Lean coffee board

Lean coffee is a meeting with a democratic agenda: people show up, write the topics they care about on cards, and the room dot-votes on which ones are worth the time. Each winning topic gets a timebox instead of an open-ended slot, so no single subject quietly eats the hour. When the timebox ends the group takes a roman vote, thumbs up to keep going and thumbs down to move on, and the majority decides whether the topic earns two more minutes or the next card comes up.

The format was created by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in Seattle in 2009. Their insight was that the agenda is the expensive part of a meeting, and that a group can build one in five minutes if you let it vote rather than argue.

Everything on this board is live and shared. Cards are visible as soon as they are posted, so people can build on each other rather than duplicate topics, and each person holds three dots. A dot comes back when its topic has been discussed, which means people who join late or run out early still get a say in the next round.

A card is a title and an optional line of context, both capped at two hundred characters. That is enough to say what you want to talk about and not enough to write the discussion out in advance, which is the right trade for a format that depends on people reading the queue quickly. One board holds up to a hundred cards, far more than any session will reach.

You hold three dots and spend one per card. Pressing a card you have already backed takes the dot back, and there is no way to put two of your dots on the same card, so one strong opinion cannot outweigh two mild ones. The queue sorts on the dot count, and cards level on dots stay in the order they were posted, so an early card wins the tie against a late one.

The card on the table and the cards already finished are out of the vote. Editing and deleting belong to whoever wrote the card, and stop once the card has been discussed. Dots return as topics finish rather than at the end of the meeting, which is what gives somebody who spent everything in the first minute a say in what comes up sixth.

Six people, twenty five minutes, a five minute box. Everyone posts for three minutes and nine cards go up. The dots land unevenly, which is the useful part: the failing Friday deploys take five, moving the demo takes four, two cards take one each and the rest take none.

The deploys go first. At five minutes the countdown reaches zero and the keep-going vote opens; four press up against two down, so the card buys two more minutes and the clock restarts at 2:00. The second vote runs two up against four down, the card drops into the discussed column with 7:00 beside it, and the demo question comes up on its own.

Twenty five minutes in, the room has spent real time on the two things it cared about and the five cards nobody backed cost nothing. Copy the wrap-up markdown before the tab closes. It lists what was discussed in order with the minutes and dots each one took, then the cards left queued, and that second list is the honest answer to what deserves a properly scheduled meeting.