How to run an architecture design workshop with dot voting
Use a sketchboard for the stage before a model exists: get everything onto the board without worrying whether it is valid, then run a voting session that ends with a decision rather than a photograph of a wall.
When this is useful
- The design has not been chosen yet and drawing a model would prematurely commit to one.
- A workshop generates thirty ideas and then trails off without agreeing which three matter.
- You need the messy stage recorded somewhere other than a phone photo of a whiteboard.
Before you start
- A sketchboard rather than a diagram. These are separate on purpose — a sketchboard has no model behind it, which is exactly what makes it usable when nothing is decided.
- The people who get a vote, in the session. Voting after the fact, asynchronously, produces a different and usually worse result.
Step 1: Open a sketchboard
Create a sketchboard from the home screen. It opens as a freeform canvas with no schema to satisfy: notes, freehand strokes, polylines and shapes, none of which have to be valid.
Resist the urge to start in a diagram. The moment a canvas requires valid entities, people start editing their idea to fit the tool instead of writing it down.
Step 2: Get everything onto the board
Run the divergent part of the session: everything goes up, nothing is filtered. Freehand and notes are deliberately low-effort so that writing an idea down costs less than arguing about whether it is worth writing down.
Group the related ones afterwards, not while they are arriving. Sorting during collection suppresses the ideas that do not obviously fit anywhere, which are often the useful ones.
Step 3: Start a voting session and set the vote limit
Start a session and choose how many votes each person gets — 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10. The limit is the mechanism: scarcity is what forces a group to rank rather than approve of everything.
Whoever starts the session is the host. Pick the limit deliberately — 3 votes across twenty ideas produces a sharp result; 10 votes produces a flat one.
Step 4: Let the group vote, then end the session
Everyone allocates their votes and the leaderboard updates live, so the group can see convergence happening rather than waiting for a tally.
The host ends the session. This is the step that matters: an unended session is how a workshop trails off with everyone assuming somebody else recorded the outcome.
Step 5: Formalise what won
Take the ideas that survived and build them as a real diagram, with the model, standards and validation the rest of the product provides. The sketchboard stays as the record of how the decision was reached.
Page ▸ Entity / TablePage ▸ ConnectorPage ▸ Note
What happens next
You have both artefacts: a decision, and the reasoning that produced it. Six months later the second one is usually the harder to reconstruct and the more valuable.
The formalised diagram picks up everything the sketchboard deliberately lacked — validation, versioning, review, impact analysis.
Example
A session on how to split a monolith: eleven candidate boundaries on the board, three votes each across seven people, and two boundaries clearly ahead of the rest. Those two became the first diagram; the other nine stayed on the board as the record of what was considered and rejected.
Tips
- Set the vote limit lower than feels comfortable. A group given plenty of votes spreads them, and a flat leaderboard is not a decision.
- Do not tidy the board before voting. What looks like a duplicate to the facilitator is often two different ideas to the people who wrote them.
- End the session in the room. The leaderboard at the moment everyone was still present is the result; anything after that is a different, quieter vote.
Limitations
- A sketchboard has no model behind it. Nothing on it participates in validation, lineage or impact analysis — that is the trade being made, not an oversight.
- Voting is per session on one board. It is a convergence mechanism for a workshop, not a general-purpose polling tool.