Setting up an event

This page assumes you know what you want the session to do, and you are looking for guidance on how to configure Samvinas to do it.

1. Create the event

Sign in, choose New event, and give your event a name. You will be invited to either start from a blank flow or select one of your saved templates. If this is the first time using the system, or you have never saved a previous event as a template, you will only have the blank event as an option.

Every event receives a randomly generated five-character join code and a QR code. Participants join the event by either entering the code, or snapping the QR code. This is important because it means that your colleagues need neither an account nor an app.

2. Build the flow

The flow is the ordered list of tools you want your session to move through — for example Brainstorm → Voting → Clustering. Flows are completely dynamic. You can add or remove tools as you go.

Add tools with the + button. Each row shows the tool's icon, name, a live item count, a ⚙ for settings and a Focus button. Clicking a tool's name opens the participant's view of it, so you can see exactly what the room will see before anyone joins.

Inside ⚙ → Basics:

• Name — what participants see this step called.
• Prompt — the question they answer. The highest-leverage field on the page: a vague prompt produces vague ideas.
• Source and Filters — where this tool's items come from. That's the next section, and it's the one idea in Samvinas worth slowing down for.

3. Pipes: passing work from one tool to the next

By default a tool starts empty and collects its own items. But most of the time you want the next step to work on what the last step produced — vote on the ideas you just generated, cluster the ones that won the vote. That connection is a pipe.

Think of it as handing a stack of cards to the next person in the room. The Brainstorm collects the cards. Voting takes that same stack and puts stars on them. Clustering takes the starred stack and sorts it into piles. Nobody re-types anything, and nobody exports a spreadsheet in between.

Three things are worth knowing, because they're what make pipes different from copy-and-paste:

It's live, not a snapshot. A pipe isn't a one-time import. Add an idea to the Brainstorm while Voting is open and it appears in Voting. You don't have to "finish" a step before wiring the next one up.

It flows forward only. A tool can draw from any tool above it in the flow, never below. That's why the source list only offers earlier tools — and why reordering your flow can disconnect a pipe.

It chains. If Clustering draws from Voting, and Voting draws from Brainstorm, then Clustering can see the Brainstorm's ideas through Voting. You don't need to connect Clustering to both.

Setting a source

Open ⚙ → Basics on the tool that should receive the items — the downstream one — and pick from Source. A tool can have more than one source, and they merge into a single incoming set.

4. Filters: choosing what comes through

A pipe on its own passes everything. A filter is a sieve on that pipe — it decides which of the upstream items arrive.

This is what turns a flow into a funnel. Brainstorm → Voting → Clustering moves every idea forward at every step. Put a filter of ≥2 votes on the pipe into Clustering, and only the ideas the room actually backed get sorted — so eighty ideas become the fifteen worth arranging.

Click a filter row (in ⚙ → Basics → Filters) to open it. There are four kinds of filter, and they stack — an item has to satisfy all of the ones you set to come through:

• Minimum / maximum votes — the workhorse. "Only what the group backed."
• Sequence range — by item number, so 1–10 takes the first ten. Note it counts the items that have already passed the other filters, not the first ten in the source: combine "≥2 votes" with "1–10" and you get the first ten of the ideas that got two votes.
• Contains any of these words — comma-separated. An item mentioning any one of them comes through, so this widens as you add words.
• Only items tagged — the fan-out filter. One Tagged Brainstorm can feed several downstream tools, each taking a different bucket: Helps into one view, Hinders into another. Leave it empty for all tags.

Anything you can set, you can loosen. Clear All returns the pipe to passing everything.

Tightening a filter after items have already flowed: the copies that no longer qualify have to go, or your downstream tool keeps work the filter excludes. Samvinas shows you the count and asks before removing them — widening a filter never prompts, because nothing is lost.

A worked example

You want a session that generates broadly, narrows honestly, and ends with something you can act on:

Eighty ideas in at step 1. Everyone votes at step 2. Step 3 only sees the backed ones, and turns fifteen into five themes. Step 4 scores those five themes for value and do-ability. Each step does one job on the output of the last — which is the whole idea.

5. Bring people in

Share the join code or project the QR. To put results on a big screen, open the Display view — it follows whichever tool you have focused.

Two things worth setting before people arrive:

• Visibility — new tools stay hidden until you reveal them, so the room sees one step at a time.
• Lock — freezes a tool's responses without hiding what is already there.

6. Run it

Press Focus on a tool to make it the live step; everyone's screen follows.

Participants tap the ? in the tool header for that tool's own help page — the participant half of this site.

For small groups, add Breakout Groups: each group becomes its own mini-event with a slice of the items (or the whole set), and Gather Results brings their work back into the main flow for the next step.

7. Get the results out

• The event report — the whole event as a single HTML file, formatted for reading and printing.
• CSV export — per-tool data for spreadsheets.

Export reflects what is on screen, filters included — so what you export is what the room actually worked on.

Designing the session rather than building it? Start with the process at a glance and facilitating the room.