Administering Ronde

This guide is for the people who run Ronde for an organisation: the administrator of a self-hosted instance, and the owners and admins of a workspace (in the cloud or on your own server). To install Ronde, start with the self-hosting guide.

The instance

The first account created on a new instance becomes its administrator. The administrator opens Server administration from the workspace menu, top left (/admin), where they can:

• see how many accounts, workspaces and meetings the instance holds;
• pick the default language, used when neither the person nor their browser asks for one Ronde speaks;
• decide who may create an account;
• enter or remove the license key.

Values saved on this page take precedence over the environment variables. Each workspace's own settings (members, roles, security) stay in its Settings.

In the cloud, Ronde's team runs the server: there is no Server administration, anyone may create an account, and each workspace's plan comes from its subscription.

Who can create an account

The same choice can be made with SIGNUP_POLICY (invite-only, domains, open) and SIGNUP_ALLOWED_DOMAINS.

License key

Team and Enterprise features turn on with a license key, set in Server administration or with the RONDE_LICENSE variable (the variable wins and locks the field). The key is checked on the server, offline: nothing is sent anywhere. The page shows the plan, the customer, the expiry date and how many seats are used.

• A seat is a person who took part in a meeting in the last 30 days, as on Ronde's cloud. Someone invited who never came, or away for the month, uses none, and a person in several workspaces (with the same account, or the same address) counts once.
• The highest count of each license is kept while it works (active, or in its grace period), counted every night and on each visit of the page. It is what the renewal counts. A new key starts its own count, and the page still shows the previous license's highest count, to settle it.
• More people than seats: nothing is blocked. The page says so, and the difference is settled at the renewal.
• Expired: a grace period of 14 days keeps everything working. After it, the paid features become read-only: what they hold stays readable, nothing new can be added. Community features are never affected.
• The ronde-ce image is built from the open-source code alone and cannot read a license key: use the ronde image for Team or Enterprise.

Schools and universities get a free Enterprise license: write to hello@joinronde.com from your institution's address.

Hiding the paid plans

Admins see discreet hints about the paid features in the settings (never during a meeting). Set RONDE_HIDE_UPGRADE_HINTS=1 to remove them from the whole instance.

Feedback from users

The speech-bubble button at the top of the pages (in the account menu on phones) lets people report a problem or share an idea, with a screenshot if they want. With the message go the page's address (without its query), the browser, the window size, the language and Ronde's version. The administrators read the messages in Server administration, answer by email the people who asked for it, and can open a pre-filled issue on the Ronde project for a problem of Ronde itself. When SENTRY_DSN is set, the messages also reach that Sentry project as user feedback. Messages are deleted after a year; RONDE_FEEDBACK=off removes the button.

Workspaces

A workspace holds a team's people, meetings, templates and connectors. Anyone allowed to sign up can create one; a person can belong to several. Its settings are under Settings in the sidebar:

Roles

Each member has one workspace role:

Each person in a meeting also has a meeting role:

The person who creates a meeting is its host. With Enterprise, custom roles add permissions to members and guests; their meeting permissions apply to every meeting of the workspace.

People and invitations

The directory is shared by every meeting of the workspace: a person's name, birthday (day and month only), job category and accounts on GitLab or GitHub are entered once. People can be added without an account, for a meeting where they do not sign in; inviting them sends an email with a link valid for 14 days. Removing a member ends their access; their check-ins and history stay with the workspace. With SCIM, people deactivated in your directory lose their access the same way.

Absences

Each person can add their absences on their profile (people managers can do it for anyone): a first and a last day, a note, and who runs the meetings they host meanwhile. During an absence the person is marked absent from the sessions of those days, gets no reminders, and their profile shows when they are back. The person named as a stand-in gets a notification and runs the meetings as their host, for those days only.

Margin between meetings

In the General tab, Margin between two meetings (none, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes) is kept free before and after each meeting of a person. "Find a slot" respects it, and the schedule of a meeting flags the dates that come too close to another meeting of the same people.

