Town Hall

A town hall room is built for the moments the whole company shows up to: the all-hands, the quarterly review, the launch, the webinar. It presents events as a browsable gallery of upcoming and past town halls, and gives each one its own page — banner, agenda, discussion, live status and running RSVP counts — instead of a calendar invite and four follow-up emails.

Where the event room handles team-scale happenings like offsites and lunch-and-learns, town hall is the big-room counterpart: an agenda of sessions, real broadcasting, speakers, recordings and per-event guest access. Most companies use both.

Create a town hall room

Click + in your space's sidebar and pick Town Hall. Set visibility at creation — everyone, or certain people — as with any room.

Events, sessions and stages

Three layers, and getting them straight makes the rest obvious:

• An event is the gathering: the all-hands, the conference day. It carries the when, who may attend, and the guest link.
• A session is one talk inside it. Sessions are the real happenings — they hold the broadcast, the chat and the RSVPs.
• A stage groups sessions into one continuous broadcast, so several talks can share a single stream URL, and gives the agenda a track heading.

An event with one session is the ordinary all-hands. An event with three stages and twenty sessions is a conference. Both are the same machinery.

Stage an event: draft → scheduled → live → ended

Every town hall moves through four states:

• Draft — build the event quietly: banner, agenda, sessions, timing. Nothing is announced while you stage it.
• Scheduled — it is announced and on the calendar.
• Live — doors open.
• Ended — it closes and moves to the past gallery with its page intact.

The staging flow means the quarterly business review can be fully prepared days ahead and switched on at the exact moment — no scrambling to assemble the page while people are arriving.

Five ways to broadcast

Each session chooses how it reaches people:

Broadcast type	What it means
Webinar	A third-party meeting attendees join by link. You can name the tool — Zoom meeting or webinar, Teams, Meet, Webex, GoToWebinar, BigMarker or other — which is shown to attendees.
Stream	A live stream embedded on the session's page.
Prerecorded	A video played at the scheduled time.
In person	A venue, with its name, address and notes.
Openbook live	Broadcast on the session page itself, with Openbook as the provider. No third-party tool at all.

An Openbook-live session carries its own status — idle, live, ended — and when it started, so the page shows whether the thing is actually happening.

The talk page

Each session has its own watch page, and it is more than a video embed:

• Chat, during and after, with file attachments.
• Likes, so the session's reception is visible.
• Tags on the session.
• The live status, when Openbook is doing the broadcasting.

Recordings

An Openbook-live broadcast can be recorded, and recordings are kept as their own list. A session can be broadcast more than once — going live again must not overwrite what was captured last time — so each broadcast is its own recording with its own title and length, and the session's replay link points at the latest one so links already shared keep working.

Recordings are kept with the rest of the organization's files, in the Bookbag account service, and deleting one removes the file as well as the row. They are usually the largest thing an organization stores, so they are the first place to look when the allowance runs out — see Storage and files.

A session can also link to a recording hosted somewhere else, as media.

Speakers

Speakers belong to the room, not to one event, so the same person can appear across several town halls without being re-entered.

A speaker is either a member of your organization, or an outside guest invited by email. A guest speaker gets a personalised link that lets them fill in their own name, headline, bio and photo without an account — the details you would otherwise chase by email, entered by the person who actually knows them.

That link expires. Past its expiry the guest loses access and is dropped from the sessions they were booked for, so a stale invitation does not stay a way in.

Speakers are then assigned to the sessions they present.

Media

Slides, documents and externally hosted recordings attach to the event or to a single session, as named links. It is how one page ends up answering every "where were the slides?" that would otherwise arrive by email the next morning.

Collect RSVPs

RSVPs are per session rather than per event, because sessions are what people actually decide about. The answers are going, maybe and no, and the tallies update live.

Organizers watch the counts move and know their room size before the day, without sending a single "please respond" reminder. Watch the going-to-maybe split rather than the total: a heavy maybe count is a signal about the timing or the pitch.

Invite guests from outside

Guest access is switched on per event. Turn it on and share the event's link, and customers, candidates or a community can attend that event — and see nothing else in your workspace. Guests reach the talk pages too, and can chat there.

Two switches sit alongside it:

• Allow replays — whether replay links show after the fact.
• Allow guest uploads — whether a guest may attach a file in chat. This is off by default, deliberately: a guest's upload is saved against your organization and spends the owner's account allowance, which is shared across every Bookbag product. Somebody with the link spending storage you also need in Madebook and Bookbag has to be a decision you make rather than the default.

Rotating the event's token revokes every copy of the guest link that has already gone out.

Analytics

Each event has an analytics view breaking RSVPs and likes down per session, so you can see which talk people actually came for rather than only how many came.

Keep the archive

Ended events stay in the past gallery with their pages intact — agenda, sessions, discussion, media and recordings included. Over time that becomes a history of the company on the record: new hires can browse every all-hands that came before them.

Tips

• Stage in draft as early as you like; only moving it on makes it the audience's business.
• Use stages when several talks share a stream. One embed URL on the stage beats pasting the same one onto six sessions.
• Invite outside speakers early. The personalised link means their bio arrives without a chase, and it expires, so early is cheap and late is not.
• Keep guest uploads off unless the event is genuinely a workshop where people need to share files.
• Don't delete ended events. The archive costs little and is the best onboarding artifact you didn't have to write.

FAQ

How is this different from the event room? Event is team-scale: one happening, an RSVP and a thread. Town hall is company-scale: an agenda of sessions, stages, speakers, real broadcasting, recordings and per-event guest access.

Do we need Zoom? No. An Openbook-live session broadcasts on the talk page itself. You can still use Zoom, Teams, Meet and the rest if you prefer — pick the webinar broadcast type and give the join link.

Can outsiders attend? Yes, per event. Switch on guest access and share the link. Guests see that event and nothing else.

What happens if we broadcast a session twice? Both recordings are kept. The session's replay link points at the most recent one, so links you already shared keep working.

Can a guest speaker edit their own bio? Yes — that is what the invitation link is for. It expires, and an expired link no longer grants anything.