Allow group owner not to be a member of the group

[tobiaseigen]

Here’s a feature request to allow group owner to not be member of the group, as discussed in Group owners for managing group membership. Let me know if there’s more clarification required here. Thanks, @sam!

@tobiaseigen

As admin I have to take care of adding and removing folks from groups all the time which is problematic and time consuming, and puts me too much in the middle of a critical function. We have a number of groups that we use for bringing together members in private categories and making them @ mentionable in discussions (e.g. staff departments, course participants etc). Our helpdesk team helps with onboarding and offboarding and providing help with accounts, We can’t give them admin privs for various reasons (e.g. they should not be able to read PMs or topics in some private categories used for sensitive discussions, limiting access to user export for data privacy reasons, making troubleshooting easier by limiting who can break stuff, etc).

[InspektorCluzo (Michel)]

I would love to see that.

@InspektorCluzo

For workflow reasons, it is very helpful to be able to, essentially, delegate the ability to make someone a group member outside staff.

For us, for instance:

• dispatchers (who are not staff) are volunteers who administer the workflow of what we do (deliver meals)
• they deal with people coming into the site who want to become consumers of meal (a group) and to volunteer to drive meals.
• the only way to do that is to make all dispatchers consumers and drivers, then group owners.

For us, in this instance, it would be much cleaner to make our dispatchers all group owners for drivers and consumers groups, without making them group members.

The reason why I really like the concept of this feature is that, for many sites, that are two workflows:

(1) the worfklow of administering the site membership processes

(2) the workflow of administering what the site is here for. For us, it is delivering meals.

It makes sense for staff to be responsible for (1). But (2) should be administrable with a different cadre. This feature essentially enables the site admins to create a hierarchy of connected roles that are focused on the workflow of whatever the mission of the site is.