Sign-in and single sign-on

The Community edition offers email and password accounts, sign-in links by email, two-factor authentication, Google, GitHub and Microsoft accounts, and one OpenID Connect provider for the instance (OIDC_* variables, see the self-hosting guide).

Each person manages how they sign in from their account, under Sign-in and security: password, passkeys (Face ID, Windows Hello, a password manager or a security key), two-step verification, and signing out everywhere. Passkeys are tied to the domain of APP_URL, which must use HTTPS: after a change of domain, people add them again. An address that must use single sign-on can neither add nor use a passkey.

With Enterprise, the Security tab of a workspace adds:

1. Verified domains. Add your email domain and the DNS record shown, then verify it. A verified domain can:
   • capture new accounts: anyone signing up with an address of the domain joins the workspace as a member;
   • require single sign-on: its addresses sign in with your provider only, with no password and no email link. Check that the provider works for you before turning this on.
2. Identity providers, OpenID Connect or SAML (Okta, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Keycloak…), for the addresses of your verified domains. The page gives the redirect URI or the reply URL (ACS) and the entity ID to enter on the provider's side.
3. Company directory (LDAP or Active Directory). People sign in with their directory password. Ronde looks them up with a service account and checks their password without keeping it. Use ldaps://, or ldap:// with StartTLS.
4. Provisioning (SCIM). Your directory (Okta, Entra ID, JumpCloud…) creates people, keeps their name and address up to date, and removes them when they leave. The tab gives the SCIM endpoint and a token.

An instance behind an authenticating reverse proxy can trust the address it passes in a header instead (AUTH_TRUSTED_EMAIL_HEADER); only do this when nothing else can reach Ronde.

Meetings

Owners and admins can keep meeting creation to organizers and admins in the General tab. Each meeting then has its own settings, open to its hosts: schedule, people and roles, check-in sections, agenda, modules, appearance, notifications, video call and integrations. A meeting can be saved as a workspace template, without its people, history or tokens.

A meeting starts with its template's emoji, shown next to its name in the menus; under Settings › Appearance, its hosts pick another emoji or upload an image (a logo, a team photo).

Sessions on the spot

Start now, on a meeting's card, holds a session right away, outside the schedule: the team is told (bell, and the "session started" notification rules), and the control room opens. The session is dated today; the date it was planned for stays in the schedule. Starting from the control room a session prepared for another day does the same.

Sample meeting

Before its first meeting, a workspace's home offers a sample one: a weekly sync with a fictitious team of five, a month of archived sessions with their minutes, stats and actions, and a session ready to run, all in the workspace's language. It is there to try everything: it sends nothing (no reminder, email, calendar entry or notification), costs no seat, ticks none of the first steps and stays out of the workspace's insights and reports. A banner on its pages says so, and Delete the sample removes it for good with its fictitious team (someone of that team added to another meeting stays). Its people show as Sample in the directory and cannot be invited.

Public holidays

In the General tab, a workspace picks the public holidays of a country, and of a region where they differ (a German state, a Spanish community…); a new workspace starts with those of its time zone's country. A session that falls on one of them is skipped: the next date is prepared, reminders and calendars follow, and the schedule names the holiday. In its schedule, a meeting can follow other holidays or none, and its host can still hold or move each skipped session. Holidays come from the date-holidays project, based on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Guest links

In a meeting's settings, People › Guest links creates a secret link for people without an account (a client, a board, a partner). It opens the shared screen, live and read-only, until it expires (1 to 90 days) or a host revokes it. The link is shown once, when it is created; Ronde only keeps its hash.

Projects and portfolio

The Projects page of a workspace holds its portfolio: each project, subject or workstream with a one-line summary, a description, a theme, a status, a health (on track, at risk, off track), a lead, the people working on it, dates and links. Members can create projects; their lead and the admins edit them. A project's page gathers what every meeting said about it, session by session, for the people who can read those meetings.

Each project can have a logo, beside its name and on its step in meetings: click its mark on the project's page to pick an image; without one, its initials stand on its colour. An import brings the tool's own image: a GitHub organization's avatar, a GitLab project's or a Jira project's. Those who can edit the project change or remove it.

