> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aciona.me/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Rotation, participants and timezones
> How participant order, rotation type and timezone determine who is on call.
## Participant order matters twice
Schedule participants have an explicit **position**. That order is used at two different moments:
At each handoff, responsibility moves to the next participant in the list. After the last one, it wraps back to the first.
When nobody acknowledges an incident in time, aciona.me pages the **next participant in the list** after the current owner. If the current owner is the last one, escalation runs out.
Order people the way you would want them paged in sequence. If the most experienced person should be the second target, put them right after whoever goes first.
## Adding and removing participants
Only team members can be participants in that team's schedule. When adding someone new, review their position — inserting in the middle changes the escalation sequence.
Removing someone from a team does **not** remove them from the schedule automatically. After any change to team composition, check the participant list.
## Timezones
The timezone is configured per schedule, not per person or per organization. It governs:
* The time at which the weekly handoff happens.
* How the rotation start is interpreted.
* How coverage periods are displayed in the dashboard.
Use IANA identifiers: `America/Sao_Paulo`, `America/New_York`, `UTC`, `Europe/Lisbon`.
Teams distributed across countries usually work better with **one schedule per region**, each in its own timezone, than with a single schedule trying to cover them all.
## When the rotation resolves nobody
If, at the moment the alert arrives, the schedule cannot point at a valid participant — inactive schedule, no participants, or participants who are no longer active members — the incident is still created, but **with no owner**, and the organization owners are notified.