Managing Projects

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Overview

Projects help you organize related sessions, track progress over time, and collaborate with team members. This guide covers how to create and manage projects in Harmonica.

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What are projects?

Projects are containers that help you:

• Organize sessions: Group related sessions together
• Maintain context: Keep background information and goals in one place
• Track progress: See how discussions evolve over time
• Collaborate: Share access with team members
• Customize appearance: Add banners, colors, and descriptions

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Creating a project

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Project settings

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Basic information

• Title: A clear, descriptive name for your project
• Description: What this project is about and its goals
• Location: Optional location or context information
• Status: Active, draft, or deleted

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Visibility

Projects can be:

• Public: Visible to anyone with the link
• Private: Only accessible to invited members

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Appearance

Customize how your project looks:

• Banner image: Add a header image
• Gradient colors: Set custom gradient from/to colors
• Use gradient: Toggle gradient background on/off

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Adding sessions to projects

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When creating a new session

When creating a session, you can:

• Create it within an existing project
• Create it as a standalone session (add to a project later)

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Adding existing sessions

You can add existing sessions to a project:

• From the session settings
• By dragging and dropping (if supported)
• Through the project management interface

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Managing project members

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Sharing access

Projects can be shared with team members:

• Invite users by email or username
• Set permission levels (viewer, editor, admin)
• Manage access from project settings

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Permissions

Different permission levels allow:

• Viewer: Can see project and sessions but not modify
• Editor: Can create and modify sessions within the project
• Admin: Full control over project settings and sessions

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Organizational context (HARMONICA.md)

Sessions across all your projects benefit from a shared organizational context. Harmonica reads your HARMONICA.md — a short markdown document describing your team, vocabulary, and working norms — and injects it into every new session you create. It means the AI facilitator arrives already knowing who you are, without you copy-pasting a brief each time. HARMONICA.md is scoped to you as a host, not to an individual project.

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Project knowledge

A project’s Knowledge tab rolls up structured findings from every session it contains, so you can see what the whole body of work has surfaced — not just one session at a time.

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What it collects

Harmonica extracts typed findings from each session and aggregates them across the project into five categories:

• Decisions — what the group concluded or committed to
• Tensions — where perspectives diverged or trade-offs surfaced
• Actions — concrete next steps that came out of the conversations
• Open questions — what remains unresolved
• Themes — recurring topics across sessions

Each finding keeps a link to the participant evidence behind it, and findings that recur across several sessions are surfaced as such. Findings can also be drawn from imported context sources, not only live sessions.

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A stable, findings-first layout

The Knowledge tab renders the same layout every time: the findings first — grouped by the five categories, with a colour legend — followed by a synthesized narrative that ties the themes together. The layout does not reshuffle when you re-synthesize; regenerating refreshes the content, never the structure.

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Keeping it current

Click Synthesise to regenerate the project’s knowledge after new sessions complete. The synthesis pass re-reads the project’s sessions and imported sources and refreshes the narrative while preserving the stable structure.

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Building on past sessions

Once a project has one or more completed sessions, Harmonica turns that accumulated knowledge into starting ground for the next conversation. There are two ways it does this, one automatic and one deliberate.

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Inherited project memory

Every new session you start inside a project silently begins from what the project already knows. Harmonica assembles the project’s settled points, open tensions, and recurring themes (the same material you see on the Knowledge tab) into quiet background context for the facilitator, so a new session does not start from a blank slate. Participants never see this as a script. It is prior ground the facilitator builds on, not an agenda it forces. You control it from the Inherited by new sessions card on the project’s Knowledge tab. The card shows exactly what a new session would inherit, and an editor can toggle it off to make new sessions start fresh. It turns on automatically once the project has at least one concluded session with settled ground.

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Reflection sessions anchored on the project

Sometimes you want people to react to where the whole project has landed, not just start another open conversation. From the same Inherited by new sessions card, an editor can click Start a reflection session. This creates a new session anchored on the project’s accumulated map: participants are shown the settled points and open tensions from across the project’s sessions and are facilitated to confirm them, correct them, or add what is missing. It is the explicit counterpart to inherited memory, useful for a checkpoint after several sessions or for bringing new people up to speed on where a body of work stands.

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Project context sources

Like an individual session, a whole project can carry context sources — reference material the facilitator draws on across every session in the project. Open the Sources button in the project header to attach files or an MCP server at the project level; they apply to every session in the project, ahead of each session’s own sources. The project view also lists the sources attached to individual sessions inside it (read-only), so you can see the full body of material feeding the project’s knowledge in one place. See Context sources for the available source types and limits.

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Publishing a project as a public page

You can publish a project as a public Broad Listening page, where anyone with the link can read its synthesized opinion landscape and react to the statements it surfaced — agree, disagree, or pass — without an account. Publishing is a deliberate action from the project’s public settings, and you control the page’s slug, intro, and theme. Projects can also be created and published programmatically through the API. See Broad Listening for the full walkthrough — publishing, the opinion landscape, and getting listed on the public hub.

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Best practices

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Project status

Projects can have different statuses:

• Active: Currently in use, visible on your dashboard
• Archived: Set aside — hidden from your active dashboard but fully preserved and reversible
• Deleted: Marked for deletion (will be removed)

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Archiving a project

When a project is finished but you want to keep its sessions and accumulated knowledge, archive it instead of deleting it. Archiving removes the project from your active dashboard without touching any of its data — no sessions, summaries, or knowledge are lost. Open a project’s menu (from its dashboard card or the project page) and choose Archive. Archived projects drop out of the default dashboard view; you can surface them again and unarchive at any time to bring the project back to active. Use archiving to keep your dashboard focused on live work while holding on to completed projects for reference. Unlike deletion, it is fully reversible.

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Nested projects

Projects can have parent-child relationships:

• Create sub-projects for more granular organization
• Maintain hierarchy for complex projects
• Track relationships between related work

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Exporting project data

You may be able to export:

• Project summaries
• All sessions within a project
• Aggregated insights
• Participant data (with appropriate permissions)

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Troubleshooting

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Can’t create a project

• Check permissions: Ensure your account has permission to create projects
• Try refreshing: Sometimes a page refresh resolves temporary issues
• Contact support: If problems persist, reach out to hello@harmonica.chat

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Sessions not appearing in project

• Check project settings: Verify the session is actually added to the project
• Filter settings: Check if any filters are hiding the session
• Refresh: Try refreshing the page

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Can’t share project

• Check visibility settings: Ensure the project isn’t set to private if you want to share it
• Verify permissions: Make sure you have admin access to the project
• Try the share link: Use the project’s share link if direct sharing isn’t working

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Related guides

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