Guide
How OrbitDots works
Last updated: 17 May 2026
OrbitDots is a live prioritization board where a group surfaces what it actually cares about. You can start with optional pre-work to collect ideas before the meeting, then move into the live board. Instead of polls or raised hands, participants move toward the topics that matter to them. Proximity and orbiting generate a live score visible to everyone, so alignment emerges organically.
Watch the flow first
A fast walkthrough of the full session flow: setup, movement, voting, scoring, controls, and results.
1. Getting started
One person hosts a room and shares the URL. Everyone who opens that link joins the same board instantly. Each participant appears as an animated dot and can move freely across the canvas. Cards represent topics, ideas, or questions. They can be added live (if the host allows it) or collected beforehand through pre-work. From there, the board comes alive as people gravitate toward what interests them.
2. Pre-work
When creating a room, a signed-in host can enable Collect pre-session ideas. That turns the room into a pre-work board before the live session begins.
During pre-work, signed-in participants can submit ideas into lanes. They can see idea counts, but submissions stay private to their author until the host starts the live session. The host can review everything, manage lanes, and move submissions around before the meeting starts.
When the host clicks Start live session, pre-work closes and the collected ideas become normal board cards. If pre-work is cancelled or expires first, the room becomes read-only and keeps the collected ideas as a record.
3. Voting with movement
There are no buttons to click “+1.” Your position on the board is your vote.
- Proximity: being near a card contributes score to it.
- Orbiting: clicking a card locks you into an orbit around it. This is the strongest signal you can send and contributes the most to that card’s score.
4. Scores
Every card on the board has a score shown as a percentage. That percentage is the card’s share of the room’s total attention right now. If a card shows 40%, it means 40% of the room’s collective focus is on that card at this moment.
Scores add up to 100% across the room. When one card gains attention, the others’ percentages naturally decrease in relative terms.
One important property: scores are sticky. When participants move away from a card, its score doesn’t drop instantly. Instead, it fades gradually. This is by design. It prevents scores from flickering with every small movement and gives the board a sense of momentum. What you see reflects sustained interest, not just where people happen to be this second.
5. Clusters
When cards are dragged close together they automatically form a cluster, a visual group with a shared score. This is useful for merging duplicates or grouping related ideas so the room’s score isn’t split across cards that mean the same thing.
Orbiting score directed at a cluster is split evenly across its cards, and a cluster’s score is the combined attention of all its cards.
In ranked views, a cluster is named after the card with the most orbiters.
6. Host controls
The host has a set of real-time toggles that shape how the session runs. They’re facilitation tools that change the dynamics of the room.
An important design principle: the host is also a participant. Some controls, like Reveal cards and Show others, apply to the host just as they apply to everyone else. When card text is hidden, the host can’t see other people’s cards either. When others are hidden, the host is also alone on their screen. This keeps the playing field level and prevents the host from having more information than anyone else during a session.
Other controls, like Manage cards and Move cards, restrict participants but not the host, because the host needs to be able to set up and organize the board regardless of what participants are allowed to do.
Preventing herd behavior
Turn off Reveal cards so participants write and submit ideas without seeing what others have posted. This prevents anchoring and ensures the first few cards don’t dominate the conversation. The host can reveal everything later once the brainstorming phase is done.
Independent voting
Turn off Show others to hide all other participants, their orbits, and live scores. Everyone (including the host) sees only their own dot, so people contribute score to cards without being influenced by where others are moving. When the voting phase is done, the host can turn visibility back on to reveal the results together. Pairs well with taking a snapshot right after revealing.
Card permissions
Manage cards controls whether participants can create, edit, and delete their own cards. Turning it off means only the host manages topics, which works well for structured Q&A or when the agenda is set in advance. Move cards controls whether participants can drag cards and form clusters, or whether only the host organizes the board.
