How a live meeting works
Running a meeting involves two screens with sharply divided jobs:
- The display screen — read-only, made for the projector. Before the meeting it shows the planned schedule; during it, the big color-coded timer.
- The control screen — a phone-sized remote, and the only place the meeting can be changed from: start, finish, pause, skip, end.
A third page, the report, works both after the meeting and during it as a “report so far”.
Nothing happens by itself
Section titled “Nothing happens by itself”OpenSpeak never auto-advances. When an item’s time is up, the timer goes red and the phone beeps — but the item keeps running until a human taps Finish. When an item finishes, the next one waits to be started. The gap between — applause, walking to the stage, setup — is real meeting time, and it’s tracked and reported as “in between” time rather than blamed on any item.
Every screen stays in sync
Section titled “Every screen stays in sync”All meeting pages poll the server every second, so a tap on the phone shows on the projector within a second. There’s no pairing and no session:
- Open the display and control pages on as many devices as you like. Several people can hold the controls — the last tap wins.
- Idle pages notice when someone starts the meeting elsewhere and switch to the live view by themselves.
- The full meeting state lives on the server, so any device can reload, crash, or join late without losing anything — reopen the URL and you’re back exactly where the meeting is.
Timer colors
Section titled “Timer colors”The timer reads like Toastmasters timing cards, and the colors are identical in every palette:
| Color | When |
|---|---|
| White | From start |
| Green | Elapsed time reaches min |
| Yellow | Elapsed time reaches expected |
| Red | 30 seconds before max |
Thresholds you didn’t set are skipped — an item with only an expected time goes white → yellow. Reaching max also triggers a double beep, on the control screen only.
Time is shown as MM:SS, switching to H:MM:SS past an hour.
Pause freezes the timer on every device (with a “PAUSED” caption) and stops the clock fairly: paused time is excluded from elapsed time everywhere — the live timer, the beep threshold, and the report’s Actual column. A speaker interrupted by a fire alarm loses nothing.