Create communities

There are many different ways to create a new community. We will demonstrate some of these ways using our three use cases above. We'll start with the "Astronomy Forum". If you are starting from scratch, do the following.

•      Select Community in the top menu of your personal workspace ('home folder'); this is the only place where you can create new communities in this way. The 'New Community' form contains several sections.

•      In the tab 'General' you enter the name of the new community (e.g. 'Hobby Astronomers') and optionally a description and keywords. The latter will also be displayed in the 'Other communities' folder for other users. The associated community workspace is created together with the new community. This workspace, initially empty, will appear in your personal workspace and you will be its owner and manager. The workspace will have the same name, description and keywords as the new community.

•      Next, select the 'admission policy' for the new community: open, closed or hidden. You should only create non-hidden communities if you are really sure that your communities are of interest to other users of your BSCW server. Non-hidden communities appear in the 'Other communities' list of every registered user of your BSCW server. In our case, we choose the open community because we want to encourage other users to join our community of hobby astronomers. The admission rules of a community can be changed later by a community manager. So if you think that enough members have joined your community, you can change its admission rule to 'closed'.

•      Finally, select the 'Community member role', i.e. the community role in which all community members access the community workspace. You should select a role that is appropriate for the purpose of your community. For example, if you want community members to be able to read the workspace content only, select the Restricted Member role; if you want them to contribute to the workspace content, select Associated Member as the role (the default role offered), which includes actions to modify the content. Note that the Member role gives community members the right to uninvite other members of the workspace, including the community itself, which you usually don't want. In our case, we would select the default Associate Member role because we expect future community members to contribute to the content of the community workspace, but not to modify its membership. The community role can be changed later by the community manager.

•      In the 'Members' tab you determine the initial members of the new community. If you already know some hobby astronomers who are users of your BSCW server, you could create your community by starting with these community members. When selecting members, you can use the same mechanisms as if you were inviting new members to a workspace. - with the difference that you cannot invite groups of members from other workspaces, only communities (see also 11.5 "Hierarchical organization of communities" on p. 163 and 11.6 Invite communities to member groups and vice versa). You as a community producer and manager are not automatically a member of the community, but you are of course a member of the community workspace in the role of manager.

•      The 'Automatic versioning' tab concerns the rules for automatic versioning of documents in the new collaborative workspace.

The new community workspace 'Hobby Astronomers' will appear in your personal workspace ('home folder'), but will not be listed under 'Communities of your-username' unless you are a member.

Normally, you would now create a structure with appropriate content for the workspace. Then you could either wait for other users to join your community or directly invite some astronomy interested users to join your community.

•      Click the icon  that appears in the 'Share' column of the community workspace entry to view the members of the community workspace. This icon generally indicates that a community is a member of a workspace.

•      Select  Add member access in the context menu of the community.

Next, let's consider our example bulletin board case. We assume that the workspace with the initial bulletin board content already exists to the tab, with you as the manager and some other users who should also provide input as members. You now add a community to this workspace that contains all your tab members (by default, you must be a manager of the workspace to do this).

•      Select  Add Access Community in the context menu of the workspace.

•      The new community that will become a member of the workspace will have the same name as the workspace.

•      In the 'Add community' form, select the 'Admission policy' for the new community: open, closed or hidden. In our case we choose the hidden community because we do not want to make the existence of the community known to all other users, but we want to invite the members of the community themselves.

•      Next, select the 'Community member role', which is the community role in which all community members access the community workspace. In our case, we would select Restricted member because we want to give read-only access to the community members.

•      Finally, you invite the members of the new community, in our case the members of your department. You could use the option 'Search for BSCW users' with the department name as search criterion.

In our last example case, "Crowded Workspace", you want to merge the many members of the workspace into a community that then becomes a member of the workspace as a whole, thereby significantly improving server response times for workspace operations. By default, you must be a manager of the workspace for this action.

•      Click the icon  in the 'Share' column of the workspace entry to view its member page.

•      Select those workspace members who should become members of the community by checking the checkboxes of the corresponding member entries. (It may be faster to select  all members by clicking on and then deselecting Manager and Owner). Select Edit to Community from the top menu or click on in  the multi-select toolbar. Workspace owners cannot be made community members in this way.

•      In the 'Add Community' form, proceed in the same way as described above for adding a community to a workspace with Add Community access The default value offered for the community role is the role that most members hold in relation to the workspace. In the usual case where all members of the workspace except the manager have the Member role, the access rights remain unchanged when this role is selected as the community role. Note that the access rights of community members are changed if they have a role in the workspace that is different from the community role. As an admission rule, you would choose the hidden community in our example case because the community is not for the purpose of attracting other users to the community, but to improve the response time of the server.