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Dashboards

A dashboard is one screen that answers "how are we doing?" — without anybody having to open five things and do sums in their head first.

It's a canvas of tiles — charts, single big numbers, timelines, boards — each reading from your own data. Open tasks by status. Progress against a deadline. What's on this week. A counter's current value.

Whatever the person who keeps asking the question actually needs to see, so that they stop asking.

An initiative dashboard

Dashboards only display

Nothing on a dashboard can be edited from it. That isn't a compromise we made — it's the entire point.

It means you can leave one running on a screen in the corner of the room, or send it to a board member, or hand a tablet to a volunteer, without the low background hum of anxiety that normally comes with handing somebody a live system.

The worst thing anyone can do to a dashboard is look at it.

Everyone sees their own version

Each tile shows you only what you're already allowed to see.

So two people can open the same dashboard and correctly see different numbers, and neither of them is looking at a bug.

The access rules you set on projects and documents follow straight through into the reporting — which means a dashboard is never the accidental side door to something somebody wasn't supposed to see.

Published figures

There is one case where that's wrong, and it's the case dashboards get built for: the number everybody in the room is supposed to be looking at. A total that's smaller for half the meeting isn't a total, it's an argument.

So under Settings → Published figures you can name a project the dashboard should show the same way to everyone who can open it. Name it once, and the tiles stop answering per person for those rows.

Four things hold:

  • You can only publish what you can open yourself. It hands on your reach, never more.
  • Whoever owns the project sees the share sitting on it, and can take it back whenever they like.
  • If you lose access, leave, or your account is suspended, it stops — the tiles go back to showing each person their own.
  • The dashboard says when it's on, so nobody has to wonder whose numbers they're reading.

Building one

From an initiative's sidebar: Dashboards → New dashboard. Add tiles, point each at what it should read, arrange them on the canvas.

Or skip the building entirely. The marketplace has ready-made dashboards you add in a couple of clicks and then adjust.

Usually faster than starting from a blank canvas, and often better, because somebody else has already spent a year discovering which four numbers actually matter and which nine just look impressive.

Steal a layout, then change it

A marketplace dashboard becomes an ordinary dashboard of yours the second you add it. Rename it, rearrange it, delete the tiles you don't like. Nothing phones home and nobody's feelings are hurt.

Pointing a tile at something

Two steps, and most people never leave the first.

Build is clicking. Pick what to read — tasks, documents, queue items, notices, events, your community's own people — then which columns, what to group them by, and what to narrow it to. The dashboard writes the query for you.

SQL is the tab beside it, for the question clicking can't describe. It's real SQL, with the tables and columns offered as you type and the statement checked as you pause. One thing to know before you start: once you've edited the text, that tile stays in SQL. The builder can't read arbitrary SQL back, so it stops trying rather than quietly mangling what you wrote.

Either way you can reach what a thing is attached to without writing a join. Tasks by the person assigned, by their status, by their project — pick the related column and the rest is worked out.

Narrowing it

The Filters rows say which rows a tile is about. Pick a field, how to compare it, what to compare it against. Bracket a few as any of these when "high or urgent, and mine" is the actual question.

Dates are asked as distances rather than as dates. A tile set to the next 30 days still means that next month, which is the whole difference between a dashboard and a screenshot.

A tile that's about whoever's looking

Wherever a filter wants a person, one of the choices is Me.

That doesn't mean you. It means whoever is looking at the tile. Place My open tasks once and everybody who opens that dashboard sees theirs — one tile, not one per person, and nobody's name stored inside it.

(A tile like that can't also be a published figure. A number that's different for everyone can't be the same for everyone.)

Boards

One of the tiles is a board: your tasks dealt into columns, and you say what a column stands for. A status. The people on the work, so everyone gets a column and you can see who is carrying what. Priority, project, tag — or one of your initiative's own properties, which is how you end up with a board columned by "Squad" or "Sprint" or whatever your group actually argues about.

A value that exists and has nothing in it still gets its column. An empty Blocked is information.

Like everything else here it only displays. There's nothing to drag a card onto — moving work between states is still a project's job.

Widgets from the marketplace

Some marketplace tiles are custom widgets. They run in an isolated sandbox and can only hand back something to draw — so a widget that misbehaves shows an error in its own tile while the rest of the page carries on as though nothing happened.

Where they show up

Dashboards live inside an initiative, next to its projects and documents, and share the same way — Viewer, Editor, Owner, or the whole initiative. Since "look at this" is the entire use case, they're often the one thing a group opens right up.

Each dashboard has its own comment thread, which is an excellent place to argue about what a number actually means. Switch it off under Settings → Details if you'd rather that argument happened somewhere else.