Setting up a Community or Group on OpenVCE

You can create and manage resources for a community of interest in openVCE.  This may provide news, access to shared resources, a knowledge book (a style of Wiki), image galleries, forums, etc.  There are many ways in which this could be done, but a suggested mechanism is described here to set up your group, in a way that has been found useful for other OpenVCE communities.

• Browse to the the page for "Other Group Books" and add a child page there to act as the top level entry page for your group.  Give it a suitable Title, and you may wish to establish some tags that will apply to your group content.  By adding this as a child page of the "Other group Books" page it will already appear in a suitable posiution in the "Book Outline" but this can be altered at any time by editing this page, where, for very active groups, you can also shift it to be a "top level" book.  Importantly give this page a "URL Path Setting" (friendly URL) that reflects the name of your group.  e,g, "example".  save that page and you already have a stable URL for you community http://openvce.net/example
• Then, you can insert your group logo, a description of the group purpose, and add on "child pages" to act as sub-sections.

Example Group Home Page (with Forum and Members Lists)

Example Knowledge Book (a type of Wiki)

Example Image Gallery (Esatblish by uploading an image and creating a new gallery for it)

Example Resources Page (establish a child page and attach files to it)

• You may set up Events via the Calendar, See separate Standard Operating Procedures for Events.

• Create a "Group". For security, OpenVCE.net does not allow all users to create groups, and have group leader level persmissions.  So "Create Group" does not appear in the create content menu normally. Please contact Stephen Potter or Austin Tate who can arrange this initial step with you.  However, after this is done you can create a Group Forum and manage memberships, communicate with members, etc.  Groups can be open, moderated or by invitation only.

Moderated Groups and Members

A group manager may require users to request membership which they can approve or deny.  A group manager can see the number of outstanding requests for membership  not yet handled on the Group Page in a group block on the right side.  It says N members (M) where the number M in brackets are those awaiting approval.  When you click on the members list link, there are several displays.  Go to the "List" one and that lists all members with approve/deny actions for those awaiting approval.

For all users OpenVCE.net insists that they have authenticated to use the system using:

• e-mail - which you can assume reaches the person as they would have needed it to authenticate their account)
• real name
• organization

We recomend that you do not allow membership of any moderated group without knowing who an individual is are as they could cause havoc with the very open edit and change permissions on OpenVCE.net.

If they chose not to give a recognizable real name and organization check with the OpenVCE.net admin team (admin@openvce.net)  to ask who they are and we can ask them to give a better name/organization first.  The e-mail must get to them as they could not have authenticated with OpenVCE.net otherwise. OpenVCE requires an e-mail confirmation before they a user can get in and change anything.