Plan and run a session

Before the session: the Planner

The Planner is where you, as a facilitator, design your session.

1. Sign in and make a session. Give it a name, a date and a place, how many people you expect, and a few words about who they are, such as final-year students at a teachers college.
2. Choose the six questions. The Planner starts you with a ready set of six. You can keep a question as it is, change its words to suit your group, or replace it with one of your own. You can change the questions any time until the session starts.
3. Try it out. Before the real day, you can run a practice session filled with bots: pretend people who answer the questions by themselves. You and your team join with your own phones, and you see the whole session from start to finish, exactly as your group will.

Every session you create is saved in your Planner.

Running the session in person

You need a computer connected to a projector. The people in the room need their phones.

1. Open the room screen. Sign in, go to the Planner, find your session under Coming up, and open it. Press Open the room screen, and put that window on the projector.
2. Let people join. They scan the QR code on the screen with their phone camera. Each phone gets a number, which is that person's ID for the session. The screen shows how many people have joined.
3. Go through the six questions. Press Start to show the first question. When most people have answered, the Next question button starts to glow, and you press it to move on. If you want a time limit, the screen has a timer you can set and pause.
4. Give people time to talk. After each question the screen shows how many people picked each choice, without revealing who they are. Ask them to turn to the people near them and talk about what they chose.
5. The reveal. After the sixth question, press See how the room went, then Reveal. Every phone shows a group number, and the IDs of the people who made the same choices. Send each group to its own part of the room: “Group 1, over here. Group 2, over there.” Inside their group, people find each other by their IDs.

The group numbers say how far people chose alike. Group 1 made the same choices at all six questions, Group 2 at five, and so on. The last group is for people who missed a question along the way, so nobody is left out.

Before you press Reveal, tell the room what it means. Finding someone who chose the same way is not a match, and nobody is being told they will get along. It only means you made the same decisions. Whether that means anything more is what the conversation is for.

If something goes wrong. If the screen gets stuck, refresh the page. If someone misses or skips a question, their phone asks them once whether to answer it or skip it. Start over resets the session, and everyone joins again from the beginning.

Running the session online

A session can also run on a video call, such as Zoom. Online sessions have not yet been tried with a real group, so treat your first one as a trial.

Each participant needs a computer to join the video call, and one more screen to take part in Forks. That can be a separate browser tab on the same computer, or their phone.

1. Share the room screen on the call, instead of putting it on a projector.
2. Share the joining link. Copy it from your session's page in the Planner and paste it into the chat. Participants open it in a new browser tab, or scan the QR code on the shared screen with their phone. Each question and its three choices appear on their own screen, so they can answer and stay on the call.
3. Use breakout rooms for talking. In a large group, people cannot talk with each other in the main call. After a question, you can open breakout rooms for a few minutes so people can talk in small groups. Whether and when to do this is your choice.
4. Groups meet in breakout rooms. At the reveal, each participant's screen shows a group number. Before then, set up breakout rooms named Group 1 to Group 6, and turn on the Zoom setting that lets participants move between rooms. Each person goes to the room with their group number. Inside, they look for the IDs on their screen, so ask everyone to add their Forks ID to their name on the call.

Good to know

• Participants take part without registering. Only facilitators register. A participant needs a phone with a camera and an internet connection, and never types in their name.
• The best size is about 120 to 300 people. Smaller groups, such as a class or a team of 30 to 50, work too. Everyone still meets their rhymes, but the rhymes are shorter, and Group 1 may be empty. The conversation then turns to how far people walked together and where their paths split.
• Questions are fixed once you start. After the first question, the questions are what people have answered, so they can no longer be changed.
• Sessions you have run are kept. They hold your group's answers, so you can archive one to tidy your Planner, but not delete it. A session nobody has answered in yet can be deleted.
• Tell small groups in advance. Answers are kept without names, and findings may be published as totals across many sessions. If your group is small enough that people could recognize each other's answers, tell them when you invite them. What is kept.