Concepts
Community
A community holds together members and content within ECS. Only members of a community have access to a community’s content.
A community has a unique internet address (for example http://www.hpv-vaccines.net/community1) and a unique email address (for example community1@www.hpv-vaccines.net). In addition, one can give a human friendly community title. Community name, which is the last segment of the URL is used in URL, as the email of the community, and as a prefix of subjects of all messages sent from a community. The name is often referred to as short name of a community.
Content Moderation
A community can either accept contribution from any member and make it immediately visible to all other members, or it might require approval from a community leader before content is accepted and made visible to all. A community that requires leader approval for content is said to be moderate, and the one that doesn’t is said to be non-moderated.
It is possible to set up a community such that only invitations to new members suggested by other members are moderated – thus allowing the community leader to control the membership growth – while other content is not.
It is also possible to set up moderation requirement only for each member’s first contribution. Once one contribution from a specific member is approved, future contributions from that member will not require approval, and will immediately be visible to all other members.
User
An ECS user is any person able to log in into ECS, and has a profile defined in ECS. A user does not necessarily have to be linked with any community, although most users are.
The only way to become an ECS user is via membership in one of the communities. After a user stops being a member of any community, her or she will still have a profile on ECS and can join other communities in the future.
A user can delete own profile and thus terminate membership in ECS – this action is not reversible: once the profile is deleted, one needs to create a new profile through registration in a community. In addition to user deleting own profile, only a coordinator can delete user profiles.
Member
A user with access to a community is said to be a member of that community. Members can initiate discussions, contribute documents and other content, and can invite other members to join a community. In moderated communities, members' contributions will require leader’s approval.
If a community has one or more parent communities, member’s membership automatically extends to all of community’s parent communities.
Leader
A community leader has full control of a community. Leader can invite or remove members, promote other members into leaders, can contribute content to a community, and in a moderated community can also decide whether to accept or reject content suggested by members. Finally, leader can change community settings, turn a non-moderated community into a moderated one, make it read-only, change its name, or delete it. A community can have more than one leader.
In a community hierarchy, a leader of a community is automatically a leader of all of its sub-communities.
To contact the community leader of any community, send an email to admin.community_name@www.hpv-vaccines.net.
Coordinator
A coordinator is a person that has leader access rights in all communities on ECS. In addition to leader rights, a coordinator also has right to add or delete users from ECS, to change password for any user and to modify default settings for all communities on ECS. Coordinator’s main role is to assist leaders in user support and to ensure smooth operation of ECS. There can be more than one coordinator.
To contact ECS coordinator(s), send an email to coordinator@www.hpv-vaccines.net.
Community Hierarchy
Communities can have parent communities and sub-communities, forming a community hierarchy. Hierarchical relationship between communities is formed through community URLs: a sub-community will always include parent’s community in it’s URL.
For example, if community1 had sub-community sub1, then sub1’s URL will be: http://www.hpv-vaccines.net/community1/sub1. If sub1 then had sub-communities of its own, those would comprise of sub1’s URL plus own name.
In addition to URL organization, community hierarchy has some other desirable properties: all members of a sub-community are automatically members of all community’s parents. This is very practical for specialization of topics: a top-level community can reach all members of all sub-communities, and deeper levels of sub-communities can serve increasingly specialized topics. One needs only add member to the lowest level of hierarchy, and the membership will automatically extend to all parent communities.
Conversely, all community leaders can automatically administer all sub-communities of that community. This is very practical if a single person wants to oversee a number of specialized topics. Inheritance also promotes accountability – a leader can create new sub-communities and delegate leadership to others, but will always remain able to visit and manage those sub-communities.