Community¶

A community is a anchor point for grouping people and resources together around a common interest. Communities are typically long running endeavours.

Communities have members. These are the people working together in the community.

The community can gather together a collection of useful metadata elements, such as assets, projects, glossary terms, and a collection of external references.

The members can create forums on different topics to share information.

The members can attach comments to the community itself and to forum contributions, and add replies to them.

Members can also provide reviews to forum contributions. This includes a star rating and review comment.

Members can add tags to the community and any of its contents.

Members can also add a like to the community and any of its contents.

Community Member¶

A community member is a person whose profile is linked to a community.

There are different roles a community member can be assigned to. Each has different privileges.

Community Forum¶

A community forum provides a place for a community to store notes and comments about a specific topic. Forums can be created by community contributors, administrators and leaders.

Each forum has a name, description and a list of forum contributions.

Forum contributions can be created by community members, leaders and administrators. Each contribution can be updated/deleted by the community administrators.

Anyone can add comments to a forum contribution. Thus it is possible for a forum contribution to simply pose a question to the membership and the membership creates the discussion and possible answers using comments.

Community roles¶

Members of a community are assigned a role. The roles are additive.

At a minimum, a members is a Community Observer. This means they receive notifications from the community.

This can be upgraded to Community Contributor to add the right to post content to the community.

Next is a Community Administrator who is given the additional ability to add members and delete inappropriate content.

Finally the Community Leader has all of the powers of the administrator but really focuses on the health and content of the community - typically creating forums, keeping the exchange of information flowing, ensuring the lists of useful resources and external references are up to date, and more.

The person creating a community is the first community leader. This can be changed. Typically the community leader assigns administrators to manage the membership lists to free them up to manage the content.

Community Observer¶

A community observer is someone who is interested in a community but is not contributing.

Community Contributor¶

A community contributor is a role for a community member who is able to create content for the community. This could be a new forum and contributions to any forum, comments, likes, tags and reviews.

Community Administrator¶

A community administrator is someone who is responsible for managing the membership list of a community.

When a community is created, the administrator defaults to the person who created it. This can be changed.

Community Leader¶

A community leader is a person who gives direction to a community.

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