What is a Section?

A Section is a persistent collection of Places. Where a Group is the "people" side of Eventene, a Section is the "places" side. Sections are most often used to manage seating, room placements, table assignments, or similar location-based coordination during an Event.

Sections are a deliberate part of the platform — used by organizations that need to assign participants to specific spots within an Event. Not every Program uses them. If your Event has no concept of "where each person goes," you can ignore Sections entirely.

Places and Spots

A Section is made up of Places. A Place is one location, role, or slot. Examples:

A table at a banquet (Place: Table 1, with 10 Spots)
A classroom at a training event (Place: Room 204, with 25 Spots)
A volunteer role at a fundraiser (Place: Check-in Desk, with 3 Spots)
A breakout session room (Place: Workshop A, with 30 Spots)

Each Place has a Spots count — the number of participants it can hold. When you assign participants to Places, Eventene tracks how many Spots are filled and how many remain.

Sections vs Groups

Sections and Groups are parallel but distinct:

	Group	Section
Holds	People	Places
Used for	Access and registration	Assignments and placements
Persists across Events?	Yes	Yes
Has Subgroups / Subsections?	Subgroups	Subsections
Filtered by	Rule-based Subgroups	Rule-based Subsections
Referenced from	Activities (for access)	Activities (for Assignments)

A single Event can reference both — for example, a "Welcome Dinner" Activity can reference the All Attendees Group (who can attend) and the Banquet Tables Section (where they'll be seated).

Main Sections and Subsections

Like Groups, Sections have two layers:

A Main Section is the source-of-record collection of Places
A Subsection is a filtered view of a Main Section, defined by Rules

Use a Subsection when you want to work with only part of a Main Section — for example, "Tables 1–10 reserved for VIP guests."

How Assignments work

When an Activity references both a Group (people) and a Section (places), the Assignments workflow becomes available. Organizers can:

See which participants are Attending the Activity
Assign each participant to a specific Place
View who's been assigned where and how many Spots remain
Track unassigned participants (people who are Attending but haven't been placed)

Assignments appear in the Mobile App for organizers and Event Staff at runtime, and in the Web App for organizers configuring placements before the Event.

Common use cases

Banquets and dinners — assign guests to tables
Conferences with breakout sessions — assign attendees to session rooms
Volunteer events — assign volunteers to roles or stations
Classes and trainings — assign students to classrooms or groups
Tournaments — assign teams or competitors to courts/fields

When you probably don't need Sections

Skip Sections if your Event doesn't have meaningful "where" coordination:

Open conferences where attendees self-select sessions
Networking events without seating
Webinars and virtual events
Simple sign-ups where everyone goes to the same place

A note on terminology

Sections were originally part of the broader "Lists" concept in v1 (before there was a separation between people and places). In v2.1 (February 2019), Lists were split into Groups (for People) and Sections (for Places), with corresponding Main/Sub layers. Older customer documentation may still reference "Lists of Places" — that's today's Sections.