the app's picker groups them — by the kind of move they make:

• Generating tools — widen the field: produce many options before any judging starts.
• Focusing tools — narrow down: compare, weigh and choose among what you have.
• Organising tools — make sense: group, map, sequence and develop, without cutting anything.

A well-shaped session alternates between them: diverge with a generating tool, then organise or converge with what came out — and repeat.

Shaping the event

Three tools shape the session rather than the ideas in it:

• Breakout Groups — split into small groups, each with a shared workspace.
• Personal Workspace — give every participant their own mini-flow.
• Instructions — a page of guidance in the flow.

Utilities

Enable these once and they are available across every tool in the event:

• Timer — a shared countdown in everyone's footer, with fullscreen presenter mode on any device.
• Raise Hand — a fair, visible speaking queue.
• Event Info — a standing page for WiFi, schedule and venue details.

Getting your data out

• The event report — the whole event as one shareable HTML file, formatted for reading.
• CSV export — every tool's results as a spreadsheet-ready file.