The facilitator role

LEMA Chat has a built-in Facilitator role, and a clear vision for what a facilitator should be able to do. It's important to be honest about the gap between that vision and what's enforced today — so this page marks each capability Shipped or Coming soon.

What's shipped

The Facilitator is one of the platform's built-in roles. Today it carries the Member capabilities plus the ability to manage categories (organise the folder/category structure a session lives in).

The facilitation mechanics you actually run a session with are shipped — they just aren't gated behind a special facilitator power yet. Any participant with the right permissions can:

• Run widgets — polls, word clouds, sortboxes. (Shipped)
• Branch to a SideChat — move a thread into its own linked room. (Shipped)
• Capture findings and commit resolutions — close a conversation with a durable outcome. (Shipped)
• Convene deliberation — /council, /council-nc, /board. (Shipped)

So you can facilitate a full session today; the tools exist and work.

What's coming soon

The granular, facilitator-only powers are designed but not yet enforced as role capabilities. Treat these as roadmap, not current behaviour:

• manage_resolutions — resolution control as a distinct facilitator power (today it rides on general permissions). (Coming soon)
• move_to_sidechat as a gated facilitator capability. (Coming soon — the action itself works; the dedicated permission does not exist yet.)
• facilitate_sessions — live session control: pause, mute, and orchestrated breakouts (timed simultaneous rooms). This is called out in the code as a separate build and is not implemented. (Coming soon)

Don't rely on enforced session control yet

If your process depends on being able to force participants to pause, mute a speaker, or push everyone into timed breakout rooms, that enforcement does not exist today. You facilitate by convention and by the shipped tools above, not by hard session-control powers.

Where roles are configured

Roles (including Facilitator) and their assignment to members are managed in the Admin console. See Groups & roles.