How to configure parent groups and subgroups

@seanfarmelo , your work with Students for Cooperation looks totally amazing, and I'm stoked that we can support it with Loomio! I just read your blog post on thenews.coop (everyone in here should read this! http://www.thenews.coop/47348/news/general/blog-students-co-operation-sean-farmelo/) and it made me very happy.

I know other people (e.g. @hannahsalmon ) have their heads around the group permissions, so will leave it to them to answer your questions, but I just wanted to say that SfC is exactly the reason we started this project in the first place :)

Oh and! I also wanted to say that you should talk to @derekrazo about Loomio and student co-ops! He was involved with a big student co-op at Berkeley, and is totally plugged in to the co-op scene in the Bay Area (as well as being a Loomio super-star).

The first question came in my mind weather loomio has policy regarding dark or extreme groups or groups with terrorist intention or it concern about content at all.

@waelalsaad , we don't have a formalized policy on this, but will need to develop one as we grow.

We have a firm privacy policy that Loomio staff do not view private content, so we only know what goes on in public groups.

You can see more detail on our privacy policy here: https://www.loomio.org/privacy

Sounds like y'all are doing great work @seanfarmelo :)

I'm glad to say you can configure your Loomio groups to achieve this. First make sure the parent group permissions are set to allow members to create subgroups. Then, when someone creates a new subgroup, they can set the privacy to "Members only", which will make it invisible to anyone who has not been explicitly invited to it.

Let me know if I can clarify anything :)

@seanfarmelo great question! I just updated the discussion title and context so your use case can be an example for others who are likely to have similar situations.

Thanks for clarifying this. As well as Students for Cooperation, we'll also make use of this at Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op and a number of other student co-ops. :)

Cheers for that Richard! Think that should do the trick in general.

Your solution does still leave one problem though, people are unable to self identify into caucuses - they would have to be invited by the sub groups admins. Is there any way to make the group viewable but all of the info relating to it private including it's membership? Also some people from caucuses might not think of joining the group if they didn't know not it existed.
I guess one solution is to have an email address for each caucuses on the main group where people can send their emails so that they can be invited to the group by the admin but that sounds like an unnecessarily bureaucratic solution.

@seanfarmelo yes you can set up groups so they are just like that... private except for the group title and description and a "request to join" button. You can also set privacy on discussions on a per-discussion basis in such a group, so you can have some public content visible as well.

@seanfarmelo here's how I would recommend you configure your privacy settings:

• "Who can find this group?" is "unlisted to the public, but visible to parent group members"
• "How do people join?" is "By request - anyone can request to join"
• "Who can see discussions?" is "only members can see discussions."

Note, the subgroup name and description will be visible to parent members, but all the discussions and the members list will be hidden [as of 2 minutes ago since I just deployed that feature that hides the members list :P ]

brilliant! thanks for making the change :) think that is exactly what we are looking for