Imagine you are sitting in a weekly meeting. As always, topics have piled up, and you spend the first ten minutes discussing what to discuss first. Sounds familiar? With version 18.0, planned for December 2026, OpenProject will publish vote-based sorting of agenda items in meetings to let the whole team decide what comes first. A quick up or down vote on each item, and the agenda reflects what’s most important to everyone in the room — not just the loudest voice.
This article explains how the new feature works, how the idea emerged from within OpenProject, and how you can use it with methods such as Lean Coffee.
About vote-based sorting
For most of us, meetings are an essential part of our workday — where decisions are made and information is exchanged. In the Meetings module of OpenProject, you can add one-time and recurring meetings, use templates, attach files, and much more.
Although it is possible for everyone to add topics to a meeting (provided that the person has the required permissions), the items normally stay in a first-come-first-served order. But of course, this isn’t always the best way to work through the topics in a meeting. The first option is to manually reorder the items, which is normally a task of the host. But what if the meeting host isn’t sure which topics are most important?
With OpenProject 18.0, we’ll introduce the vote-based sorting mode. After activation, participants can vote for agenda items by giving a thumbs up or down, and the items get automatically reordered. The number of votes (downvotes count as negative votes) is shown while hovering over the respective item.
Screenshot: Hovering over agenda items to vote and see the current rating. Please note that this feature is still under development, and the exact design may change before its release.
This feature makes it easy to agree asynchronously on a common priority ranking even before the meeting begins. This takes some pressure off the host and makes the meeting more productive — and any items that can no longer be addressed can be moved to the agenda backlog. It favors a community-centered approach where the meeting agenda isn’t determined from the top down, and opens up the possibility of implementing several methods in OpenProject.
An idea sparked by passion (time)
Requests for new features often come from our customers or our Community. It’s our product team’s job to prioritize and organize these requests, which is how we create our annual roadmap. But at OpenProject, we also “eat our own dogfood” — which means we also use OpenProject for our own development work and planning. That’s why there are always features that our employees are asking for in particular. Features that might be small and not part of any roadmap.
Once a year, all our employees have the opportunity to work on projects they’d like to see implemented in OpenProject: during our Passion Time. The ideas must be pitched so employees from different departments can join and teams can implement their passion projects in OpenProject within two weeks. This is how vote-based sorting of agenda items was brought to life in OpenProject.
“This feature will come in handy whenever you don’t yet know which topics are most relevant. That’s the case, for example, with our daily open door meeting between developers and designers. Everyone brings topics to the table. And with the voting feature, we’ll know right at the start of the meeting what to discuss first.” — Oliver Günther, Senior Software Engineer at OpenProject
If you want to read more about our last passion time in October 2026 and other passion projects, please refer to our article “Passion Time 2026: Two weeks to turn ideas into something real”. If you have ideas of your own on how to make OpenProject better, feel free to submit a feature request.
How to use the new feature in “Lean Coffee”
The method Lean Coffee was developed by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in 2009 and is a participatory approach to create an efficient meeting agenda. As the Lean Coffee website puts it, in meetings using the method “Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.”
Lean coffee can be used in different ways, depending on group size, time, and location. Here, we will show you how to implement Lean Coffee using the new vote-based sorting mode in OpenProject. The method may be slightly modified in parts — feel free to adapt it to your team’s needs as well.
- The host creates a meeting, invites participants, and sets the topic.
- Before or during the first few minutes of the meeting, participants can contribute topics. They can provide more detailed explanations in the descriptions of the agenda items or include links to work packages.
- Then the sorting mode is changed to vote-based order, and participants can vote on the agenda items (this can also be done before the meeting).
- Once voting is complete, the team can set time limits for each topic. If more discussion is needed, these limits can be adjusted.
- Outcomes can be defined for each agenda item, for example, in the form of a work package. Agenda items that are not completed are moved to the meeting backlog and can be voted on again at the next meeting.
Screenshot: Meeting agenda in the middle of the Lean Coffee process. The first topic with the most votes has already been covered, with outcomes added.
Conclusion
Vote-based ranking started as a small idea during our Passion Time, and with OpenProject 18.0, it will become available to everyone. Whether you run a classic Lean Coffee or simply want your team to agree on priorities before a meeting begins, the feature helps you spend meeting time on the topics that count.
