Creating a Community

Create a New Community

Click on Add Community in the bottom box of the left column on any page. If you are already in a community, you will be adding a sub-community to it. Otherwise you’ll be adding a top-level community.

Only leaders can add new communities. The creation process to follow is the same, but your community will require leader or coordinator approval (if you are requesting a top-level community). Once approved, the community is created just as if the leader created it.

IMPORTANT: A community creation process has two steps: data entry, and preview. One needs to click on Finish button in the preview step to create a community.

Community Settings

When creating a community, one can specify a number of settings to determine the behavior and properties of a community. You can change any of these settings at any time during community lifetime.

Title is a human friendly title for your community. This title will appear in a community directory, and preferably should be not too long, yet descriptive enough to entice someone to look into community’s content or to remember what the community was about.

Community Url is how the community will be addressed on the Internet. This is the address you will share to users so that they can access the community. The URL must be unique within PCO. The part you are specifying will also be used as a community short name: it will appear in community lists by that name, and will also be used for the left side of the email address by default. The name cannot contain anything other than characters, numbers, and underscore (_).

Community email address serves to submit discussion items via email. By default, it will be the same as the short name of the community if you leave this field empty. Otherwise enter a full email address in the form name@peopleconnector.org.

Purpose description helps others understand what your community is about. This text is exposed in the community directory. Make it short and descriptive and highlight what is unique or special about this community if you want to attract new members.

Community membership determines the security level of your community, or in other words, how can one gain access to community content.

  • A community open to all registered users allows access to anyone who already has a profile on PCO. Any member can visit a community with a simple click, and can also subscribe to receive community notifications with add to my communities link. This type of community is usually used to share resources of interest to all users of PCO.
  • Membership requires invitation or registration is the most used security model. The community with is closed, but any user or non-user can request membership (to be approved by community leader), and both leaders and members can invite other users to join. Non-members know of existence of a community, but cannot access its content, nor can contribute content.
  • Invisible to the users of the system is useful when one needs to hide a community – for example when using a community for team communication about financial issues, etc. A hidden community does not allow unsolicited membership requests, nor does the community appear in community directory. The only way to know of the community existence is to be invited as a member. Use this type of community for small groups.

Read only community does not allow any contributions, except requests for membership and requests to create sub-communities. One would create a read-only community as a root community for other users to request sub-communities.

Moderated community requires approval for all member content contributions. Leader contributions do not need approval. One can choose to moderate all content all the time, or only first contribution of each user. Once a member’s contribution has been approved, future contribution from that member do not require leader approval and are visible to all community members immediately. One can also choose not to moderate content, but to control who gets invited by other members by ticking Invitations sub-setting. This way, members can freely communicate, but adding new members requires leader’s agreement – invitations initiated by members will not go out to invitees unless approved by leader.

Content security has a few additional facets one can apply to a community:

  • A community can accept email from unregistered senders – normally, only community members can email discussions to a community. Sometimes, however, it makes sense to allow anyone to send messages to community’s email address – for example if a community is used for support, or one wants to survey a group of people for certain answers without requiring people to create a profile. Messages from non-members are always moderated, regardless of community’s moderation settings. This is a spam prevention measure.

  • One can also show list of community members so that other members can see who else is involved in a community. The list contains names, titles, and countries of community members, and does not expose sensitive details such as email address. Every member can control what gets shown in this list through public profile feature. Not showing the member list makes sense when dealing with sensitive topics, or if members belong to competing commercial organizations.

  • Most of the time, email notifications are distributed only with links to documents, to prevent large attachments clogging people’s mailboxes and slowing down their connection. Clicking on a link might require a log in to the system, which many users find annoying and unnecessary, especially if a document is not highly sensitive. Ticking do not require login for document download will allow email recipient to click on a link in the message and immediately start document download. The document statistics in that case might show anonymous download – that is, the system might not be able to tell you who exactly downloaded the document.

  • Ticking content available to authorized users will expose all content to everyone on the Internet. The pages will look the same as to a community member, but will be read-only – that is, non-members will be able to browse all community content, but only members will be able to contribute. This setting is useful if the group has implications for the wider audience, in which case membership primarily serves as spam-prevention measure.

  • A community can use a specific default language of the user interface and messages in email notifications and invitations. This setting does not determine the language of member-contributed content. A member is still able to content in any language. The language designator, however, might indicate to users browsing the directory the content of this community (even though this would usually be evident from title and description already). Leave on Automatic to let users' browser or language preference decide on the language of the user interface.

Tools determine the content type a member can contribute to a community. A leader can limit contributions to only certain type of content by checking off some of the boxes next to the content type.

Tags are descriptive labels one can use to better describe a community. Tags appear in community directory to help users understand the community focus. Enter as many words as you want, separated by a comma.

In addition to tags, one can classify a community based on its regional focus from predefined lists of countries and regions, and can also define which sector the community addresses. (These last three classifications might not be enabled on PCO).

Approving a Community

When a member requests a sub-community from an existing community, all community leaders will receive Action Required message to approve the community.

Requests for a top-level community will be sent to PCO coordinators.

Community does not exist until approved. If several users request communities with the same name or same email address, only the first-approved one will be successfully created. Approvals of other requests will fail with error message Community is not unique.