Turn groups into collaboration units

In Foswiki the concept of groups is much around access control. Browse through the documentation and you'll hardly find other uses for groups.

At the same time we see other collaboration platforms center around groups as ways to structure communication (and reduce spam for users outside the group). For instance, with Yammer any user can create a group and invite users (see example), and then send messages to members of that group.

While Foswiki is not a Facebook/Twitter clone, I do see uses for collaboration groups:

• Brainstorm on a set of topics and get notifications without having to set up a separate web
• Have a central message board to share thoughts and updates
• Have group sub pages
• Distribute material to the group members, for instance when you upload an attachment, send a notification to members of the group or groups you are in
• View group members to quickly identify which users are interested in (or expert in) a topic area
• Visit the user page to see which groups they take part in
• Have emails sent to the group automatically archived in Foswiki
• Let users easily subscribe and unsubscribe from the group

-- ArthurClemens - 27 Dec 2010

One thing I've been looking at is linking a good mail list / archive server in to act as the group mechanism for authentication. Initially considered mailman but I've since converted to Sympa. By mapping Foswiki groups to email lists, the list server could take over the group membership and notifications features while providing a searchable archive of messages. Sympa is integrated with MHonArc for archiving. The list server policies for list memberships (Moderated, open, hidden, etc. ) provides flexible controls of centrally or self-administered group membership.

Sympa is a bit different from mailman in that it uses a "scenario" based list configuration. There are various models of lists (Open, discussion, announcements, ... etc.) and the Scenario is used to configure all the detailed list controls internally. It is extend with new scenarios, though I have not tried that feature. Also mailman has a per-list password, where Sympa separates out the user identification which would be critical.

The mapper part is fairly straight forward I suspect. Where I've been spinning a bit is how to approach unifying the web interfaces and authentication. There is a mod_sympa auth extension for apache could authenticate against sympa. I have not dug into the various cookie and session mechanisms yet to understand if they could somehow be unified. And trying to fit together the css into some sort of uniform interface is a huge task I suspect.

-- GeorgeClark - 27 Dec 2010

Why not use webs for the described use case, maybe using custom tailored template webs? Is it more than just recasting the available means onto a collaboration setup? Which parts of the desired functionality is not available in foswiki?

-- MichaelDaum - 27 Dec 2010

The biggest reason to use Groups is because thats what users think of to create groupings of users. The fact that we might use them mostly for ACLs (and notification...) atm doesn't mean that we'd be recasting that set creation functionality.

(though Micha's point does deserve a brainstorm/feature of its own - as with git, we should consider the idea that it should be easier for all users to make webs, and to merge, restructure and remove them)

-- SvenDowideit - 28 Dec 2010

Even if a lot is possible with current tools, it is not obvious how to create it, and because of this Foswiki cannot be marketed of being able to provide this service to users.

• There is no documentation how groups can be useful for anything else than for access control
• Wiki Groups page is not inviting to create a group (to what end?)
• It is not possible yet to view groups and click a "Join" button - but this could easily be built
• It is not possible yet to click a "Leave" button to be removed from the group
• It is not possible yet to view "My groups" - but this could easily be built
• If I want to add members to a group, I can only add existing wiki users - I cannot send an invitation by email
• It is not possible to view all messages that are sent by my group members - although Foswiki does not use messages, it would be possible to find topics "created by" members in my group

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Dec 2010

Very true. I really like the direction you are thinking and I am quite sure that this would be a great addition to foswiki as a product. While the tool as is could be customized to a certain extend to match your vision, there are some little parts that are impossible to set up right now, foremost invitations. The rest could be done using a clever interface on top of foswiki without any core changes or additional plugin.

-- MichaelDaum - 28 Dec 2010

I want to be able to:

• Message a Foswiki user

-- MartinCleaver - 06 Jan 2011

I am currently using an installation of Foswiki 1.0.9 with a Sympa mailing list server in the following manner for a not for profit organisation whose work is divided in several Commissions, where groups have effectively been turned into collaboration units:

• each Commission has its own web, and its own Web admins (who are the heads of this Commission)
• the Web admins can create working groups clicking a simple button, which are, actually Groups using a special template with a form attached to it. In addition to the group members included in the topic, the attached form includes the name of the Commission, the name of the WorkingGroup, the e-mail address of the WorkingGroup (which is a mailing list), and location of the archives of the list
• the users who are members of this group can be added / removed by the Web admins
• each WorkingGroup topic is translated by a cron job into a WorkingGroupML ASCII file listing the WikiNames of the members of the Group and their e-mail addresses with a script I did
• the Sympa mailing list server is set to use the WorkingGroupML ASCII file as the source for the members of the mailing list (Sympa allows that, and much more)
• on Foswiki, a %SEARCH% displays all the WorkingGroups pertaining to the Commission (Web), with their e-mail address, and the location of the archives of the list
• users of the Foswiki are explained that they can address a particular WorkingGroup by writing to the e-mail address of that WorkingGroup
• members of the WorkingGroup use the mailing list for daily communication, and they summarise and synthesise the status of their works on the Foswiki
• they can also access the archives of the mailing list discussions

Currently, the mailing list creation of the Sympa side and linking to the WorkingGroupML ASCII file source is done manually. It can be automated too with command-line by just feeding the sympa.pl script (Sympa is Perl based) an .xml file (see this).

For this type of use of the Groups, I find it quite annoying that the current new interface of Foswiki 1.1 hides to the user the value of ALLOWTOPICCHANGE (it is hidden in "More topic actions - Edit settings for this topic..."). That is quite bad because users of the Foswiki don't know who are the persons responsible for managing the WorkingGroup. Modifying the template for viewing the Group page would be a nice thing to do to recover this information which was clearly shown in Foswiki 1.0.

-- RaulFRodriguez - 10 Jan 2011