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.

Belated thanks for this mockup, Sara! I like the checkboxes with default settings, but I thought we liked Hidden and thought Private was confusing? Should it be Public and Hidden as the most-open and most-restrictive options?

I wonder if there should be a line underneath summarizing the settings instead of just a tooltip. Maybe it depends on the length of the text. Are we thinking something like this?

- Public: Anyone on the web can see group content (forum, members, events). Any Commons user can join.
- Hidden: The group is not publicly visible or searchable, only members can see its content, and only invited Commons users can join.
- Custom

Under Group Visibility, is this the same thing but simpler?

Who can find the group in the Commons Directory?
- Anyone on the web
- Only logged-in Commons users
- Only group members
(I'm not familiar with the admin-only visibility - do we have this?)

Then don't we just need two options for this one, because publicly visible is only the Public option? And it's publicly visible in general right, not just in the Directory? Cleaning up the language a little.

Who can view the group's content and member list?

- Any logged-in Commons user
- Only group members

And don't we need this question too?

Can any Commons user join the Group?
- Yes, and they will be automatically accepted
- Yes, but they must be approved by an admin
- No, they must be invited to join by an admin

Going through all of this, I'm wondering if it's more clean to do what Boone suggested and have at the top:

Public
Hidden
Custom

And then when you select Public or Hidden, there are default checkmarks activated as defined below IN CAPS. But if you select Public or Hidden and then change one of the boxes, or if you just start selecting boxes, the selection up top changes to Custom. This way, you see in one place all of your options, and how they are changing.

I'm not sure if we need tool tips with this solution, as it's clear in the lower section what Public and Hidden provide. Or maybe it's tool tips with hidden text as above.

Who can find the group in the Commons Directory?
- Anyone on the web (PUBLIC)
- Only logged-in Commons users (Semi-Public and Private internal types)
- Only group members (HIDDEN)

Who can see the group's content and member list?
- Anyone on the web (PUBLIC)
- Any logged-in Commons user (Semi-Public internal type)
- Only group members (HIDDEN and Private internal type)

Can any Commons user join the Group?
- Yes, and they will be automatically accepted (PUBLIC)
- Yes, but they must be approved by an admin (Semi-Public and Private internal types)
- No, they must be invited to join by an admin (HIDDEN)