A meeting follows projects in Settings › Projects. Each project followed gets a tab in everyone's check-in, with a shared sheet: the health and the message of the day, written by the people working on it. Add the Project round block to the agenda to give each project its own turn, where its people speak together; without it, the items about a project are presented in each person's turn. The Portfolio review and Team and projects templates start with it. With Team, a dashboard shows the health of every project week by week, the due dates and the projects gone quiet, exports it as CSV and adds the projects to watch to the email report. With Enterprise, a project can belong to another one, which becomes a programme (three levels at most), be seen by its members only, and let its members edit it, not only its lead.

Import, on the same page, brings projects from your tools: the repositories of a GitHub organization or the projects of a GitLab group, the milestones of a GitHub repository or a GitLab project (each named "repository · milestone"), the epics of a Jira project, or Linear's projects. Pick the ones to bring in; those already in the portfolio are recognised, and an item comes in once. The token typed there serves that import only and is not kept:

• GitHub: none for public repositories; for private ones, a fine-grained token that can read them (Metadata, and Issues for milestones).
• GitLab: none for public groups and projects; otherwise a personal, group or project access token with the read_api scope.
• Jira: an API token of the account whose email is given (id.atlassian.com › Security › API tokens).
• Linear: a personal API key.

Members import from github.com, gitlab.com, Atlassian Cloud and Linear; importing from another server (GitHub Enterprise, a self-managed GitLab, Jira Data Center) and through the issue trackers saved in the workspace settings is for the workspace's administrators. With Team, importing through such a tracker keeps the projects in sync every hour: their name, status, dates and progress follow the tool, what the tool does not give stays as set in Ronde (a repository gives its name, and is marked done once archived), and their progress shows on the cards and in meetings while it is current. The project's page offers Update now and Stop syncing. Sync stops for good with Stop syncing, when the tracker is removed or points to another server, and pauses while the workspace is not on Team. An item the tool no longer finds (deleted, or out of the token's reach) is tried again once a day. Archived projects are not updated until they are restored.

Modules

Every facilitation module is free: icebreaker, team mood, usefulness vote, reactions, raised hands, kudos, spotlight, wheel and random draws, birthdays, sounds, timebox, polls, parking lot, decision log, retrospective, planning poker and async meetings. A module turned off in a meeting disappears from its control room, shared screen and check-ins; its settings are kept.

The usefulness vote asks everyone, at the wrap-up, how useful the meeting was (1 to 5 stars, from their screen or phone). The average shows from 3 ratings, so that no one's rating can be guessed; it goes into the minutes and the stats. The templates of short daily meetings, one-on-ones and formal bodies (steering committee, boards, class council, site meeting, case review, incident review) leave it off.

Exports

Pages that list things export them for a spreadsheet: Export as CSV on the Actions page (every action of the view, also those done more than two weeks ago), the Decisions page (with its search and meeting filter), a meeting's Stats (one line per session) and, with Team, the Insights table and the portfolio dashboard. Minutes download as Markdown or PDF from the History. The files open straight into columns in Excel, LibreOffice or Numbers, in the person's language (";" and a decimal comma in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian), and a text that looks like a formula stays text.

Notifications

Connectors are the channels where meetings can post: email, Matrix (Tchap), Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Mattermost, or a webhook signed with HMAC. Owners and admins add them in the General tab of the workspace. Each meeting then chooses, in its Notifications settings, which events go to which connector: a session soon, started or ended, minutes published, a check-in reminder, an overdue action, a birthday.

Every Monday from 08:00 (workspace time zone), each member gets a weekly summary by email: their sessions of the week with a link to each check-in, their open follow-up actions and the kudos they received. It is sent only when there is something in it; each person turns it off in their account or with the link at the bottom of the email. On a self-hosted instance it needs SMTP_URL; RONDE_WEEKLY_PER_RUN (150 by default) caps the emails sent per hour, the others go the next hour.

