Share and reuse interoperability solutions for public administrations

What is a community?

A community is a dedicated area in the platform for a group of users who share a common interest in a particular topic. The members of a community have the authorization use the community’s communication and collaboration tools to share and obtain information. 

Interoperability solutions hosted on the Joinup.eu platform have their own community of users and developers – these developer/user communities are called projects.

What is the difference between community "member" and community "facilitator"?

• A community member is a user registered on the platform who has the role ‘Member’ in the context a particular Community. Within her/his community, a member can publish content, and edit and delete her/his own contributions. He can also create, edit and delete user comments on content. A member can also highlight content. A member can leave a community.
• A Facilitator is a role that can be attributed to a user of the platform in the context of a particular community. It gives the user the responsibility and authorisations to manage the community membership (in case of a closed community) and to review the content that has been created within the community (highlights, forum topics, wiki page, news and blogs). In particular, a Facilitator can edit or delete content within the community, he can approve or reject membership requests, invite or remove members and authorise other members to become community facilitators.

What is displayed on this page?

On a community’s page, you can find the following:

• A list of the 5 latest activities in this community;
• a list of the 3 latest news items published or highlighted in this community;
• a list of the 3 latest e-library items published or highlighted in this community.

Join a community

Who can join a community?

Any registered user of the platform can join a community.

How to join a community?

Joining an open community does not require any validation.  To join a community:

1. Click on “Actions” and "join this community" and confirm;
2. Once clicked and confirmed, you are a member of that community.
3. You will be redirected back to the community main page with your membership already activated.

You are now a member of the community. 

Leave a community

Who can leave an open community?

Any member can leave the community.

How do I leave an open community?

1. Click on the Community that you are belonging to;
2. Click on “Actions” and "Leave Community" in the right column of every community you are a member of;
3. A confirmation note will be displayed. Confirm that you want to leave the community.
4. You will be redirected back to the main page of the community from which you have just unsubscribed yourself.
5. You are not a member of this community anymore. The red icon below the community title has disappeared.

How do I leave a community for which I am the owner?

As owner of a group, you have to contact the platform administrator to leave the community.
When requesting to be unsubscribed, you have to inform the platform administrator about the new owner.

How to rate a community?

Click on the stars next to the community title for rating the community. The rating levels vary from ‘Poor’ (1 star) to ‘Awesome’ (5 stars).

How to highlight a community?

1. Click on “Actions” and “highlight this Community" link in the right-hand menu;
2. A list of communities of which you are member is displayed;
3. Choose the communities [by checkboxes in front of them] where you want to highlight the Community and click on the "highlight content" button;
4. If the content has already been highlighted, either by you or by somebody else, the checkbox in front of the community's name is already checked;
5. If you want to remove the highlight, uncheck the check box in front of the community's name and click on the "highlight content" button.

Note: Once the community is highlighted, you can go on the page of the community (ies) you are a member of and find the highlighted community by clicking on the ‘Communities’ button in the left column of the page.

Please click here to know more about the Highlight functionality (?)

How to find other members of a community?

All community members have a public profile on the portal.

To view the list of other members of a community:

1. Click on ‘Member list’ in the left sub-menu.
2. You are now on the member list page of the community.
3. On this page, you can search for a specific name or sort the list using the drop down menu ‘Role’.
4. Did you find the member you were searching for? Simply click on the name and a ‘User Profile’ page will appear.

Note: The contribution of members and their level of involvement in their community are reflected in the amount of ‘Kudos’ they are given.

How to get involved in Community’s forum?

1. Click on "forums" in the left-hand menu;
2. At this point, you are in the list of pre-defined forums
3. Click on the forum for which you are interested in ; or
4. In case you don’t find a topic of your interest, you can introduce a new topic by clicking on the ‘Create a Forum Topic’ button at the right side of the page.

Click here (?) to know more about how to create a forum topic

How to create News Items in a community?

Share your own news with other community members by posting a news item.

1. Click on the "Create a news item" action, displayed in the right-hand side menu;
2. At this point you have to fill in the form to create the news item;
3. Once the form is filled in click the button “save”;
4. The news item is created and immediately visible within your community or project under the left sub menu item “News & Blog posts”.

Note:

• The maximum file size is 32 MB
• The following extensions are allowed: ‘pdf’, ‘doc’, ‘docx’, ‘odt’, ‘xls’, ‘xlsx’, ‘ods’, ‘ppt’, ‘zip’.

Facilitators, keep your community active!

Archived communities

On Joinup we strive to maintain and present active, informative and up-to-date communities. Communities that in the past have produced useful and informative content but have not been active in a longer period of time become archived. This is to ensure that no information will be lost. As a visitor of an archived community you are able to consult the content created within this community.

Archived communities do not function as active communities; funcitonalities as posting comments and adding content have been disabled.