Network

A Network is a collection of organizations on the platform.

• Networks are "owned" by the organization of the user that created them.
• Networks have member organizations. Organizations are invited by the users of the network's owner organization. To do so, an admin of the organization that owns the network invites the admin of another organization using the admin's email. (This is the basic level of this functionality and relies on previous interaction between admin's in order to know the email to send the invitation to. This also prevents organizations from getting spammed by network invites.)
• Networks can have as many member organizations as the owner wants. Organizations can be in as many networks as they want. (In the long run, this functionality will necessitate some form of filtering and/or "retiring/archiving" of networks that have reached an end-date.)
• Organizations in a network are partners of the other organizations in that network. Team members from partner organizations become available options both in communications and in selecting and assigning tasks in content that has been marked as "collaborative" with specific organizations in a network or the network as a whole.
• Organizations can collaborate with partner organizations or entire networks. Projects, series and stories can be marked as Collaborative and select the partners involved. A collaborative item is accessible and editable by the team members of the organizations involved. (Ex. Criterion News creates an Coastal News Network and adds the Arctic Times and Wolf Media to that network. Criterion News creates a story, "Whale populations reach record numbers," and sets it as collaborative. They can then select either the Arctic Times or Wolf Media or the Coastal News Network as collaborating partners on "Whale populations reach record numbers." The editor of that story can now assign team members from the collaborating partner(s) to the story.)
• Organizations can also share with partner organizations or entire networks. Sharing is intended as a distribution mechanism and is available on stories. A shared story appears in the network content feed. An Organization can see all the stories available to them and collect that story by making a copy. The story then appears in the organization's content dashboard and is available to team members. CopyDetails are recorded and include all the relevant fields. (More details on how copying works in the content model documentation.)
• Networks can host communication and notes that are available to the team members of all member organizations.

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Organizations can own and be members of multiple networks.

In a Network, partner Organization Users can participate in discussions as well as track notes that are available to the whole Network.

Users can view content available or soon to be available from Network partner Organizations.

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Network Use Case

Network: Collaboration and sharing

Example: The Coastal Collaboration is a network of four organizations that cover coastal communities and regularly report on issues of common interest to all of their respective audiences. Through the Coastal Collaboration, the member organizations trade content amongst themselves governed by a common agreement. The member organizations also sometimes collaborate with one or more of the other member organizations and use the connection of the Coastal Collaboration for those collaborations.

Considerations

This functionality can easily be over complicated and will be built out as further features and needs are identified. The initial version of the platform will focus on two main utilities for networks:

• creating connections between organizations for sharing and receiving content from partners.
• creating connections between organizations for collaborating on content.

There are some questions to be more fully explored around:

• content updates after an item has been shared.
• notifications
• tests to ensure that content shared with specific orgs are only visible to those orgs, content collaborated on by multiple orgs are in the regular dashboards of those orgs TK

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Fields

Network

name

• Should allow for diacritic marks, spaces and hyphenation.

owner_organization

• Organization of the User that created the network.

network_description

• Short profile description of the network.

logo

• Image representative of the network to attach to all public profiles.

creation_date

• When the network was created on the platform.

organizations

• The member Organizations

notes

• The Notes associated with the Network, viewable by all Users that are part of a member Organization.