Confine mode
Confine constrains all participants to a fixed region of the board. This is a practical way to freeze scores. This is useful during card creation and brainstorming phases to prevent newly placed cards from accumulating attention before the group is ready to vote, or when the host wants to pause interaction and discuss what’s on the board without scores shifting underneath the conversation.
7. Anonymous rooms
When creating a room, the host can enable Anonymous mode. This is a room-level setting chosen before the session starts and cannot be changed afterwards. In anonymous rooms, participants join instantly without entering a name. Everyone receives an auto-generated identifier instead. In non-anonymous rooms, participants are asked for a display name when they join.
Anonymous mode pairs well with the visibility controls under host controls.
8. Snapshots
At any point during a session, the host can take a snapshot. A snapshot captures the board state at that moment: which topics were leading, how they were clustered, and who was orbiting where.
Snapshots are useful for marking key moments: before and after revealing cards, at the end of a voting round, or right before moving on to a new topic.
The live top scores panel shows the delta since the most recent snapshot, and you can step back through earlier snapshots to compare the live board against earlier moments in the session.
Once the session ends, all snapshots appear on the results page with timestamps, so you can compare how attention shifted between different phases. Ending the session also saves a final snapshot, which becomes the closing record for the room’s results.
Snapshot rankings and cluster labels are frozen at the moment the snapshot is taken.
9. Discussed topics
The host can mark a card or cluster as discussed. Discussed cards stop accumulating score: orbiting and proximity no longer count toward them. They stay on the board with a checkmark badge, but they’re effectively frozen. This lets the host move through an agenda without old topics competing for attention against new ones.
The host can also reopen a discussed card if the group needs to revisit it.
If a cluster is marked as discussed, all cards in it are included. That discussed cluster stays locked together unless it is reopened.
Discussed topics keep the label they had when they were marked discussed.
10. Lanes and timers
The host can divide the board into lanes: titled, color-coded columns or rows. Think retro categories, discussion phases, or priority buckets. Lanes are purely visual and have no effect on scoring or clustering. They’re a facilitation layout, not a scoring mechanic.
The timer works the same way: a visible countdown that helps pace the session. When it runs out, nothing is forced. The host decides what happens next.
Both lanes and timers are host-only tools designed to add structure without influencing the outcome.
11. Results
When the host ends the session, everyone is taken to a results page that breaks down what happened: topics ranked by peak score, engagement duration, number of orbiters per card, and a timeline showing how attention shifted over time.
Clusters are preserved with their grouped cards, discussed topics are shown separately from open ones, and snapshots captured during the session are also preserved as board-state checkpoints, so you can revisit what the room was focused on at each key moment. The results page is shareable via its URL, and anyone with the link can view the outcome.
12. Signed-in users
OrbitDots works without an account, but signing in unlocks a few conveniences:
- My rooms shows all rooms you’ve hosted: active sessions, past results, and expiration status in one place.
- If you hosted a room while signed in, you can delete an ended room from My rooms. See Privacy for data-removal details.
- Display name is saved to your profile and pre-filled whenever you join a non-anonymous room, so you don’t have to type it each time.
- Host defaults let you save your preferred room settings (anonymous, confine/free, card permissions, visibility controls). New rooms start with those defaults instead of the built-in ones.
- Pre-work requires sign-in to host and to submit ideas, so submissions can stay tied to their author until the live session starts.
- Quick start panel can be dismissed by anyone, but signed-in users can bring it back from Settings.
All of these are managed in the Settings page.
13. Good to know
- Room titles can be renamed by clicking the title in the top-right corner of the board, or from the results page after the session ends.
- Reconnection is automatic. If your tab closes or connection drops, OrbitDots restores your position and session state when you return.
- Keyboard shortcuts: press ? on the board to see them all.
- Room expiration: demo rooms are automatically deleted 24 hours after creation, and their results page is permanently removed. Regular rooms do not currently expire.
- Desktop-only: floating card modals, inline room renaming during a session, and right-click to create a card at a selected location are not available on mobile.