Key concepts

Membership

Membership comes in several flavours:

• Not a member. Someone who finds our pages through Google is not a member. They can only see published pages.
• Individual member. An individual member has signed up through the Global Collaborative's membership form. They have a log-in name and a password. Individual members can be given permission to read private documents and edit documents.
• Organisational member. Organisations that join the Global Collaborative are given a space where they can create their own pages. They have signed a written agreement with the Global Collaborative organisation governing their use of the Global Collaborative Web portal.

Logged in vs logged out

To be logged in, you need to join the Global Collaborative as an individual. As part of the joining process, you will choose a log-in name and a password. Once you have done that, you can log in.

You can tell if you are logged in by looking at the bottom of the left hand menu. If it shows a list of Recent Changes, then you are logged in.

Sharing access to an area

The manager of your area of the Global Collaborative controls who can edit that area. They do this by using the [Sharing] tab at the top of the page. The [Sharing] tab allows additional people to be added to the editing team.

The [Sharing] tab has several uses:

• See who has what sort of access (the current sharing permissions) to a folder or page.
• Add sharing permissions to users.
  
• Add sharing permissions to groups.
• Some advanced settings.
• Change ownership of a page or folder.

For now, just be aware that the manager of an area will need to add you to the list of people who can edit an area before you will be able to see it.

Published vs Private

All new content on the Global Collaborative is 'Private'. Only people who are logged in and have been given access to an area can see 'Private' content. This allows a small group of people to develop content in private and then publish it to the world when they are satisfied with it.

Published content can be seen by anyone in the world.

While folders and pages on the Global Collaborative can be Private, images, PDFs and other files can never be made Private. If someone has the exact Web address of a file, they can always see an image, a PDF, a video, a spreadsheet or a MS Word document. They do not need to log in to see these sorts of files.

Display vs contents

There are two main ways to view the contents of a folder: [display] and [contents].

The [contents] menu is on the top left hand side of the page. By clicking on it, you can see all the contents of a folder as a simple list. It is the best way to make sure that you can see everything in a folder.

The [display] menu allows you to control how other people see what is in a folder. It provides five different possibilities:

• Summary view.
  
• Tabular view.
• Thumbnail view: for displaying a folder of images.
• Standard view: which shows all files in the folder with their descriptions.
• Select a content item as default view...

Most people either use the standard view or select a content item to be the default view. The standard view is useful for showing a folder of similar documents, like the archives of a newsletter, for example.

Selecting a content item to be the default view allows you to make sure that visitors always see the same page when they come to the folder. When you choose this option, you are asked to select one page that will always be the 'front' page of the folder. It is useful when you want to provide a carefully crafted front door, rather than a simple list.

I hope that these basic concepts help you to understand the structure of the Global Collaborative. Please let me know if they are unclear. Thanks for all your feedback.