Closed-Membership Workgroups

High-trust projects sometimes require strict, pre-approved membership. To enforce collaboration boundaries (thus creating “closed cohort governance”), you can create closed-membership workgroups for the project. Once created, you can add the closed-membership workgroup for a high-trust project.

This article explains what a closed-membership workgroup is and how to create one.

About Closed-Membership Workgroups

In Rhino FCP, a workgroup is a foundational unit of collaboration, which is often a lab or a small team within a larger organization. You can also add other collaborators, who might be outside of your organization, to the workgroup so that you can collaborate on federated research projects. For a brief primer on workgroups, see What is a Collaborator?.

By default, a default workgroup is not set up as a closed-membership workgroup. A closed-membership workgroup is a workgroup where Rhino administrators and Workgroup Admins cannot add members.

Prerequisite

Before you complete this procedure, do the following.

• The Workgroup Administrator must send a request to the Rhino Administrator to create a new Closed-Membership Workgroup. The Rhino Administrator will add workgroup members and set the Closed-Membership Workgroup flag to true.

• Once complete, the Rhino Admin notifies the Collaborating Workgroup Admin.

Once a workgroup is designated as closed-membership, it cannot be changed back to the default workgroup. At this time, only Rhino Administrators are able to set a workgroup.

Overview

After the prerequisite has been met, the steps for setting up a closed-membership workgroup in Rhino FCP involves three steps and two roles. The roles are: Collaborating Workgroup Administrator and Project Lead Administrator.

Here are the three steps:

1. The Project Lead creates a new project and in the permission policy, sets “Allow Only Closed-Membership Collaborators” to “Yes”.

2. An admin member of the Project Lead’s group creates a project and adds the closed-membership collaborator(s).

3. An invitation is sent to the Collaborating Workgroup Admin. The admin accepts the invitation.

Here are a few additional details.

• Once a workgroup is established as Closed-Membership, it can be added as a collaborator to a project that is configured to “Allow Only Closed-Membership Collaborators”.

• Once a Workgroup is set by a Rhino Administrator as a Closed-Membership Workgroup and that Workgroup joins a project with “ Allow Only Closed-Membership Collaborators”, this setting becomes locked and cannot be changed.

• The Closed-Membership option is enabled by the Rhino Admin setting the Closed-Membership flag to true. Establishing a Closed-Membership Workgroup can only be done by Rhino administrators with approval from the Workgroup Administrator.

Creating Project and Setting the Closed-Membership Collaboration Policies

To set up a closed-membership workgroup, complete the following steps. Note that this should be done by the Project Lead.

1

From the main screen, create a project

From the main screen, select the Create a Project button, then add the name of the project and a description.

Select the Permissions Policy downward arrow to view policies.

In the Project Level permissions, set the Allow Only Closed-Membership Collaborators policy to Yes.

Finish entering the rest of the permissions. For more details, see Creating a New Project.

2

Create the project

Select Create Project to create the project.

Adding a Closed-Membership Workgroup as a Collaborator

To designate a closed-membership workgroup as a collaborator, complete the following steps.

1

Open the collaborator list

In the project that you want to add the collaborator to, select the Collaborator button.

2

Select the closed-membership workgroup

Select the closed membership workgroup you want to add.

3

Approve the invitation

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and select the checkbox to approve inviting selected collaborators to this project.

4

Wait for collaborator approval

A message appears in the collaborator’s box on the collaborator’s screen that indicates that it is waiting for the collaborator to approve joining the project.

5

Begin collaboration

Once the collaborator approves, the closed-membership workgroup members can interact in the group as they would normally.

Once a Closed-Membership workgroup has been added to a project, no additional members can be added to that workgroup, only removed (unless it is one of the Project Lead’s workgroups).