Join projects and areas

[MichalisKas]

User should be able to see available projects and join in. We could even think of an automated way where if someone becomes member of OCW (s)he would automatically join all areas too.

[fosterlynn]

Background notes: There are different domains for Freedom Coop and for Bank of the Commons, but they both use the OCP system/database. To join anything that is not BotC, you use the Freedom Coop domain now, which causes problems for OCW, nodes, etc. Putting membership into a new UI/app can solve that. Also note that there is discussion about splitting out the BotC into a separate instance. If/when this is done, there might be further splitting of OCP also, both in terms of different user groups, and in terms of splitting out backend apps And, there was some work done recently by @bum2 to not allow duplicate email addresses, and possibly some other work on the OCP backend to clean up membership.

I think for this new app, we should think more generically about the different ways people will join groups in general. And we discussed only supporting one or a limited number of them at first, depending on who wants to use it first. But let's assume the existing OCP as the backend to start.

Scenarios:

• The person does not have credentials for OCP. Needs to be set up as an agent and user before joining anything. (Note some work was done to integrate FairLogin, but it is not tested or deployed yet.)
• The agent has credentials, and wants to join a group.
  • Group is free to join automatically, it should just happen.
  • Group has moderated joining, agents can see on a list and request to join, but there needs to be a conversation between the prospective member and someone in the group, perhaps a coordinator. Or perhaps some other permission? There is a workflow for this now in OCP, with threaded comments and email notifications; then an admin has to put the member in directly. Moderated joining seems to be the most popular, checking the current data.
  • Group is private, not visible for requesting joining. So then people in the group need to be able to add new members themselves.

We could even think of an automated way where if someone becomes member of OCW (s)he would automatically join all areas too.

This implies some new configuration in the backend for the different ways groups want to handle sub-groups. For example, the OCW requirement is that OCW members can do everything in sub-areas. The Freedom Coop requirement is more the opposite. Note that the OCW requirement could be handled a couple ways: actually create memberships in all the sub-groups; create logic that checks the configuration and gives permissions to subgroups without direct membership recorded.