Thanks Sam - and no worries about the delay! I hope you’re all enjoying your co-location time!
I totally agree about how there can be too many bosses in some cases, so no arguments there. I think that what qualifies someone as a “boss” and the format of the community can be major factors in when you hit that. Part of that could be due to my mentally pushing Discourse beyond what it’s “intended” to be - and maybe even beyond what’s possible.
When I think of my example of a single Discourse for an entire city’s PTAs, I think of a space of spaces.
- There’s discussion areas for everyone to participate and
- share their ideas - “Has anyone ever done x before at their school?”
- support each other - “We’re struggling to get parents involved, what can we do?”
- collaborate - “We have speaker X coming - would anyone else want to book them while they’re in town?”
- store shared documentation/reference materials
- with the added benefit of platform stability for parents with multiple kids and as kids grow up - as they go between schools, the platform doesn’t change, the groups a parent’s in does.
- There’s spaces for each PTA to have their own stuff so they can
- create a knowledge warehouse instead of keeping what they’ve done in the past in members’ heads such as what assets they have or can access, prior event planning
- discuss/track projects that are in flight (without siloing them in an email thread)
- store reference materials, documents (or links to them), and assets (e.g. logos)
- But this space should be “safe” with some amount of access control
- Private space that limits access to parents/teachers/students through invites or QR-code
- Groups to limit access to some content based on school or role (e.g. board members vs volunteer)
While it makes sense for the city’s PTA org to have “Admin” control:
- manage the actual software implementation (site settings, impersonation)
- access or manage a user’s PII (some exceptions)
- see dashboards and logs
- fully access all categories
- manage categories (creation/removal)
- managing post ownership
Much of the stuff that falls into the “Moderator” arena but not the “Category Moderator” one is where I see room for flexibility. The user management features, in particular.
- approve new users (depending on membership entry points?)
- manage group membership (for their groups/categories)
- see user emails (for their groups/categories)
- lock posts
- grant badges (?)
In a community like a PTA, the groups (and category access) for many users would be changing from one year to the next - at the start of the school year, and whenever new parents join. That seems like something better done by someone on a school’s PTA board who actually knows the people joining, rather than being gated by someone in the larger org.
I think maybe part of where I’m getting confused is the terminology. I see references to “group owners” and “group membership” but the only mention of “group” in the Trust Level Permissions Reference chart is about “tag groups” (not the same thing?) and the group owner role isn’t mentioned on the User statuses, roles, and permissions page, either.
Is this just the missing piece that addresses most of my issues?