the 'Share' column of the
community workspace entry to view the members of that workspace, and then
clicking on the community entry. Communities can be organized hierarchically by making communities members of other communities. In this way, for example, the hierarchical organization of a company can be mapped to BSCW communities.
Members of a subcommunity can access the community workspace of the upper community. However, the related community workspaces are not necessarily contained within each other. This is different from the seemingly similar relationship between workspaces and their member groups.
As an example, let's take the case of the bulletin board for a large department, which we had organized above as a community workspace. The associated community has as members all employees of the department. If you as a community manager now want to set up bulletin boards for subdepartments A, B and C, for example, which are also to be implemented as community workspaces, proceed as follows:
•Go to the department community member page by first clicking on the icon
the 'Share' column of the
community workspace entry to view the members of that workspace, and then
clicking on the community entry.
•Tick the checkboxes of all the employees belonging to the subdivision A
and click on 
in the multi-selection toolbar
to create the new community for the subdivision A.
•In the 'New Community' form that appears next, enter the name of the new community (in our case 'Subdivision A bulletin board') and select the inclusion rule as well as the community role (in our case Hidden Community and Restricted Member). This will also create the associated community workspace that will appear in your personal workspace with you as the owner and manager. If you do not want to manage the subdivision bulletin board yourself, invite someone from subdivision A to be the manager in the new community workspace.
•Repeat the above steps for subdivisions B and C. Now the bulletin board member page no longer shows the tab the employees of the three subdivisions, but only the three entries of the subdivision communities.
In this way, you have created three subcommunities of the original community. You could now further subdivide the subcommunities by proceeding exactly as described above. Note that the members of sub-communities access the community workspace of the parent community in the community role of the parent community, i.e. the community role of the parent community determines how the members of the sub-communities and further subordinate sub-communities access the community workspace of the parent community - independent of the community roles in the sub-communities.
Instead of subdividing an existing community to form a hierarchical organization of communities, you can also proceed from below by unifying existing communities so that these communities become sub-communities of the new unified community. Suppose you have already created three communities A, B, and C for the three subdivisions and now you want to create a department community with these three communities as members so that all members of the existing communities can access the community workspace of the new department community.
•Set the admission rules of all three communities A, B and C to 'closed'. Hidden communities cannot be invited to other communities.
•Create a new community in your personal workspace via 
in the top menu. In the 'General' tab of the action form,
enter the name of the new community (in our case 'Bulletin Board of Tab D') and
select the inclusion rule as well as the community role (in our case Hidden
Community and Restricted Member). This will also create the
associated community workspace that will appear in your personal workspace with
you as the owner and manager.
•In the 'Members' tab, select 'Search for BSCW groups' and enter e.g. 'brett' as query assuming that this string appears in the name of all three bulletin board communities A, B and C. Transfer the three communities found to the 'Selected users' field and click [OK] to create the new community.
•Set the recording control of the three communities back to 'hidden'.
Alternatively, you could first create the department
community D and then invite the three communities A, B and C as subcommunities
via 
the context menu of community D or you
could first create a workspace D and then add a community to it with the three
communities A, B and C as members. However you proceed, you would always use the
same mechanism of searching for BSCW groups in the invitation form.
If you have access to a community because you are a member of a subcommunity, that community will also be displayed under 'Communities of your-username' even though you are not a member.
When you remove a community from the community workspace member group, the community is deleted, but not any subcommunities. They are only removed as members of the community before the community itself is deleted. However, in the 'Remove Members' action form, you can optionally accept the members of the community, including a sub-community, as members of the community workspace in the community role. In the case of a subcommunity, you should keep in mind that it is not the individual members of the subcommunity that are adopted as members, but the member group of the subcommunity workspace; this includes at least its managers and/or owners. Furthermore, this has the consequence that the community workspace becomes part of the subcommunity workspace.