📅 Building the agenda

Import or hand-build sessions, organize them by day, track and room, and pick the right session type.

Two routes into an agenda: paste what you already have and let the assistant parse it, or build sessions by hand. Most events do both — import the bulk, then hand-edit.

📥 Importing an agenda

📥 Import agenda on the event hub takes unstructured input and turns it into structure. The page is blunt about what it accepts: "Paste anything — a CSV export, a copied agenda web page, meeting notes." It parses that into sessions, rooms, tracks and speakers for review.

Paste your agenda into the box — a spreadsheet export, a copied web page, even the email thread where the schedule was agreed.
Let it parse, then read the draft carefully. Times and dates are what it most often gets wrong.
Apply it, or discard and try again with cleaner input.
It reports what it created — rooms, tracks, sessions and speaker links. Then check the sessions list and fix anything off.

ℹ️ Note

The importer reads rooms as physical locations and tracks as days or topical groupings, and creates both in one pass. You can also manage them by hand at any time — see 🏛 Rooms & tracks below.

💡 Tip

Import first, even for a small agenda — it's how you get your rooms, tracks and speaker records created in one pass instead of one at a time.

🗓 Sessions

🗓 Sessions lists everything with its time, type, room and whether Zoom has been provisioned (· 🎥 provisioned). Hidden sessions are dimmed. Each row has edit and delete; + Add session is top right.

Field	Notes
Title	Required.
Abstract	The description on the public session page. Plain prose — any pasted HTML formatting is stripped when displayed.
Session type	See the table below. This is the most consequential choice on the form.
Room	Pick from the event's rooms, or (no room).
Zoom mode	Zoom: join link sends attendees out to Zoom; Zoom: embedded keeps them on the session page. Only matters for the two Zoom types.
Starts / Ends	Required. Entered in your browser's local time.
External / video URL	Required for `external_url` and `on_demand_video` — the link out, or the video file / YouTube / Vimeo URL.
Keynote	Highlights the session on the agenda with a ⭐ and a warm background.
Visible	Untick to hide a session from attendees while you're still working on it. Hidden sessions stay in your list, dimmed.

⚠️ Heads up

Times are entered in your browser's timezone but displayed to attendees in the event's. If you're building a Boston agenda from California, double-check a couple of sessions on the public agenda page before you publish.

🎬 Choosing a session type

The type decides the entire attendee experience, so pick deliberately:

Type	What the attendee gets
zoom_meeting	Interactive Zoom. Agenda shows live; the session page has Join (opens at session time), going green to 🔴 Join live now during the window. Can be auto-provisioned and recorded.
zoom_webinar	Broadcast Zoom with panelists. Same attendee experience as a meeting, but speakers need panelist links.
on_demand_video	Your External / video URL plays on the session page. Given a scheduled time it premieres as live: countdown card before, synced playback during (nobody can skip ahead), free scrubbing after. This is the semi-live format — great for a pre-recorded talk with the speaker live in the Q&A.
external_url	Agenda shows 🔗 external; the page has a 🔗 Join session link out to another platform.
in_person_only	Agenda shows 🏛 in person; the page shows a grey 🏛 In person only marker with nothing to click.
break	Not a card at all — renders as a plain centered line on the agenda ("— Lunch · 12:30 PM —"). Use it for lunch, coffee and receptions. Breaks get no rating form.

ℹ️ Note

Join links and video are gated to ticket holders (plus speakers, moderators and organizers). Titles, abstracts, times and speakers stay public — that's the part that sells tickets.

🪑 Capacity-limited sessions

A session with a capacity becomes a seat reservation rather than a bookmark: the agenda shows 🪑 12 seats left, the button becomes 🪑 Save a seat, attendees can hold only one seat per time slot, and the session locks when full.

Set it in the session form's Capacity box — leave it blank for an uncapped session. The sessions list marks capped ones with 🪑 N seats.

💡 Tip

Capacity is about the experience, not just the fire code: it's what stops forty people turning up to a hands-on workshop with twenty laptops. Set it a little under the room's true capacity so there's room for walk-ins.

🏛 Rooms & tracks

🏛 Rooms & tracks on the sessions console manages both by hand. Rooms are physical locations (a room's own capacity is a note to you — the seat limit attendees see is per session). Tracks are themed strands or days, and show as coloured pills on the public agenda; pick the colour with the swatch.

ℹ️ Note

Deleting is deliberately non-destructive. Removing a room leaves its sessions in place with their times and titles, just unassigned; removing a track detaches it from every session carrying it. Neither deletes a session.

📊 Launching a live poll

Also on the sessions page: 📊 Launch a live poll. Pick the session, type the question, put one option per line, and launch. It appears in the Polls section of that session's page for signed-in attendees, with results filling in live.

💡 Tip

Speakers can't create their own polls, so agree the questions in advance and have someone in the console ready to launch each one on cue. Give the speaker a heads-up that this is how it works — see 🖥️ Your sessions & presenting online.

✅ Before you publish the agenda

Open the public 📅 Agenda page and read it as an attendee.
Check day groupings and times are in the event timezone.
Confirm every on_demand_video and external_url session actually has its URL — those types show nothing without it.
Untick Visible on anything not confirmed, rather than leaving a placeholder title public.
Then provision Zoom and sync panelists.