With Team, notification workflows add conditions and your own wording to each message, and two more connectors send SMS and WhatsApp messages through Twilio: enter the Account SID, the sender number and the auth token. Messages go to the mobile numbers people enter on their profile (international form, +33…), and never to people who are away. For WhatsApp, the sender must be approved in Twilio, and WhatsApp only lets a business write first with a template Meta approved: create one in Twilio's Content Template Builder with two variables (the message, then the link) and enter its Content SID in the connector. When a workspace leaves Team, these messages stop and the log of each meeting says why.

Check-in by email: when the instance reads a mailbox (INBOUND_IMAP_URL, see the self-hosting guide), the reminder says that a reply works. Each section's name on a line, the items under it: the lines are added to the person's check-in (never replacing anything), and an email confirms what went in. Only replies from the address the reminder went to (or the person's account) count, for 14 days; observers and the sample meeting are left out.

Push notifications: once the instance has its keys (see the self-hosting guide), everyone can install Ronde from their browser (or add it to an iPhone's home screen) and, in their account, turn notifications on for each device: their turn coming up during a live session, check-in reminders, and what lands in the bell. Each kind can be turned off, and the devices are listed there.

Integrations

Tokens and secrets entered in Ronde are encrypted with SECRET_KEY before they are stored, and never shown again. Keep that key safe: without it, they cannot be read back.

The tokens of accounts signing in with Google, GitHub, Microsoft or single sign-on are encrypted too, with AUTH_SECRET.

Slack

With Team, owners and admins click Add to Slack in the General tab and pick the channel for notifications. Then:

• check-in reminders arrive as direct messages, with a Fill in my check-in button that opens the meeting's sections in a Slack form; the answers are saved in Ronde as if typed on the page;
• the chosen channel becomes a connector, ready for the meetings' notification rules (minutes published, session soon…);
• /ronde shows each person their next sessions and open follow-up actions, visible to them only.

People are matched by email: their Slack account and their Ronde profile must share it. Those not found in Slack keep the email reminder. Disconnect removes the app from Slack and deletes the notification rules posting to its channel. On a self-hosted instance, the administrator first creates the instance's Slack app (see the self-hosting guide).

Microsoft Teams

An owner or admin downloads Ronde's app for Teams from the General tab; a Teams administrator uploads it to the organization's apps and adds it to a team. In its channel, Ronde posts a card: Link to Ronde opens Ronde, where the workspace is picked. From then on, check-in reminders go by personal message to the people found in the team (matched by their email), with a button that turns the message into the check-in's form; writing “ronde” to the app lists the person's next sessions and open actions; and the channel becomes a connector for the meetings' notification rules. Removing the app from the team, or Unlink in Ronde, stops it all, and reminders go back to email.

Notion and Confluence

Owners and admins add a wiki in the General tab: a Notion page shared with an internal integration (created at notion.so/profile/integrations; share the page with it from ••• › Connections), or a Confluence space, in the cloud (site, space key, the account's email and an API token from id.atlassian.com) or on a Data Center or Server (a personal access token). An optional parent page keeps the minutes together. Each meeting then picks its wiki under Settings › Integrations: at each archive, the minutes become a page named by the session's date and the meeting's name, with a link back to the history. Editing the summary updates the page; earlier sessions are published from the history, where a failed publication says why and can be tried again. Sample meetings publish nothing.

AI assistant and transcripts

With Team, the AI assistant drafts the summary of a session and suggests follow-up actions; the host reviews everything before it is saved. It uses an Anthropic API key: the instance's (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY) or the workspace's own.

Transcripts turn what is said during a session into text, filed under each round-table turn (what is said outside the round table stays unattributed). They need a speech-to-text service: OpenAI, or a Whisper server of your own (the whisper profile of the Compose file runs one on the same machine). Each meeting must allow them in its settings, everyone sees a banner while a session is recorded, and each person can leave their turns out. The sound is deleted as soon as it is transcribed.

Audit log

With Team, the Audit log tab lists who changed what in the workspace over the last 90 days: settings, people, roles and meetings, with a CSV export. Enterprise keeps the whole history, and can send each entry, signed, to a webhook connector for your SIEM or log platform.

Backups and upgrades

Everything Ronde keeps is in its PostgreSQL database. The self-hosting guide explains how to back it up, restore it and move to a new version.