CUNY Academic Commons

Also - I feel like there may be a need for another ticket with a differentiated aspect about bolstering group privacy - maybe bulk hiding member lists from logged out users? But I cannot remember exact details and if this was supposed to be separate ticket. If so please let me know and I can write up the other ticket.

Thanks for this overview, Laurie. Regarding your follow-up about whether we might bulk hide member lists from logged-out users, we did discuss this but leaned I think toward not making a blanket change that would impact existing groups.

I do think there's an argument to be made that the semi-public option could be the default selection when you go to create a new group (the default is public right now), to protect anyone who breezes through the creation steps.

The semi-public rationale looks good to me and tracks with my notes from Friday. How should semi-public work as far as being able to join? Is it the same as public, where any member can join automatically, or is it like private and I believe hidden where you request to join and then need to be approved?

Are there any other technical differences between the three privacy settings we should be considering here?

On Friday we also discussed adapting Open Lab tools where a user can individually hide their memberships across all groups they belong to, but that would be more complex than the group-level changes. Perhaps we could explore this later.

Moving this forward, I am proposing the addition of a group privacy setting called "Semi-Public" or "Public to the Commons" that, when selected:

- Group is listed in directory (can be viewed by anyone- logged in or out)
- Group content (forums, member lists, events) can be viewed by - and this is the difference between private groups- all logged in members of the commons
- Commons members can join groups through similar mechanism as public groups

The affordance of this new privacy setting is that it offers commons members some privacy because not just anyone on the internet can see that they are in a semi public group. Group admins can choose to restrict complete public visibility of their groups while remaining open to the commons. My theoretical use case for this setting is the Anti-racism at cuny group. As it stands any one on the internet can visit the commons, search "racism" in the group directory and this public group is the second hit. A logged out visitor can click into the group and see all member and forum posts.

There are some instance when a completely public group mught make sense but in this case and many others I think, the group is geared toward CUNY folks and making the whole group public presents privacy issues, especially in our current political landscape.

This functionality sounds pretty good, but calling it "semi-public" adds to what is, I think, already a confusing system for group privacy. "Public" and "Hidden" make sense, but "Private" is really kind of an odd name. With that in mind, here's something for others (Laurie? Sara?) to think about. What if, instead of having Public/Semi-Public/Private/Hidden radio, we instead have three different settings: 1. Is visible in directory; 2. Can be joined by Commons member; 3. Content is visible to non-members. Public groups would say 'yes' for each, Hidden would be 'no' for each, Private would be Yes for 1 and No for 2 and 3. We could keep the Public/Private/Hidden/(Semi-Public) as a shortcut if it we thought it was a helpful heuristic, like "recommended settings", so when you click 'Private', certain specific options are pre-selected for you.

Anyway, this kind of more granular setup certainly adds to the number of questions that a group creator needs to ask. But it also provides more flexibility, and might make each individual point easier to understand. Just putting it out there as a provocation.