Welcome to Pourover¶
Pourover runs weekly coffee pairings for your team. Once a week (or at whatever rhythm you choose), everyone on your roster is matched with a colleague for a short coffee chat, and each person gets an email naming their partner. You bring the names; Pourover does the matching, the emailing, and the remembering.
Who this guide is for¶
- Organizers — you have (or want) a Pourover account and run pairings for a team, a community, or an office. Most of this guide is for you.
- Participants — someone added you to their roster, or you got a pairing email and want to change how often you take part. You don't need an account; see For participants.
How Pourover thinks¶
A few ideas come up on every page, so it's worth meeting them once:
Your roster is yours alone. Everything you create — people, pairings, history — is private to your account. No other organizer can see it.
Consent comes first. Adding someone with an email address doesn't put them in the pairings; it sends them one invitation with a choice. Nobody is paired — or emailed again — until they say yes, and every email they ever receive carries a personal link to step out. See Invitations & consent.
Participants never need accounts. Email is their whole interface: an invitation to accept, then one pairing announcement per round. Nothing to install, no workspace to join.
Matching has a memory. The matcher avoids pairing people who met recently, and only allows a repeat when the roster leaves no other way. When the group is odd, it makes exactly one trio.
Weeks are the unit of work. Each round of pairings belongs to a week (always keyed to a Monday). A week moves from draft to locked or sent; locked and sent weeks count as history so nobody gets rematched too soon.
The five pages¶
Once you're logged in, the navigation bar has five stops:
| Page | What it's for |
|---|---|
| This week | The pairing board for the next cycle — generate, adjust, and send. See The week board. |
| History | Every past week and its status. |
| Roster | The people — add, pause, remove, and see who has accepted. See The roster page. |
| Requests | Opt-out requests from participants, waiting for your approval. See Opt-out requests. |
| Settings | Cadence, automatic sending, and AI pairing instructions. See Settings & automatic sending. |
The short version¶
- Create an account and activate it from your email.
- Add your people — paste a list straight from Outlook or a spreadsheet. Invitations go out; acceptances trickle in on their own.
- When you're ready, open This week, press Generate pairings, glance at the groups, and press Finalize and send the email.
- Optionally, turn on automatic sending and let Pourover run the whole ritual without you.