The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative
As of March 15 2025, The Communication Initiative (The CI) platform is operating at a reduced level, with no new content being posted to the global website and registration/login functions disabled. (La Iniciativa de Comunicación, or CILA, will keep running.) While many interactive functions are no longer available, The CI platform remains open for public use, with all content accessible and searchable until the end of 2025. 

Please note that some links within our knowledge summaries may be broken due to changes in external websites. The denial of access to the USAID website has, for instance, left many links broken. We can only hope that these valuable resources will be made available again soon. In the meantime, our summaries may help you by gleaning key insights from those resources. 

A heartfelt thank you to our network for your support and the invaluable work you do.
Time to read
5 minutes
Print
a- a+
Read so far

Questions about "Group News"

9 comments

Is the overall idea for New Groups to be like a group chat? Will network members be able to create a News Group Name and open up a discussion?  will other newtwork members see that News Group name and be able to join in and/or remove themselves? Will they need to be added to the group by another person in that news group or by the creator of the News group topic? Or will these News Groups be facillitated by the CI? Will this replace http://networks.comminit.com or are these 2 separate entities? If there been an outline of this process stated somewhere, can someone send me the URL, if it exists, I missed it :) Thanks

Deanna

Comments

Submitted by Warren Feek on Tue, 03/01/2016 - 17:57 Permalink

Deanna - thanks for these questions. I will try to respond:

Deanna: Will this replace http://networks.comminit.com or are these 2 separate entities?

For groups/communities/networks that involve people within the network, yes, this will replace Atrium. The new process is embedded in the main site. People will have one account and one log in. Their contributions will be part of their profile and account. For example see your won account here. 

Deanna: Is the overall idea for New Groups to be like a group chat?

Yes - a community, network, group chat - however we wish to name a process in which people discuss, support, review in a peer process.

Deanna: Will network members be able to create a News Group Name and open up a discussion? 

As presently configured non-The CI staff will not be able to create an overacrhing group - but they will be able to create a major theme (Group News) within the overarching groups that we create. But that can be changed. In future we could configure so that everyone can do anything.  

Deanna: Will other newtwork members see that News Group name and be able to join in and/or remove themselves?

Registered network members can join and leave any group. There is a simple button to click and then confirm.

Deanna: Will they need to be added to the group by another person in that news group or by the creator of the News group topic?

We can add people - and perhaps will initially. And people can be invited by others to join a Group. and they cna join themselves.

Deanna: Or will these News Groups be facillitated by the CI?

Initially yes - but we can assign faclitation roles to others also.

Hope that responds to your Qs. Please do ask any follow ups. And would encourage others to also chip in with questions.

Thanks - Warren

Hi

Warren's answers make sense to me but I wonder if we need to think a bit about the naming conventions we end up using.  In the above they are refered to as News Groups but what we create are threads called Group News.  I am a little confused by how this will work in terms of the logic it presents to the user.  

At present we have an overall group called The Communication Initiative Team.  It has 23 members and each member can create threads of discussion within this group which are called Group News.  We have created Group News threads on a range of different things from the work we're engaged in such as the Open Knowledge Hub, Classifieds and Creating Country Profiles to threads like this focused on how we understand (or don't) Group News itself.

I think this works quite well for our internal discussions partly because they really are 'news groups' in that they give us a space to share what we've been doing.  However, as we go forward I am wondering if this is the right terminology for the network.  I may not have this right but my sense is that the network equivalent to The CI Team group would be around overall thematic areas which we will create.  I am wondering how these would be structured - will they be established around our existing theme sites or on things our partners are interested in developig more dialogue around - Democracy and Governance in Africa or Social Media and Vaccine Hesitancy for instance.  I am not sure what the thinking is here but would be interested in hearing more.

Within those overarching 'Groups' whatever their themes, I am assuming that members of the network can create a sub-thread which we are presently calling Group News.  What is the thinking for these sub-threads?  If we are calling them Group News that implies they will focus on news items related to that overarching thread.  This could push us (the network) towards things like the sharing of news clips or job opportunities or people moving from one organisation to another - in other words newsie items.  However, I can also people wanting to create threads that speak to specific areas of the overall Group theme - social media and vaccine hesitancy in Ukriane or Democracy and Governance and Community Radio to give two very random examples - in other words things that people would not define as news but rather topics for conversation. 

I think my question is more one of what's the architecture for this space.  What will it look like? Will it be a series of distinct overall groups each with a range of Group News discussions under them - which is much like the Atrium structure?  If so perhaps we should also think about what we've learned from using Atrium internally especially as it is now old enough and large enough to give us some idea as to how the new space may evolve.

Sorry this turned out to be a longer comment than I planned!

Cbris - thanks

1. We are very unlikely to play with the architecture. That means deep changes and we have got into trouble when we have done that in the past. Too many knock-on effects.        

2. The "Group News" are intended as themes, topics, sub-items for each group. Anyone can create these. So you have a group, themes or topics or sub-sections in that group, comments on those themes etc; and repleis to the comments.       

3. The key issue at present is what to call Group News. so that "Create Group News" would become what?

All suggestions most welcome

Warren

Hi Warren,

Your responses make sense to me. I only wonder about this: "Registered network members can join and leave any group." I would hesitate to post certain things in The Communication Initiative Team group if I knew that non-staff could participate. Or maybe by "any group", you meant any non-private group.

~ Kier

Kier - great observation - I did not explain this well. When creating a Group there are the following options:

Membership requests:

Open - membership requests are accepted immediately.
Moderated - membership requests must be approved.
Invite only - membership must be created by an administrator.
Closed - membership is exclusively managed by an administrator.

How should membership requests be handled in this group? When you select closed, users will not be able to join or leave.

Private group

Should this group be visible only to its members? Disabled if the group is set to List in Directory or Membership requests: open.

The CI Team Group that we are using for testing is a Private Group. Only members can see it and only members can engage with it. No-one can just join. 

But most groups will be Moderated. Related to those people can join and leave as they wish.

Hope that this helps - Warren