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What is HARMONICA.md?

HARMONICA.md is a short markdown document that describes your organization, team, or community to Harmonica. It is scoped to you as a host — once set, it is injected into the facilitation prompt of every new session you create, so the AI facilitator arrives already knowing your vocabulary, your decision-making norms, and the context that would otherwise take a paragraph of copy-paste each time. Think of it as a standing brief for the AI: “Here is who we are and how we work.”
HARMONICA.md is available on Pro, LTD, and Enterprise plans. Free accounts can still run sessions; they just start without this layer.

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Where it lives

Go to Settings → Context. The editor on that tab is your HARMONICA.md. Changes you save there take effect on the next session you create — existing sessions are not retroactively affected.

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How it gets seeded

When you sign up, onboarding asks what brought you to Harmonica, who you bring together, what you want your sessions to produce and, optionally, what you are exploring. When you complete it, Harmonica turns those answers into a starter HARMONICA.md with one section for each question you answered. You are not locked into this draft; edit it freely. Harmonica writes the starter file only while your HARMONICA.md is empty, so it never replaces anything you have written. Skipping onboarding does not create one. To go back through onboarding later, open Settings → Context and use Open onboarding form under Onboarding details.

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What to put in it

A good HARMONICA.md typically has three to five short sections:
  • Who you are — a sentence or two about the team, company, or community
  • What you do — the mission or focus area
  • How you work — decision-making style, communication norms, meeting culture
  • Standing context — things every session should know (ongoing initiatives, terminology, recent decisions)
Keep it under a page. The facilitator reads the whole file on every turn, so a concise document is more effective than a comprehensive one.

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How it flows into sessions

When you create a new session, Harmonica assembles the facilitation prompt from several layers. HARMONICA.md is the outermost layer — it wraps the session-specific goal and approach so the facilitator’s voice stays consistent with your organizational context. The full prompt stack at creation time (outermost to innermost):
  1. HARMONICA.md — organizational context (this file)
  2. Platform Guidelines — base facilitation rules
  3. Facilitation Approach — methodology-specific instructions for this session
  4. Summary Generation — how to synthesize participant responses
You can inspect and edit all four layers from the Session Design tab inside any session. See Session Design for details.

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Edit your HARMONICA.md

1

Open Settings

Click your account icon in the top right and select Settings.
2

Go to the Context tab

Select the Context tab. Your current HARMONICA.md appears in the editor.
3

Edit and save

Update the content. Click Save when done. The file has a 10,000-character limit — it is intentionally a concise reference document, not a knowledge base.
You can use standard markdown in HARMONICA.md — headings, bullet lists, and bold text all render correctly when the facilitator processes them.

Managing projects

Organize sessions into projects

Session Design

Inspect and edit all four prompt layers for a session

Creating sessions

How HARMONICA.md flows into new sessions

Templates

Start from a pre-built methodology